Worcester Morning Daily Spy

TIS YANKEE GENIUS
Manager Coughlin Tells of New Work By the G. E. Concern.

Big Electric Engines to Be Sent to England and Alternating Currents to Be Transformed to Direct.

William H. Coughlin, the manager of the Worcester electric light station, on Faraday street, who has recently returned from a business trip to Schenectady, N. Y., brings to the notice of the Spy a new instance of American enterprise and ingenuity. The General Electric Company of Schenectady will make this week the first shipment of machinery to fulfill a contract with a street railroad company of London, England, the total aggregate of which is over $2,000,000. The company has obtained the contracts entire for the transformation of the road from a steam road to an electric one, the intention being to use powerful electric locomotives instead of ordinary steam engines. The installation will be done by the employees of the company's English office.

The machinery will consist of several 1200 kilowatt generators and a number of 650 horse power rotary transformers. The conditions under which the road operates are particularly difficult, the traffic being heavy and the location of the power house being necessitated at the extreme end of the line, which is six miles in length. These conditions necessitate the use of a high initial voltage at the terminals of the generators, owing to the drop along the line before the current is used by the motors. The direct current is not, for scientific reasons, adapted to transmission over lines under such conditions as prevail on this one, and the alternating current is not generally used for street railway propulsion, so that an ingenious expedient is necessary to reconcile these two difficulties to the circumstances. The generators are built to produce an alternating current at a voltage of 2000, at which potential it is delivered to the main circuit. Along the line, at convenient intervals, are placed the 650 horse power transformers, which change the voltage from 2000 alternating current to 500 direct current, and supply it to the trolley at that potential. By placing these transformers at proper intervals, the current is kept at constant voltage and equal to the maximum demand likely to be made upon it.

The rotary transformer principle, while by no means a new one, has here been applied to street railway practice for the first time. The theory of the instrument is a rather complicated one, but its appearance is very much like that of an ordinary motor and the advantage of the type used by the General Electric Company lies in the fact that its form is so compact that it may be installed in a small box placed at any convenient point along the line. In a large city it would of course be impossible to have any cumbersome apparatus placed on the busy streets along which such a road would run. In spite of the large capacity of these machines, the design is so good as to permit of their being enclosed in boxes not over three or four feet square, thus permitting them to be installed on the busiest thoroughfares.

The electric locomotives used on the line will be powerful ones designed to draw trains of cars similar to those used on the elevated roads in New York. They will be used for passenger traffic only, and in appearance, resemble double-ended switching engines with trolleys like ordinary street cars. They are of the same kind as those used by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on its line across Baltimore. As the line is a surface one, the advantage of the noiseless, smokeless, and cleanly electric engines over ordinary locomotives is very apparent. Not only is the first cost of these engines less than that of the locomotives, which they will replace, but they can actually be operated cheaper than steam engines when once installed, while their working capacity is equal to that of the best passenger locomotives. They are recommended for city traffic, by their excellence of control and with proper handling should entirely obviate the danger from collisions.

The large scope of the work which is to be done, will delay the reopening of the road to traffic for some months, but when completed it will be a monument to American mechanical genius, the use of multiphase alternating currents being almost unknown previously in street railway practice, the only other instance that comes to mind being on the East Middlesex road in this state, where a three-phase current is carried on the trolley wires, and is used without transformation by induction motors on the cars.