Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/356

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��Popidar Science Monthly

���An enginfcfcrmg andci takuif^ ui li cuiciiauus cliliiculty. This honeycomb of tunnels at the Grand Central Station, at Forty-second Street and Park Avenue, New York, is being dug

��eight hundred milHon people? That is the number of passengers the present system of rapid transit in New York (elevated lines and subways combined) can transport in a year. This carrying capacity is being increased to three bil- lion! When the new system is com- pleted it would stretch, in single track, from New York's city hall into the bor- ders of Eastern Tennessee, some six hundred and twenty-one miles. The cost of the new lines and extensions amounts

��to three hundred and thirty million dol- lars, which is to say, as much as the gov- ernment has thus far expended at Pan- ama. No other urban rapid transit system in the Avorld will compare with New York's in magnitude.

The new subways — in single track, the total amounts to more than one hundred and fifty miles of tube and trench — are the most interesting side of the construc- tion now in progress ; for this work is at once the most difficult and the most

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