The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 3, Issue 4 (August 1, 1928)
Wireless on Trains
Wireless on Trains
The story of the application of wireless telegraphy to a moving train and the progress that radio has made in the transportation field during the past few years has been interestingly told by Mr. George T. Bell, of Montreal, former passenger traffic manager of the Grand Trunk Railways.
Mr. Bell, who took a keen interest in the early experiments, spoke of the many obstacles that confronted the engineers in efforts to interest scientists in Montreal. The first experiments, he explained, were tried with complete success early in October, 1902, on a special train which started from Montreal, the point selected for the experiment being Laprairie, about fourteen miles from Montreal, from which place the first railway train in Canada was run in 1837. Of special interest was the fact that on October 13, 1902, the first public demonstration of the application of wireless to a fast-moving train was staged on a special train from Chicago to Portland, Me., bearing the delegates to the General Passenger and Ticket Agents' Association, now the American Passenger Traffic Officers' Association, of which Mr. Bell served as president in 1909. The signals were audibly heard on a set of bells which had been installed on three of the cars, and the experiment made a profound impression on the gathering.
The inspiration to bring to Canada, and incidentally to the railroad of which he was an official, the honour of being the first to apply wireless telegraphy to train operation was gained, the speaker said, from a dispatch that he had read in a Boston paper telling of Senatore Marconi's trip to complete plans at Glace Bay for sending wireless messages across the Atlantic.
Mr. Bell said that the tests conducted by the McGill University scientists on what are now the Canadian National Railway lines were made a little more than two months prior to the time when Senatore Marconi transmitted his first commercial wireless across the water. Since that experiment, the Canadian National Railways had been working in the field of wireless and radio, and to-day more than forty-six cars are equipped with radio sets.
A minute lost at a railway corssing may save all the rest of your time.