Jounceless

Sporty Cortlandt T. Hill, 31-year-old, stockbroking grandson of the late great Railroader James Jerome Hill, was skiing down hills at Sun Valley, Idaho, last week with his host, Railroader W. Averell Harriman. Between slides he tried to interest the Union Pacific's able board chairman not in some of his stocks but in his two new railroad cars.

Back in Inglewood, Calif. Cortlandt Hill had a pair of plywood passenger cars which resembled ordinary units of a streamlined duralumin train, but which were mounted on their running gear in a manner which he and several partners claimed was brand-new for railroad cars. Invented by William Van Dorn and Dr. F. C. Lindvall of California Institute of Technology, who have been working on the cars for the past two years in an abandoned Northrup Aviation hangar, the coaches are sprung on a "pendulum" principle by which four heavy vertical coil springs above each of the car's four axles fit into pockets in the body of the car (see cut). As the top of these is above the coach's low centre of gravity, the tendency of the body roll on curves is inward instead of outward as on an ordinary car. Airplane fashion, the car banks into the curve, vastly increasing both comfort and steadiness. Lateral and horizontal restraint of the body is achieved by rubberized links between the inside end of the trucks and the lower portion of the car's body. Result is a full-size passenger coach whose floor is 30 in. above the rails instead of 4 1/4 ft.; whose roof is u ft. instead of 14 ft. high. Weight, if made of duralumin, is 50,000 Ib.--40% less than present streamlined cars.

Most interested railroad in the experimental coaches is Santa Fe, which loaned ten miles of sidetrack and ,an engine for the trial runs. To show them to other U. S. roads the designers plan to install two Ford V-8 engines to enable the coaches to cruise about the country under their own power. Delighted with the steadiness of the coaches during tests at 50 m.p.h., Sponsor Hill--whose previous railroad experience consists of three weeks in the Great Northern shops at St. Paul during childhood--pronounced his cars "jounce-less."

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