Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive

Tom Swift and His Electric Locomotive, or Two Miles a Minute on the Rails, is by Victor Appleton. The contents list chapter titles including A Tempting Offer, Trouble Starts, Tom Swift's Friends, Much to Think About, Barbed Wire Entanglements and The Contract Signed. A character named Mr. Bartholomew says that an electric locomotive that can make two miles a minute over a properly ballasted roadbed might not be an impossibility.

Mr. Bartholomew puts it up to the Swifts: he wants an investigation to result in the building of locomotives that will make a speed of two miles a minute, or as near that as possible, on level rails. Tom Swift does not try for much speed on the first test of the Hercules 0001 and goes around the two-mile track several times before bringing the machine to a stop near the crowd of onlookers. The text describes the Hercules 0001 snatching an eastbound freight over the mountain to Hammon at a pace slightly exceeding forty-five miles an hour.