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Show A MILLIONAIRE'S RAILWAY MODEL. Few of the visitors to the great Cornwall iron estate, in this country, receive invitation to inspect the workroom of the young millionaire, Robert Coleman. Mr. Coleman destroyed a palace half-built when his young bride died, a year ago, and her embalmed body was brought from Paris to be entombed in a mausoleum here, in the shape of an Episcopal cathedral, that cost a quarter of a million. Since the death of the young bride, the grief-stricken widower has paid much attention to machinery and engineering. He had a building erected containing a single room, with high ceiling and frescoed walls. A circular roadway, with a double line of steel tracks, extends around the room. Patent safety switches, electric crossing signals, safety frogs, and the latest method of fastening the rails, are in use on this playhouse railway. The total length of the track is about 150 feet, double track and two sidings. At one end is a roundhouse, with turn-tables that operate automatically. Three miniature locomotives are employed. Every piece of mechanism, every rod, bolt, screw, lever spring, tire cock, pipe, and pump are on these locomotives. The boiler jackets, rods and drivers are nickel-plated. The cabs are of solid walnut, and the boilers proper and the fire boxes are of wrought steel. The tenders are of copper, and their water supply is taken by scoops from vats on the roadway while the locomotives are in motion. The locomotives are about four feet in length, including the tender, and are models of beauty. They are of English design, so far as high driving wheels are concerned; otherwise, they are advanced American ideas, and have many original appliances of Mr. Coleman's invention. The locomotives are fired up and set in motion. Around the tracks they go, while the millionaire owner watches the machinery. Hours are thus passed; all sorts of experiments are tried; high speed and low speed are compared to determine the comparative effect of friction. To develop his railway ideas, Mr. Coleman has determined to build and equip a road extending from the Cornwall estate to the Pennsylvania railroad, a distance about twenty miles. In all probability this road, for its size, will be one of the best equipped in the country. It will carry the iron from the Cornwall furnaces to market over a shorter route than is now in use. - Lebanon, Pa. (Pennsylvania) Letter. |