The New York Rapid-transit Subway

Proceedings.] DISCUSSION ON NEW YORK SUBWAY. 65 was concerned. On the express track the signalling was of the Col. Yorke, usual automatic description combined with automatic train-stops, such as had been in use in America for some years past. He did not know where it was first introduced, but it was used many years ago on the Boston railways, botli elevated and underground, and it had been adopted in England on the Metropolitan District line and on the three more recently constructed tubes, already mentioned, and he believed it had yielded admirable results. The novelty about the New York subway was that on the local tracks, upon which trains stopped at every station, no signals at all were provided. In that case the driver of one train had nothing to guide him except the tail-light of the train in front of him. He was asked not long ago by a General Manager of one of the underground railways of London what he thought of the arrangement, and he hoped that he gave a sufficiently discreet answer. It seemed to him that, although it sounded very simple to say that the motor-man of one train was to be guided by the tail- light of the train in front of him, it was difficult for the man to realize whether that tail-light was moving away from him or whether it was stationary. Under normal conditions he would think it was moving away from him, and as a general rule, when the train in front stopped at stations, he was prepared for that stop. But supposing the train in front to be stopped at some unexpected point, owing to some failure of the electric current, or for any other reason, how was the motor-man of the train in the rear to realize at once the fact that the train in front had come to a stand? He would probably not realize it for some appreciable period of time, and possibly he might not realize it soon enough to prevent his running into the tail of the train that had come to a stand. It had struck Colonel Yorke that that might be got over to a certain extent by providing an additional tail-light, which would only be lighted as soon as the train stopped. There would be no difficulty, for instance, in having a light that the guard could turn on the moment the train came to a stand, and turn off the moment it moved away, such light to be in addition to the ordinary permanent light; or, better still, the second tail-light might be brought into use automatically by the stopping of the train. Whether that would be found a practical solution of the difficulty he was not prepared to say;.it would of course require experiment. At any rate he threw it out as a suggestion for what it was worth. But even supposing it was possible to adopt some method of that sort for minimizing the risk accompanying the absence of signals, there was still another tribunal far more powerful than the Board of Trade to be consulted, [the INST. C.E. von. CLXXIII.] F