Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 89.djvu/563

 Popular Science Moutlilij

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���run beneath the piers of the great ocean steamships. Whole freight cars will be raised and lowered by elevators, and branches will run through the side streets to the consignees

��Conditions in \cw York Harbor, which is ilatcd August, 1915, points out that the total amount of goods moved on the waters of New York Harbor, other than that on ferry boats, in the year 1906 was 113,969,355 tons. No one knows what it was worth, but one student of harbor conihtions guessed that it would take approximately ten billion dollars to meet the invoices.

One-fjuarter of the ferry boats of the United States were to be found in New York Harbor at that time. There were also 5,289 unrigged boats for moving heavy freight around the bay and ad- joining waters. One-half the tremendous volume of products was transported on ligiuers. A considerable part of the etjuipment for handling freight is owned by the railroad companies that have no tracks on Manhattan and cannot lay them down on the island.

In most communities it is practicable to run tracks alongside the piers, fac- tories and warehouses. It has not been so in New York City in the past. The

��manufacturers and merchants have been obliged to rely upon trucks to get their goods from the railroads and ships to their places of manufacture, storage and trade.

This has ahvays caused great conges- tion along the waterfront, particularly that of Manhattan. Here the railroads compete with the steamship companies for space to land their freight. The railroad companies do this by establish- ing depots on piers, alongside which they bring great carfloats, floating switches they might be called. So general is the use of carfloats that it has been said that every morning the terminal yards of the great trunk lines in Jersey City, Hoboken and Weehawken are detached from New Jersey and firawn across to New York Cit\-, being returntxl again at nighlfall.

Trucking, howe%'er, in New York City is costly owing to the high expense, a-ttached to housing and feeding horses and the length of time recjuired to get a load to or from the waterfront because

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