ITEMS OF INTEREST July 31, 1909 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

The first electric train of steel cars which whizzed 'through the new "McAdoo tube" from the Church street terminal in New York to Jersey City last week, made the trip in two minutes and forty seconds. The two tunnels are only a step in the plan which in a comparatively brief time will make it possible for the traveler from any point in the country to go through New York city without leaving his train for cab, trolley-car, or ferry. The twin tubes connect down-town New York with the Pennsylvania railroad station on the Jersey side of the Hudson river. In a few weeks a transverse tunnel will be opened, connecting the Pennsylvania, the Erie, and the Lackwanna stations on the Jersey side. Two years from now it is hoped to have an extension finished which will connect the present upper tubes, now running from Sixth avenue and Thirty-third street to Hoboken, with the Grand Central Station at Forty-second street. The entire system has been built by private capital, and will have cost, when complete, about $70,000,000.

The Department of the Interior has classified as coal land and restored to the public domain certain unappropriated lands in the Evanston Land District, Wyoming, fixing the price for disposal of the tracts therein in some cases as high as $500 an acre. This land contains one of the finest coal veins in the West. Investigation some months ago by special agents of the department disclosed that the title to much of the most valuable coal land in that part of Wyoming had been got from the Government through a system of fradulent operations, and suit was instituted against the patentees to recover the lands. Finally, the defendants reconveyed the lands to the Government, paying about $40,000 for coal contracted.

Herbert Knox Smith, commissioner of corporations, in transmitting the second part of his report on transportation by water to President Taft, says: "It is a public evil that the entire transportation system of the United States should be, as now, at odds with itself through destructive competition, while the transportation needs of the public suffer. State and federal work must be supplemented by private initiative, especially in terminals and equipment, and private initiative will come in only when there is reasonable chance of enough traffic to make it profitable. One of the great questions, therefore, is the question of how to secure for the inland rivers and canals a reasonable share of the country's traffic."

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