Vermont Trolleys
https://archive.org/details/rbmsbk_ap2-v4_1964_V18N3/page/n45
https://ia802907.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/27/items/rbmsbk_ap2-v4_1964_V18N3/rbms.bk_ap2.v4_1964_V18N3_jp2.zip&file=rbms.bk_ap2.v4_1964_V18N3_jp2/rbms.bk_ap2.v4_1964_V18N3_0045.jp2&scale=4&rotate=0
I was always facinated by the Mt. Mansfield Electric’s rural nature. The Stowe carbarn still exists, and a few years ago was bought by the adjacent Green Mountain Inn, and rooms were constructed in the upstairs. I stayed there about 5 years ago, and now I can say I slept in a carbarn.
That was such a huge headlight for a trolley, love it.
Mike states:
" would like to find a pic of the Trolley crossing 22 CV tracks"
4 train shed tracks and many more just west of it. This photo is too old to have any trolleys in it.
Am I the only one that can’t load the pic Vince posted?
Is this better?
That’s a kerosene headlight, or it sure looks like one. Rather odd, considering the trolley’s electric powered. As far as I know most trolleys had incandescant lamp or carbon-arc headlights.
Carbon-arc headlights could be quite large.
Definitely! Thanks for that.
Thanks, guys! Did the color of the light emitted from a carbon-arc headlight really change as its electrical characteristics change with temperature and time? Or was there any way to control the change of color? I saw some videos of carbon-arc headlight on YouTube, some emit purplish-white light, some are green.
Most interurbans in the early 20th century either had no permanent headlight, or had a “city” incandescent headlight and a plug for the arc light. Many cars had only the bracket and the plug, used to advantage after the better incandescent lights became available about 1910. Inside the car was a resistance bank to drop the voltage as required, sometimes with two taps, one for dim and one for bright selected by a two pole snap switch. The bracket the portable light hung on was also the ground, so crew learned early to pull the plug before removing the headlight.
E.J. Quinby in his book on the North Jersey Rapid Transit’s interurban line* described the carbon-arc headlights on the cars as throwing a “blue-white” beam. He also said it was quite beautiful when it lit up a snow-covered right-of-way.
Here’s an old map of the St Albans area. Click near the bottom to enlarge. The road west out of St Albans has tick marks to indicate it has a trolley track in it. It infers where the trolley line crossed the CV yard.
https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ht-bin/tv_browse.pl?id=efcb3b7225a5ce997aa3ee72376e5792
The North Shore and CA&E cars, except the Electroliners, had removable headlights, but I do not remember if they were incandescent or arc.
Arcs went out in the teens. Between the finicky nature of arc lights, some fires caused by the heat they generated, and improved incandescents and reflectors (the famous “Golden Glow”) arc lights fell out of favor.
As an old military man I’m really impressed by that topographic map of the St. Alban’s area.
I’ve never been there, but it looks like it’s in the middle of some mighty rugged country, especially the land to the east.
Perhaps a ‘remaindered’ (or old-stock) steam-railroad headlight acquired cheaply. Note that the fuel tank is pressed/soldered integrally into the square base of the light; I think if you look carefully you can see the top ‘seam’ on the side panel. The curved top maintains draft more or less stable as wind, rain, etc. blow around the light and its surroundings.
Making incandescent fixtures that run on 600VDC is a somewhat expensive art; there are few if any bulbs made to operate directly at that voltage, and dropping resistors for that voltage are fairly expensive and wasteful.
Arc lights can be difficult to set up and run and involve interesting technology to regulate when the car is running (and the voltage is sagging, the car is banging in various planes, etc.) The arc gap is not ‘fixed’ (the carbon is continually burning away as the arc is 35,000+ degrees F) and a number of automatic devices compensate for this by raising one of the ‘pencils’ to keep the gap (or more precisely, the electrical characteristics across the gap) reasonably constant. Problem is, I don’t think there is any way (aside from photo-type filters or theatrical gels and the like) to DIM an arc headlight effectively in the way ‘city’ incandescents could be – it was a blue-white plasma extravaganza when on, whenever on. This might not be a happy thing for use in-town, particularly for pedestrians or oncoming traffic needing to gauge distance and clearance with the glare in their eyes…
Here’s how Commander Quinby described the arc light headlights mounted on the NJRT’s Jewett interurban cars, I’ll quote directly.
Two Crouse-Hinds Type L carbon arc headlights, demountable, supplied with each car, suspended from central bracket on exterior dash, each end, and provided with incandescant lamp on rim of hinged door, and two-conductor flexible cord and plug to match recepticle mounted under right side of bumper. Headlight transfer switch mounted inside dash in vestibule to left of controller, providing BRIGHT-OFF-DIM positions, connected to headlight through resistor, (for arc).
E.J. also mentions part of the motorman’s duties was trimming the carbons of the arc lights and polishing the aluminum parabolic reflectors.
I should mention the arc lights were original equipment on the Jewett cars as produced in 1910. If they were ever replaced E.J. doesn’t mention it.
For those interested, I found a link to a Crouse-Hinds catalog from 1922 It’s 260 pages, probably more than anyone would want to know about their product line at the time, but here it is.
https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100790552
Scroll down and click on “Full view.” It’s actually quite interesting.
Click on “Crouse-Hinds Company” for even more catalogs.
I’d be very interested to see the arrangements made to dim the arc – my guess being that the DIM position extinguished the arc and lit the incandescent.
I was wrong about the temperature, which is more characteristic of some short-arc fixed-envelope bulbs, and I should have known better because the carbon arc light (especially the flame arc type) and the steam-locomotive firebox share something very important in common: the luminance of vaporized carbon is often an important part of the light emission from a carbon arc lamp. The temperature is something like 6500 degrees F, considerably less than plasma temperature, and there is incomplete ‘combustion’ of the vaporized carbon (leading to acknowledged generation of carbon monoxide and the need to vent it carefully)
I have been advised that the ‘green’ arc indicates the presence of mercury in the light, an improvement made in the early 1900s and, I believe, improving the emission characteristics of a lamp using magnetite ‘carbons’ (an innovation permitting vast increase in the runtime of an arc lamp – from about 110 hours up to 600 or more).
