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Show Miscellany Easing the Railroad Trackman's Burden. Compelled to do his work by primitive hand methods since the beginning of railroading, rail-roading, the railroad trackman has long ranked as the poorest paid and most unfavorably un-favorably situated of all laborers. In recent re-cent years a change has been taking place, a change that is fast placing the trackman in the position that his skill and experience and the importance of his work entitle him to that of a skilled mechanic. As in many other lines of work this change is due to just one cause, the introduction of power-driven machines ma-chines for doing the work formerly done bv back-breaking hand labor. .'The first machine to break the evil spell, as it might be called, under which the trackman has labored, is the gasoline section car, which lias been in use in a limited way for a number of years. What this means to the men engaged in the work is easily understood by anyone who has -witnessed the laborious ordeal of pumping an old-time handcar. Starting the day's work by pumping such a car over from four to six miles of track, some of it upgrade, is enough to destroy de-stroy the efficiency of any group or men for "the remainder of the day. On some of the most progressive railroads the sec-.: tion men now ride to their work on a gasoline car that is capable of making a speed of as much as thirty miles an hour. When they reach their work they are as fresh and fit as a business man who has ridden to his office in an automobile. automo-bile. Two other machines that are rapidly coming Into use and that are relieving the trackman of much heavy work formerly done by hand are the gasoline weeder and the gasoline mowing machine, the latter of which was described in a recent number num-ber of this magazine. Both of these machines ma-chines are proving profitable for the companies com-panies that have installed them. What is probably the most important Innovation in track work is the pneumatic pneu-matic tamper now being introduced. It is now known that machine tamping costs less than one-third as much as hand tamping, and that track tamped with the machine settles approximately onr-half onr-half as much as track tamped by hand and subjected to the same service. By .1. K. Murphy, in the October Popular Mechanics Me-chanics magazine. |