The car shops rank next in importance to the locomotive shops. The foreman of this plant tells you casually that it has an annual capacity of 300 new passenger cars and 3,600 new freight cars. It is a great plant of itself, some seventy acres of ground covered with great construction buildings. Some of these are in roundhouse form, for convenience in handling equipment under construction; others are set side by side and easily reached by use of a long transfer table. The work of erecting the freight equipment is carried on quite separate from that of the passenger car work. The almost universal use of steel in the manufacture of every sort of freight car, save the box-cars, which still have wooden walls and roof built upon a steel foundation, has made a large steel-working shop a necessary adjunct of every car-building plant. One of the most interesting features of the Altoona car-building plant is a giant hydraulic press situate in the open, just outside of the steel-working plant. This press brings a dead weight of 1,500 tons down upon the sheet of steel that it receives. It is used in making the sills of the freight-cars--"fish-bellies," the master car-builders call them--and under that giant press a sheet of steel, one-half inch in thickness and from thirty to forty feet in length, is bent into shape as easily as you might bend a sheet of soft cardboard within your fingers. The press makes many hundred "fish-belly" sills every working day, and it pays its way. The steel-working in this shop has been carried forth into passenger car construction and a great shed given over for that work. Within it one sees the gaunt frames of the cars that are to be, gaining shape, until at the far end of the shop is a line of the cars, completed as far as the steel workers can carry them, and ready to be swung by one of the ever-busy switch-engines to the finishing shop, and then finally to the paint shop. Even with the steel car coming into its own, there are still hundreds of thousands of wooden cars in operation; and the construction of wooden cars will not cease for many years. While steel as a raw material is not far in advance of the cost of wood these days, the cost of fashioning it into cars is still so excessive as to make it impracticable save in cases of extremely profitable operation. One of the strongest points in favor of steel in car-construction is that of the economy of its maintenance, always a strong point with railroad men. The wooden car feels the wear and tear of life upon the rail keenly; in the case of a wreck it is not to be even compared with the steel car.