Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 90.djvu/430

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��Popular Science Monthly

���A miniature electric railway by means of which half a million pounds of meat are handled daily. Nine hundred cars, driven by seven electric locomotives are used in one packing establishment

��Meat Packing with the Aid of an Electric Railway

PREPARING and packing meat prod- ucts on a large scale requires many thousands of operations in many separate buildings. Since meat is very perishable, it must be carried from one building to another in the least possible time and should be subjected to as little actual handling as possible during the processes preceding refrigeration.

It is in this capacity that the electric railway system excels all other systems, and as early as 1892 one large packing house in Chicago installed a trolley. It consisted of one modest electric locomotive and a few cars, running on three-quarters of a mile of elevated track. With the in- crease in business, this miniature railroad had to be enlarged. Now there are seven locomotives, nine hundred cars, and double the amount of track. The locomotives have a capacity of twenty-five horsepower, and the power to run them is generated in the company's four thousand, one hundred and fifty horsepower power-house.

The rolling stock consists of small flat-

��cars, box-cars carrying five tons of beef, and tank-cars for transporting blood, animal- oils and the like. A half million pounds of meat are carried about every day, and no less than one hundred and seventy-five refrigerating freight-cars leave the Chicago yards fully loaded every night.

��Making the Aeroplane Tire A Hundred Per Cent Efficient

FIVE years ago, the ordinary large automobile tire was used on aero- planes. These were necessary to help the machine start from rough ground, and also for protecting the delicate mechanism from the shocks of landing. But compared with the developed aeroplane tire of to-day, these tires seem almost absurd. They were much heavier and they offered much more' resistance to the wind. The invention of the cord tire undoubtedly accelerated tire refinement. The tires that are used in the war in Europe, for instance, are as much "alive" and as springy as older types, but they are made smaller in cross-section and lighter in weight. Hence they allow a corre- sponding increase in weight to be carried.

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