Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/904

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��Popular Science Monthly

��"Once Over" and the Road Is Done

��THERE has been put to work on the roads in the vicinity of Philadel- phia, a new and interesting piece of road-making machinery, which is attract- ing attention because it performs several operations at once. After one passage

���Drainage is essential in road main- tenance, but it is impossible where there is a thick growth of vegetation at the sides of the road. Three trips over the road during the spring and early sum- mer not only place it in good condition, but keep down this vegetation for the entire summer.

The apparatus will make a roadway thirty feet wide or may be adjusted to one-half that width. While its work is most effective in rejuvenat- ing an old road it may also be used for building new roads in connection with an ordinary tractor-blade grader.

��Two treatments of the roadway during the season keep it in excellent condition

��over a poorly-built or worn-out piece of roadway, the surface has been planed, scarified, rolled and left in good condi- tion for use. The "once-over" is all that is necessary at the time. If a roadway is treated by this machine two or three times at interv^als during the early part of the season it is in reasonably good shape for months of service.

The machine, necessarily heavy, weighs about eighteen thousand pounds. It is drawn by a traction engine of from twenty-five to forty horse- power, according to the char- acter of the work to be performed. There are two low-hanging blades on either side; as the machine passes along, these scrape off the surface of the road at the sides, bringing the loose earth to the center. The scarifier cuts off the hummocks in the center of the grade, which is then packed down hard by the action of the roller. A feature of the roller's work is that the crown of the road is as nicely rounded as if done by hand.

��Some Record Dredging at Panama

THE Cascadas, the largest all-steel dredge in the world, which made three new high records for dredging in the Culebra Cut at Panama, can remove thirty-five thousand tons of material with ease every working day of twenty-four hours. The heaviest train ever hauled by one locomotive, from Baltimore to Philadelphia, con- sisted of fiftv-five cars with four thou-

���A traction engine pulls the machine which performs the three functions of scraping, cutting and rolling

��sand four hundred and one tons of coal. The output of the Cascadas on one day, however, weighs more than the contents of eight such trains. Furthermore the Cascadas is an ail-American product, de- signed, constructed and erected in this country by a company which is the larg- est manufacturer of its kind in the world.

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