Items of Interest October 31, 1914 Issue

Items of Interest

President Wilson has signed the Alaskan coal land leasing bill, opening the coal fields of Alaska. Because of restrictions recently put on the output of coal from Canada to Alaska, the bill was hurried through Congress at the request of Secretary Lane and several Western senators. The bill is designed to throw open to a system of leases under competitive bidding the immense coal resources of Alaska, tied up the last eight years, and pending claims will be adjudicated within a year. The Bering river, Matanuska, and Nenana coal fields will be the first surveyed, the government retaining 5,120 acres in the Bering and 7,680 acres in the Matanuska fields, and one half of all other coal areas. To prevent monopoly, or in other emergencies, the government reserves the right to mine coal for the benefit of the army and navy, or for the operation of the government railroads in Alaska. Leases will be made in blocks of forty acres, or multiples of that amount not exceeding 2,560 acres altogether in any one lease, and to run not more than fifty years. Present coal land claimants may relinquish their rights to patent under the old law, payments being refunded. Royalties paid by lessees must be at least two cents a ton, with a maximum unrestricted. Proceeds from leases will be usable only to reimburse the government for building the Alaskan railway.

When President Wilson pushes a button in the White House some time in the afternoon of Oct. 31, the flash at the end of the wire in Kansas City will open the new Union station, the third largest in actual size in the United States, and the center of a terminal system that has cost in excess of fifty million dollars. A few minutes after midnight on the morning of Nov. 1, the first train will enter the new station, to be followed thereafter each twenty-four hours by more than three hundred incoming and outgoing trains. Where the old union depot was outgrown in the first twenty years of its life, the new station, with the expenditure of a comparatively small part of its original cost of six million dollars, can be trebled in size so far as train accommodation is concerned, and doubled as to passenger accommodation. The systems which will use the new station are the Santa Fé, Burlington, Rock Island, Union Pacific, Frisco, Missouri Pacific, M. E. & T., Kansas City Southern, Alton, Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, Chicago Great Western, and Wabash. The Kansas City, Mexico & Orient railroad, when completed, also will use the new station.

By touching an electric button, President Wilson will announce to the world, on an early date in November, the official opening of Houston's ship channel, the completion of which on Sept. 7 marked an era in Houston's commerce. Throughout its length of fifty-one miles from Bolivar roads in the Gulf of Mexico to Houston, Texas, the channel is more than twenty-five feet deep, as required by the government. From the Turning basin to Morgan's point it is one hundred feet wide at the bottom, and thence to Bolivar it is one hundred and fifty feet wide at the bottom. The amount expended in this improvement was two million five hundred thousand dollars, and the work extended over a period of two years. Houston assumed responsibility for half this amount, and the United States government for the remainder. In return for the government's half and its promise to maintain the channel forever, the city of Houston promised to erect and maintain free wharves. It has cut the distance for rail hauls and will bring commerce direct to the largest railroad center in the Southwest.

Send a comment to the editors

We'd love to hear from you!

Easily submit your testimonies, articles, and poems online.

Submit

Items of Interest

We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up for unlimited access