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70 The cars Niles built were used in a variety of service modes: city, suburban, and interurban, as well as freight. In some cases they were called upon to run almostconstantly,particularlyincityandsuburbanservice,butinothersonly atnight,whichbecametheruleforfreightservicewhencitiesbalkedathaving themonthestreetsindaylight.TheGrandRapids,GrandHaven&Muskegon Railway, for example, ran its Niles passenger cars as a boat train that met, in Grand Haven, boats from Chicago and carried the passengers and their baggage to Muskegon. Their freight motors, in season, carried large quantities of fresh fruit from western Michigan to Grand Haven for shipment to Chicago. AlthoughNilesproducedanextensivecatalogofcarbodydesigns,thereis no evidence that Niles had a significant design department. Rather, throughout its existence it was, to a great extent, a contract builder of railway car bodies ,andtheNilescatalogfeaturesnumerouscarsknowntohavebeendesigned by others. Niles did not participate in the Master Car Builders organization but preferred to remain independent. Trucks, brakes, and hardware were purchased from other manufacturers and the catalog featured Baldwin trucks. In some cases the cars were designed by the railway companies themselves. Many of the larger traction systems maintained well-staffed engineering departments that were perfectly equipped to design cars and had a better understanding of the requirements for their systems than an independent designer might have had. Additionally, there were several well-known and respected engineering firms that railway companies called upon to design power plants, track, and cars—firms such as J. G. White & Company, Ford Bacon & Davis, and premier among them, Stone & Webster Incorporated, all of New York. Stone & Webster became involved with electric railways at an early date, initially through the design of power plants. Its expertise in engineering soon led to the outright management and ownership of electric street railways acrossthecountry.Thefirmintroducedmanyinnovationsincardevelopment 6}} Observations Observations 71 designed to reduce weight and increase strength and safety while reducing overall operating cost. Unfortunately, the automobile matured along with the traction industry and soon motors cars operating as jitney buses were taking away traction riders, often illegally. This prompted the industry to realize that a car was needed that promoted low-cost operation as well as safety, and a Stone & Webster employee named Charles O. Birney, an experienced car designer, came up with what became known as the Birney one-man car. This single-truck, twenty-nine-passenger car weighed in at just 13,000 pounds and cut energy consumption in half. Working with the American Car Company of St. Louis (a Brill subsidiary), the Birney car quickly became the primary competition to the jitney bus that, together with legislation, put jitneys out of business. Niles did produce a single-truck, one-man car similar to the Birney car but could not use the Birney name, which undoubtedly limited sales. TheundisputedleaderintheelectricrailwaycarindustrywastheJ.G.Brill Company of Philadelphia. Brill and its subsidiaries outproduced everyone and in one year built more cars than Niles did in its entire existence. Additionally , Brill manufactured nearly everything on the car except the electrical equipment. This economy of scale gave Brill a decided advantage over other car builders in pricing. Niles’s advantage came in having capacity to spare, enabling it to promise fast delivery to anxious buyers. While extreme departures from the norm were tried, however, some engineering advances in which Niles participated were less than successful. In 1907, the firm produced the famous “Electric Pullmans” for the Washington Baltimore & Annapolis Railway that incorporated a 6600-volt, single-phase, alternating current (AC) electrical system initially developed by the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company in 1902 but built for the WB&A by theGeneralElectricCompany.Thissystemwaslargelyuntestedbutitdidsuggest significant savings in construction of the power system for the railroad. Because of a need to operate in city streets utilizing the 600-volt DC available there, the cars had an electrical system that was incredibly complex and excessive in weight (the cars had copper sheeting on the roofs), which increased power consumption and ran up operating costs significantly. Very soon, General Electric was requested to convert the railway to 1200-volt direct current (DC), necessitating a considerable expense and ultimately leading the railway to receivership. Even after converting the cars to DC operation, their excess weight (they weighed 109,000 pounds) resulted in high power consumption, and by 1910 many of the cars were sold to other railroads. It wasn’t Niles’s fault thattheACsystemwasafailurebutitbenefitedwhentherailwaycamebackin 1909withanorderfortwenty-sevenreplacementcarsthatwereslightlysmaller The Electric Pullman 72 and lighter (at about 80,000 pounds) to operate with the conventional DC system that did not include unnecessary heavy electric equipment. The cars were designed by the engineering firm Roberts & Abbot Company. At about the same time, however, Niles participated in another 6600volt AC...

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