American cars and trains

From a letter to the UK, some years back:

My neighbor was fixing his motor this morning. It’s a 1973 Ford LTD; 18 feet long, almost three tons but only two doors (each, though, as long as some cars). Seats like armchairs in a Piccadilly club, column shift, copious swathes of maroon velvet and acres of fake wood printed directly onto metal. This, he tells me, is the small version with the 385-inch motor; there was a 440, and the police got a version with, wait for it, 600 cubes. 

He was replacing the front ball joints, and when I peered into the cavernous hole left by removing the wheel the whole setup from which the hub dangled looked less substantial than that of a Mini. The worryingly small disc was backed by tiny, spindly little arms that must flap and flex like asparagus under any sort of lively driving. Ford exhibited a touching faith in the quality of their components by securing the ball joints not with bolts but with huge rivets that have to be ground off to release the hub. 

"It’s a great car," he asserted, "I can go a whole week on a tank of gas." He works three miles away; the tank holds about 30 gallons. Go figure, as they say here. I rented a Chevy Suburban not long back, a 5.7-liter beast like an overweight Range Rover. Aware of their dreadful reputation as guzzlers, and knowing that we were going to Washington DC and back, I took it into a gas station and blithely said "Fill ‘er up." We were still sat there 15 minutes later – the damn thing had a 42-gallon tank. Despite the primordial pushrod V8, the aerodynamics of a block of flats and several hours at a steady 75, I couldn’t empty it.

I thought of you when I was up at the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum a few weeks back; hall after hall of behemoths, including that electric thing designed by Raymond Loewy that looks like an art deco mantel clock and is made entirely from aluminum, and a really weird steam locomotive with vertical cylinders clinging to its flank like sucking piglets and driving a huge flywheel, whence the urge is transmitted to all 10 wheels (including the tender) by shafts and bevel gears. More than one can see in a day, and a vast 2-10-0 chuffing up and down outside, departing every hour to haul a train of ancient cars through the bewilderingly pretty Amish countryside.