While this is about the average rate per hour of the fastest train between New York and Chicago, it should be remembered that the trains run on steel rails, that curves are comparatively few, and they are not sharp, while the automobile was spinning around a mile track made of plain dirt, and was obliged to negotiate 2,506 sharp curves.  Besides, the locomotives on the fast trains are changed every 120 to 150 miles, while the entire run of 1,253 miles was made by one auto which had already run 7,500 miles in ordinary service before it was entered in the race.

Unfortunately for the automobile, it has achieved so many remarkable speed records that its name is suggestive of swiftness.  If the English language were not the stereotyped, inelastic vehicle for the communication of thought that it is we should now be speaking of “automobiling” a shady bill through the city council instead of “railroading” it.  There are few places where it is permissible to attain record speed, and fewer men who, with safety to others, may be entrusted with the attempt.  The true value of the automobile to the average man lies in its ability to keep right on going indefinitely at moderate speed under any and all conditions.

One of the innumerable tests in which the staying qualities of the automobile were brought out was the trip from Pittsburg to Philadelphia by way of Gettysburg by S.D.  Waldon and four passengers in a Packard car, September 20, 1910.  This run of 303 miles over three mountain ranges, with the usual accompaniments of steep grades, rocks, ruts, and thank-you-ma’ms to rack the machinery and bruise the feelings of the riders, was made in 12 hours and 51 minutes.

A little run of three or four hundred miles, though, is scarcely worth mentioning by way of showing what an auto can do in a real endurance contest.  A much more notable trip was the non-stop run from Jackson, Michigan, to Bangor, Maine, in November, 1909, by E.P.  Blake and Dr. Charles Percival.  The distance of 1,600 miles was covered in 123 hours, which meant traveling at an average speed of 13 miles an hour in rain and snow and mud over country roads at their worst.  In all that time the motor never once stopped.  In the Munsey historical tour of 1910 a Brush single-cylinder car covered the 1,550 miles of a schedule designed for big cars and came through with a perfect score.  If you know the hill roads of Pennsylvania you’ll realize what that means in the way of car performance.

Still more remarkable endurance tests are the transcontinental trips which are undertaken so frequently nowadays that they no longer attract attention.  One such trip which shows what very little trouble an automobile gives when handled with reasonable care was that made in 1909 by George C. Rew, W.H.  Aldrich, Jr., R.A.  Luckey, and H.G.  Toney.  Traveling by daylight only, they made the journey of 2,800 miles from San Francisco to Chicago in nineteen days in a Stearns car.  They might have done better if they had not loitered along the way.  On one occasion they stopped to haul water a distance of twenty-five miles for some cowboys on a round-up.  The motor gave no trouble whatever, while the only trouble with tires was a single puncture caused by a spike when they tried to avoid a bad stretch of road by running on a railroad track.