To describe the process of building a locomotive with full technical details would require several books, and then something would be overlooked. In the article that follows the attempt has been merely to give our readers a general glimpse of the interior of a great locomotive works, a faint idea of the character of the work that is required before one of these giants of the rail emerges a finished product from the chaos of the foundry, the forge, and the machine-shop.

Following the Growth of a Locomotive from the Pig-Iron Stage to the Day When It Goes Out Under Its Own Steam.

A VAST inferno, with myriads of blackened, shouting, sweating, panting imps, some hurrying to and fro with flaming brands, dozens poking at blazing fires, scores pouring their fiery hell-broth from giant dippers, hundreds struggling with giant forms silhouetted against the red, glowing mouths of seething fire caverns, thousands in the darkness prodding great screaming, groaning, shadowy bodies that seem to flinch and shudder! A realm of huge black monsters which stealthily crawl up and down the enveloping shadows and float noiselessly back and forth over your head or hover directly above with unnerving nearness! A bedlam where deafening shrieks and hisses and moans rend the fume-laden air, even above the continuous thunder which issues, now with a rumble, now with a crash, while the lightning flashes all about and the earthquake sways the black marl underneath!
Such is the impression made upon the visitor who for the first time steps from the midsummer glare of Philadelphia's Broad Street into the great shops of the Baldwin Locomotive Works. At first he is dazed by the vastness of what lies before him, and then he is appalled by the awful possibilities of the mammoth machinery that looms up everywhere.
But once this first plunge into the seething sea of activity has been made, he feels his veins tingle from the stimulation of seeing tremendous things produced at incredible speed. So, after the first hour spent in exploring the recesses and labyrinths of this fascinating place, it becomes but a matter of refreshing excitement to dodge a ton or two of steel swung noiselessly toward one's head by some giant crane or thrown red-hot at your feet from the door of a seething, furnace.

The Baldwin Locomotive Works is the largest locomotive plant in the world. Last year its output was 2,666 locomotives, together with duplicate parts equivalent to at least 100 more. In other words, the total output equaled over 230 locomotives a month, 53 per week, 9 per working day. Making allowance for holidays, about one locomotive was turned out every two hours.
An army of nineteen thousand men, divided into day and night shifts, work in the great shops between sunrise and sunrise each day. They comprise a body about equal to the population of Madison, the capital of Wisconsin; of Sandusky, Ohio; Newport News, Virginia; Lafayette or Richmond, Indiana; Paducah, Kentucky; Concord, New Hampshire; Battle Creek, Michigan; Evanston, Illinois, or Burlington, Vermont.
This great aggregation of men is more than half as great as the personnel of the United States navy. If armed and equipped, they, would form an army as great as the combined national guards of New York and Ohio.
Adding the members of their families, we have a total of about eighty-seven thousand mouths fed by the company—an aggregation of men, women, and children as great as the population of Richmond, Virginia, or Dayton, Ohio.
The 47 buildings in which they work comprise a floor space of over 63 acres, and ring with the din of industry 23 hours out of each 24 on week-days. The steam-engines which aid them in their work have the power of 12,138 horses; the electric-motors, that of 14,200; the oil-engines, that of 4,850—a total equal to the power of 31,188 horses, or of twice the number of mounts used by all of the cavalrymen and mounted officers of our army.
These men work in the shops under the glare of 7,000 incandescent and 951 arc electric-lamps. They consume per week 3,000 net tons of coal, and 5,000 net tons of iron. From 1831, when Matthias Baldwin founded the works, to July 1, 1907, they had turned out 31,000 locomotives, supplied to practically every country which boasts any kind of a steam railroad.
Now I am going to take the readers of THE RAILROAD MAN'S MAGAZINE with me on my personally conducted tour of this mammoth plant, which I lately made as the result of unusual courtesies extended to me by the proprietors, Messrs. Burnham, Williams & Co.
I am going to give you a word snapshot of every stage of locomotive building, from the designing-room to the last stage in the process of delivery to the purchasing road. To go into all of the details I would have to spend the next year of my life in filling this magazine from cover to cover.

The specifications for a new locomotive having been given to the firm, the first step is made in one of the two big drawing-rooms of the plant, where about two hundred draftsmen are at work. The specifications give detailed information as to all principal dimensions, all special materials, and special equipment. Each specification is copied into a great ledger about two feet high. At the top of the page is recorded the classification number of the ordered engine, and this number is a combination  which concisely describes the locomotive.
Let us suppose, for example, that it is "10—30—D—No. 442." The first number, "10," means that there is to be a total, of ten wheels, "30" represents the cylinder diameter in inches, "D" gives the number of driving-wheels, and, " No. 442 " means, that the locomotive designated is the four hundred and forty second of the above type ordered from the firm.
Sometimes the specifications fill two pages of the big ledger. From these data the draftsmen make the working drawings, the first being a side view one-sixth actual size and covering a sheet of canvas-backed. paper about six feet long.
From this detailed drawing another, giving the cross-sections of the same engine and its parts, is made. These two drawings are the basis of all work in the shop.
From them separate drawings of the various parts are made on a larger scale. These latter are traced, and "white prints" are made by a photographic printing process. The latter are mounted on heavy pieces of cardboard, varnished, and given the classification number of the engine.
This number must later be marked on each part turned out of the shops, so that there will be no confusion in assembling the parts when the engine is finally put together. At the proper time the detail drawings of the parts are distributed among the many shops, and the real work of manufacturing the engine begins.

The pattern-shop is the first to receive drawings of all parts, which must be cast-molded out of metal-rather than forged. For each such part there must be made a wooden pattern—an exact-size model—which will afterward be pressed into wet sand so as to make a mold.
These molds are made in the foundry, molten iron or steel being poured into them and then cooled, after which this metal comes out as a reproduction of each original wooden pattern.
We will next visit the boiler-shop. Here pandemonium reigns, and you must be gifted in the sign-language of the "deaf and dumb" if you wish to communicate with the representative of the firm who is conducting you through. Steel-plate is here used exclusively in making American locomotive-boilers, although on many of the engines being built for foreign countries the firebox must be of copper.
No iron is used in either case, however. The steel is received from outside steelworks in sheets of various sizes and thicknesses—some over twenty feet long.
You constantly see the great sheets sailing through the air, held in the clutches of the big overhead traveling-cranes, whose work is not impeded by belting, for the big boiler-finishing machines are driven by separate electric-motors.
Preparation of the steel-plates for punching and drilling is the first operation. Bear in mind that these flat sheets are to be rolled into giant cylinders or bent into odd shapes for making fireboxes and other adjacent parts. As you see them hauled out by the cranes, you notice that they have been cut into odd shapes, like the pieces of cloth out of which the tailor makes your clothes.
And, like the latter, they must be stitched together, not by thread, however, but by rivets, to hold which rows of holes must be provided around the edges. Each sheet is laid upon a great table, and the centers of the holes marked out by standard gages.
Straight lines are first chalked out, and the centers of the holes are then carefully spaced with absolute accuracy. The holes are then cut around these marks, either by punching-machines or drills. Foreign specifications require drilling, always, but American railways usually require punching.
I saw five plates for as many foreign locomotives being drilled at the same time. They were piled on one another, clamped together on a big table, while four drills working at once were boring out the holes wherever they were marked.
This operation was slow, compared to that of the stamping-machines at work on American boilerplates. Above each machine was a crane, from which the plate was hung with chains, several men guiding it and bringing the marks, one by one, directly within the field of the punch. The latter had on its under-side a projection which, when a lever was moved, would ascend and bite a round hole in the edge of the sheet.
All punched holes are made smaller than the required diameter, and must later be "reamed," or neatly trimmed out to size, by the drills of the reaming machines. But the time for both punching and reaming is less than for drilling alone, and gives the same even finish.

The plates out of which the cylindrical shell, or "barrel," of the boiler is to be formed are trimmed off in a large sheering-press, and the edges are planed on a plate-planer. They are now ready for the electric bending-roll, which consists of one great roller, poised midway above a pair of similar form.
The two lower ones are on the same plane, and the height of the upper is controlled by large screws operated by gears. By thus altering the position of the upper roll the plate can be bent to any desired radius. It comes out of the press rolled into a perfect cylinder, except that the lapping edges—lined with the holes above accounted for—await to be joined by rivets.
But the great flat plates, which form the firebox, are not thus rolled into cylinders. They must be joined to form an irregularly shaped case, and the edges to be joined must be "flanged," or bent to the desired angle.
If there is only one or just a few locomotives of a given type to be built, the edge of each plate is placed in a fire, forced by an air-blast, and when the desired heat is obtained the whole plate is dragged upon a large table, whose front edge is rounded and re-enforced by heavy metal. The desired width of plate having been brought over the table's edge, a large metallic beam descends and holds the plate in place.
Then with heavy wooden mallets men pound the edge down until the desired bend is obtained. Plates thus subjected to "hand flanging" emerge from the flanging-machine rather warped and bent. They are finally straightened out by being heated red-hot all over and dragged from the great furnace upon a flat platform where six men operating a huge hammer pound them flat. This hammer is a heavy weight fastened underneath the middle of a long iron bar, each of whose two ends terminates in a wide handle, held by three men.
I saw the huge "back head" of a firebox thus being "ironed out," so to speak. The six men operating the great hammer protected their skins from the intense heat by turning their coat-collars up and bending down the wide rims of their felt hats, which steamed while they worked.
Where large orders for engines of the same type are being filled, each of these plates is at one blow stamped out to exact shape between the two dies of a hydraulic press. The dies—a pair for each machine—must be specially made, and are expensive. Of course, it does not pay to make them where only a few plates have to be given one special shape.
While I was in the flanging-shop a "throat sheet"—the lower front plate of a firebox—was being stamped out on the largest hydraulic press of the works. This particular sheet was one of eighty-eight, just alike, being manufactured for a railroad.

The flat plate of steel was first heated in a large furnace. The signal being given by the skilled operative in charge of the press, the horizontal furnace-doors parted like the jaws of some fire-eating giant, a pair of long-handled pincers was pulled outward by a reel, and the huge plate was thus dragged upon a frame which held it between the upper and lower die, each the reverse of the other.
The upper die was stationary, but the lower, actuated by two large hydraulic accumulators, gradually ascended, pressing the red-hot plate against the former. This was about the prettiest operation, which I witnessed, in, the entire plant.
The ease with which the two great dies bent the immense plate into shape did not seem so wonderful, however, when it was explained that three hundred and sixty-five pounds pressure was being exerted on each square inch of red-hot surface. Tube sheets, furnace door flanges, smoke-box fronts, dome-rings, cylinder-heads, and many other parts were being rapidly stamped out by smaller presses, with a uniformity impossible in hand-work.
All of the plates, having been either rolled or pressed into shape, are collected in the boiler-shop and prepared for assembling. The roughened edges are planed off by special machines or are dressed by chipping with a hammer and chisel. The flanged plates have not yet received their rivet-holes, and these must now be drilled or punched and reamed.
The boiler is then assembled into two principal parts—the smoke-box and two front rings of the "barrel" forming one, and the third ring and outer shell of the fire-box comprising the other. The sheets comprising each part are first temporarily united by bolts, placed through some of the rivet-holes.

All parts being in position and a snug fit assured, the parts thus basted together with bolts are taken to the mammoth sewing-machines which permanently unite them with red-hot rivets in lieu of thread. These riveters are operated by hydraulic power.
The largest are composed of two parallel uprights, which rise as high as the boiler to be joined is long. If you turned these uprights to a horizontal position, you might imagine them forming the mouth of a giant sewing machine. The temporarily assembled boiler is carried up and lowered gradually between them, one upright being inside and the other outside.
On each upright is a horizontal die, one fed with red-hot rivets and the other flattening their ends after they have been pressed through the overlapping holes in the boiler. Thus the riveting is started at one end and worked all the way to the other by simply raising the boiler, which is suspended by chains from overhead travelers.
The movable die of the riveter is always on the outside of the boiler, while the rivet-head is formed against the fixed die on the inside. These great machines are practically noiseless, and each one has its own furnace for heating rivets.
Three men swing the boiler into position and handle the machine, while a boy looks after the furnace. When a boiler leaves one of these big riveters, most of the riveting has been done, although the inside shell of the firebox has not yet been united with the outside, and the front and back are still separated.
A twenty-ton traveling-crane now hoists the two parts of the boiler to the second floor of the shop. The rear half—that comprising the fire-box shell and third ring of the barrel, just joined by the riveter—is here placed upside down, and the inside shell of the fire-box is, with the back-head and other interior fittings, secured in place with bolts and nuts and afterward riveted in so by hand, but mostly by small portable hydraulic machines hung from cranes.
The inside fire-box and fittings having been thus riveted to the outside shell, the rear half of the boiler is placed right side up on pedestals, and the front half, previously finished, is joined to it. The seam where the two halves unite is riveted by hand, the rivet-heads being formed on the outside in a die, which is struck by heavy hammers, to the accompaniment of a deafening uproar.
The firebox of a modern boiler is usually fastened all around with stay-bolts hammered down at each end while cold. As the sheets are assembled they are "caulked" at the joints to prevent leakage.
This is done with a tool having a rounded edge, which pinches the plates tightly together without cutting the metal. The dome having been mounted and the tube sheets inserted, the boiler is now sent to the great erecting-shop to await the other parts, which are to form the completed locomotive.

The cylinder is one part of the locomotive that is universally made of cast iron. The foundry of, the Baldwin works, where cylinders, wheel-centers, and other parts are cast, extends over the length of an entire city-block.
Down its center are placed a number of jib-cranes, and, in addition, several small traveling-cranes which assist in handling the molds and ladles. Here and there rises a "cupola"—a stack built of metal-plates, lined with fire-brick, and fed with pig iron, scrap iron, and coke through a "charging-door" about twenty feet above the ground.
Trucks containing the iron and coke are hoisted to a gallery from which the cupolas are charged. The operation is started early in the morning by building a coke-fire in each cupola, eighteen hundred pounds of fuel being used to form a bed, on which are placed alternate layers of coke and a mixture of "pig" and "scrap."
An air-blast produced by a large blower driven by a steam engine is forced into the cupola. The hot metal runs into ladles which pour it into larger ladles holding twelve thousand pounds each and swung to the molds on a large crane. The metal is poured steadily until each mold is completely filled, and more is added as it shrinks from cooling.
The mold stands for twelve hours, after which the casting is taken out and relieved of the sand, which has adhered to the surface. Projections on the surface are also chipped off, giving each casting a fairly smooth and clean appearance.
For modern Vauclain compound locomotives, the high and low pressure cylinders and steam chest for one side are cast together with half the "'saddle"—the forked support of the boiler. One of these castings weighs about eight thousand seven hundred pounds.

The rough cylinder castings now leave the foundry and are sent to the cylinder-shop, where the work of machining them down to size is begun. All castings are made too large in the rough, the exact dimensions being effected by various finishing-machines.
Each casting is first set on a planer, which takes a cut off the end surfaces, upon which are then "scribed," by means of gages, circles which indicate the exact interior diameters of the cylinders and steam-chest. The casting is now sent to the boring-machine, which bores out both cylinders and the steam-chest at the same time.
As they come from the foundry the cylinders are about three-fourths of an inch less in diameter than they are to be sheering-press, and the edges are planed on a plate-planer. They are now ready for the electric bending-roll, which consists of one great roller, poised midway above a pair of similar form.
The two lower ones are on the same plane, and the height of the upper is controlled by large screws operated by gears. By thus altering the position of the upper roll the plate can be bent to any desired radius. It comes out of the press rolled into a perfect cylinder, except that the lapping edges—lined with the holes above accounted for—await to be joined by rivets.
But the great flat plates, which form the firebox, are not thus rolled into cylinders. They must be joined to form an irregularly shaped case, and the edges to be joined must be "flanged," or bent to the desired angle.
If there is only one or just a few locomotives of a given type to be built, the edge of each plate is placed in a fire, forced by an air-blast, and when the desired heat is obtained the whole plate is dragged upon a large table, whose front edge is rounded and re-enforced by heavy metal. The desired width of plate having been brought over the table's edge, a large metallic beam descends and holds the plate in place.
Then with heavy wooden mallets men pound the edge down until the desired bend is obtained. Plates thus subjected to "hand flanging" emerge from the flanging-machine rather warped and bent. They are finally straightened out by being heated red-hot all over and dragged from the great furnace upon a flat platform where six men operating a huge hammer pound them flat. This hammer is a heavy weight fastened underneath the middle of a long iron bar, each of whose two ends terminates in a wide handle, held by three men.
I saw the huge "back head" of a firebox thus being "ironed out," so to speak. The six men operating the great hammer protected their skins from the intense heat by turning their coat-collars up and bending down the wide rims of their felt hats, which steamed while they worked.
Where large orders for engines of the same type are being filled, each of these plates is at one blow stamped out to exact shape between the two dies of a hydraulic press. The dies—a pair for each machine—must be specially made, and are expensive. Of course, it does not pay to make them where only a few plates have to be given one special shape.
While I was in the flanging-shop a "throat sheet"—the lower front plate of a firebox—was being stamped out on the largest hydraulic press of the works. This particular sheet was one of eighty-eight, just alike, being manufactured for a railroad.

All parts being in position and a snug fit assured, the parts thus basted together with bolts are taken to the mammoth sewing-machines which permanently unite them with red-hot rivets in lieu of thread. These riveters are operated by hydraulic power.
The largest are composed of two parallel uprights, which rise as high as the boiler to be joined is long. If you turned these uprights to a horizontal position, you might imagine them forming the mouth of a giant sewing machine. The temporarily assembled boiler is carried up and lowered gradually between them, one upright being inside and the other outside.
On each upright is a horizontal die, one fed with red-hot rivets and the other flattening their ends after they have been pressed through the overlapping holes in the boiler. Thus the riveting is started at one end and worked all the way to the other by simply raising the boiler, which is suspended by chains from overhead travelers.
The movable die of the riveter is always on the outside of the boiler, while the rivet-head is formed against the fixed die on the inside. These great machines are practically noiseless, and each one has its own furnace for heating rivets.
Three men swing the boiler into position and handle the machine, while a boy looks after the furnace. When a boiler leaves one of these big riveters, most of the riveting has been done, although the inside shell of the firebox has not yet been united with the outside, and the front and back are still separated.
A twenty-ton traveling-crane now hoists the two parts of the boiler to the second floor of the shop. The rear half—that comprising the fire-box shell and third ring of the barrel, just joined by the riveter—is here placed upside down, and the inside shell of the fire-box is, with the back-head and other interior fittings, secured in place with bolts and nuts and afterward riveted in so by hand, but mostly by small portable hydraulic machines hung from cranes.
The inside fire-box and fittings having been thus riveted to the outside shell, the rear half of the boiler is placed right side up on pedestals, and the front half, previously finished, is joined to it. The seam where the two halves unite is riveted by hand, the rivet-heads being formed on the outside in a die, which is struck by heavy hammers, to the accompaniment of a deafening uproar.
The firebox of a modern boiler is usually fastened all around with stay-bolts hammered down at each end while cold. As the sheets are assembled they are "caulked" at the joints to prevent leakage.
This is done with a tool having a rounded edge, which pinches the plates tightly together without cutting the metal. The dome having been mounted and the tube sheets inserted, the boiler is now sent to the great erecting-shop to await the other parts, which are to form the completed locomotive.

The steel tires, which have been turned slightly smaller than the wheel centers, were yet to be put on. A large furnace door was opened and a hot tire dragged out, dropped upon a wooden block, and lifted upon a wheel center, there being held in place with great tongs while two brawny men drove it on with sledges.
At first it fitted on easily, as the heat had expanded it, but after having been put firmly in place it was sprayed with a stream of cold water, which cooled and shrunk it snugly to the wheel center. The crank-pins were next inserted, and finally the wheel centers received a coat of putty, which, having hardened, was to be carefully sandpapered, and finally painted and varnished.
In a vast maze of other shops hundreds of connecting-rods, which had come in from the steel-works in the form of rough castings, were being forged under steam-hammers, trimmed on planers, grooved by milling-machines. I saw also many planing-machines, each trimming at one time eight castings of journal boxes of the same size.
Frames, of both wrought iron and cast steel, piled four deep upon "vertical slotters," were being simultaneously finished on the surfaces which were to be bolted to other parts. Pistons, valve parts, eccentrics, springs, and the myriad other sundries of the modern locomotive were being finished elsewhere by scores of machines too complicated for description.
But before seeing the many parts finally united we must pause in the tender-shop. It was not so many years ago that the tender was little more than a tank and coal-bin set upon a flat car; but to-day the Baldwins are turning out complicated tenders holding as much as nine thousand gallons of water and sixteen tons of coal, and weighing, when loaded, as much as eighty-five tons.
The work in the tender-shops is much like that in the great space where we saw boilers being made. Great plates are laid in rows upon tables, and men drilling holes along their edges are followed by horseshoe-shaped pneumatic riveting-machines hanging from cranes.
Two men swing each riveter along the seam, a third delivers the red-hot rivets in a long-handled shovel, and a fourth picks them up with tweezers and feeds them to the machine. Tenders are begun on the ground-floor of this shop and finished on the fourth, whence they are lowered on an elevator and rolled out to be joined to their respective locomotives.
As a fitting climax to our tour within the works, we come last to the great erecting-shop; the most awe-inspiring of all the spaces visited. It is three hundred and thirty-seven feet long by one hundred and sixty feet wide, and on a busy day we may see here seventy locomotives, arranged in rows, all having their various parts joined together.

There are here two bays; each spanned by a pair of electric traveling-cranes, one of one hundred and the other of fifty tons lifting power. We will observe the assembling of the parts of a single locomotive upon which work is now to be commenced.
A crane delivers first the cylinders and saddle, which we saw finished from two castings joined together. This part is lowered upon screw-jacks. Next there floats noiselessly down from above the mammoth boiler.
The smoke-box shell is quickly bolted to the upper flange of the saddle. The fire-box now rests upon jacks, and next the cab is set over it, while work has begun on the insertion of the iron tubes of the boiler, which have copper ferrules at the fire-box ends. By means of a special tool operated by hand the tubes are expanded on both sides of the honey combed vertical sheets through which their ends protrude.
Meanwhile, the great frames forming the iron horse's backbone have been swung into place by a crane. The two front rails, one above the cylinders and the other below, are now bolted to the main frame.
The frame is then leveled, the guides and guide-yoke are put in place, the running-board brackets are bolted on, and the air-pump frame put in place. The boiler is finally secured to the frames by a heavy girder.
All is now ready to put the driving-wheels in place. They are set on a vacant track and are spaced the right distance apart. Great cables of hemp as thick as your upper arm are wrapped twice around the boiler, one at each end, and are grasped by the great hooks of the one-hundred-ton crane.
A signal is given, and, like a newly launched air-ship, the locomotive as thus far finished rises toward the ceiling, is maneuvered about the crowded shop often—through tight-places where there is only a half-inch of clearance—and deposited gently over the waiting drivers.
The journal-boxes are guided in between their respective pedestals, the clamps are put in place, and the engine, with drivers secure, is raised about a foot above ground and set upon the track.
The truck is now attached, nearly all the boiler fittings are made secure, the throttle-pipe with its valve is lowered through the opening of the dome-ring, and various other vital organs are attached.

Before leaving the erecting-shop each locomotive is given the "water test" and "steam test." The tank is filled with water, and caulkers securely hammer together all leaking joints or seams.
Next, steam from a stationary boiler is blown into the vitals of the engine, and thus do its makers first breathe life into it. While it pulsates under its first steam, men go over every part with lighted torches, and wherever a flame blows or quivers, joints are tightened. In this test the steam applied must be ten per cent greater than the working pressure of the finished engine.
Among the last steps are the "lagging" and "jacketing." In the former operation the entire boiler and the top of the firebox are incased in panels of magnesia, an insulation preventing the wanton escape of heat, and incidentally rendering life bearable for the engineer and fireman.
Sometimes the cylinders also are "lagged" with pliable magnesia cement. Over all of the lagging is finally placed a jacket of sheet iron. After this the boiler is again connected with a stationary steam-plant, and the engine is given three running tests to make sure that the various parts are running properly and in entire harmony.
These end the shop tests. The last fittings are now added, the pilot is bolted to the bumper-beam; the steel monster is lifted to one of the main tracks leading out of the works and is taken to the plant's new roundhouse, on the Reading Railroad, near the city limits.

This great circular building, with its dozens of tracks centering in a giant turn-table, is traversed by radial cranes which carry the last fittings needed in the final finishing touches—stacks, bells, parts of valve motion, final cab fittings, piping, etc. Here the final painting is done.
The finished engine is now fired up for the first time and is given a short run under its own steam. This is the newborn monster's first step in learning to walk alone.
The time is now come for it to go abroad and make its own way in the world, and its belongings must be packed for the trip.
It is stripped of its connecting and coupling rods, smoke-stack, headlight, and some other fittings, which are packed in cases and shipped to the purchasing company.
If it is sent abroad, its, cab is dismantled and snugly crated, as are also the slabs of magnesia lagging. If it is a new type of locomotive, its photograph is taken before it is thus partially dismantled for shipment.
In the works I was shown a complete photographic plant for doing this work. Negatives of every distinctive engine or engine part are here made and prints filed.
With each single engine delivered by Burnham, Williams & Co. or with each pair of engines—when a group is sent out at once — a "messenger" is dispatched upon the road. Night and day this guardian must stay with his charges until they are handed over to their purchasers.

The cab of one of them is boarded up to afford him comfortable quarters on the trip, which may be one of many days. A bunk is fitted up on one side of the boiler, and he is allowed a mattress and bedding, also a cook-stove, together with necessary food-staples, as well as a per diem allowance for other supplies.
The new locomotives under his care are placed in between cars at the middle of a freight-train, but the two engines are never placed together. Cars must always intervene: The messenger must see that all bearings are oiled and kept cool, and that everything is maintained in prime condition during the journey.
If any emergency arises he must put the ailing locomotive in the nearest shop. He must be prepared for all kinds of transfers from train to train at all hours of the night, must keep off tramps, and must sleep with one eye open when he sleeps at all.
At the final destination he is met by one of the corps of expert locomotive engineers regularly employed by the Baldwin works, and this new custodian stays with the engine on the purchasing road until it gives perfect satisfaction. Some of these engineers have traveled all over the world, and when I visited the works I was told that two were just starting for France.
Engines sent abroad are carefully installed in freight-steamers, and need no "messengers" to attend them, as their wheels are not running. But each is met on the other side of the ocean by one of the company's engineers, who has preceded it on a passenger-steamer, and awaits its coming.
Each foreign railroad ordering engines from Baldwin's sends an inspector, who watches the progress of construction. Recently a road in the Sudan sent a rush order for four or five locomotives. Not realizing the rapidity with which locomotives could be turned out by the Yankee plant, this road did not hurry its inspector. When he did finally show up he was astonished to find his engines completed and ready for delivery.

The record for building a locomotive at the Baldwin works—from start to finish is—eight days.