. The Street railway journal . els fitted for use on rails. Stephen-son, the father of street railway cars, followed the samelines as the steam railway car builders, and at one timeused these coach bodies built together. Finally headopted the omnibus body, lengthening it, and giving ittwo entrances. The platforms were modifications of theomnibus steps, or, perhaps, more correctly, an expansionof the broad omnibus step into a landing, or of these early types of street cars have frequentlybeen published, so that their appearance is familiar to read-ers of this paper. From appearan
. The Street railway journal . els fitted for use on rails. Stephen-son, the father of street railway cars, followed the samelines as the steam railway car builders, and at one timeused these coach bodies built together. Finally headopted the omnibus body, lengthening it, and giving ittwo entrances. The platforms were modifications of theomnibus steps, or, perhaps, more correctly, an expansionof the broad omnibus step into a landing, or of these early types of street cars have frequentlybeen published, so that their appearance is familiar to read-ers of this paper. From appearance, one might judge the platforms ofboth classes of cars essentially the same. Both are placedat the ends of the car, and usually have the same form,etc. The steam and street car platforms, however, havelittle in common beyond the fact that the passengers usethem as landings. This, indeed, was their first use. Theyadhered closely to the function of their prototype, the om-nibus step. A complete and radical difiference in their. FIG. 4.—STEAM CAR PLATFORM AND VESTIBULE AFTER ACOLLISION. CAR BUILT BY THE LACONIA CAR CO. functions, however, at once became apparent. The steamcar platform is ])ractically never loaded, three or fourpeople at most are all that it is called on to carry at anyone time; but from the first it became necessary to giveit immense longitudinal strength; in the first trains theyacted as buffers. As the speed and size of trains increased,the need of strength in this direction increased, until at thepresent time of the platfonu and floor frame, its chief dutyis that of a battering ram. While it carries the draft rig-ging and sustains the full draw-bar strains in-oduced by heavy engines, its chief strength is to resist endwise are often of extreme severity. Fig. 3 shows how heavily the small platform of an ordi-nary day coach is built. The chief idea of the design islongitudinal strength. The timbers are doweled together,the buffers are in line wit
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, bookidstreetrailwa, bookyear1884
