Page:Popular Mechanics 1928 11.pdf/10

 



Equipped with a shield in front and a motor-driven brush, a shoe-shining stand now on the market is especially designed for women patrons. The operator's stool is a separate unit and carries the motor underneath. The customer's chair is easily mounted, has a comfortable seat and back, and as entrance is gained from the side, there is no danger of catching the clothing on protruding parts. The electric brush, it is said, produces a higher degree of polish than can ordinarily be obtained with the usual hand tools and, of course, also saves time.

 



Waste of time, pricked fingers, and other unpleasant features, are avoided in a special holder for office pins. It has a top so arranged that when it is pressed, a pin emerges bead first from a little opening where it can be grasped with the thumb and forefinger, ready for immediate use. The container holds 200 pins, is attractively finished and does not spill the pins, as they come in special refill tubes ready for insertion in the holder.

 

An eight-mile tunnel through the Cascade mountains, the longest bore in America and fifth longest in all the world, is nearing completion in the northwest. When trains start through it, probably about the first of the new year, the Great Northern's route to the coast will be shortened by many miles, the climb over the mountains reduced 505 feet, a two-and-a-half-mile tunnel abandoned, and six miles of costly snowsheds eliminated. The new tunnel is to cost $10,000,000, but the saving on upkeep of snow and avalanche sheds alone is expected to pay for it. When President Coolidge, on May 1, pressed a telegraph key in Washington and set off the blast that holed through the pioneer bore alongside the big tunnel, he marked the beginning of the end, after two and a half years of labor. The pioneer bore is a smaller shaft, parallel to and sixty feet distant from the big one. It cost several millions to drive the preliminary tunnel, but the savings it made possible made the outlay worth while. Only two gangs, one starting at each end, can work at one time in a single tunnel, but by rushing the smaller bore through the mountains for eight miles, the engineers were enabled to drive short connecting shafts sidewise to the line of the big bore, and then start additional crews from each shaft, working in either direction. In this way the main tunnel was attacked from eight different places, the two outer portals and six in the mountain, with two crews working in each direction from the six, or a total of fourteen crews working at one time. Seventeen and a half miles of the present railroad line will be eliminated, along with the old tunnel and the 505-foot climb to its level. The new bore eliminates also track curves that are equivalent to nearly seven complete circles.

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