Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 September 1906 — THE RAILROAD [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE RAILROAD

Nearly $400,000 is to be expended by the Illinois Central Railroad for new pastenger train equipment. Frederick Underwood, president of the Erie road, holds seventy-two directorships and trusteeships, but is second in the United States to W. H. Newman of the New York Central in point of holdings. The interstate commerce commission, in session at Toledo to investigate the relations of the railroads with the ice trust, brought out numerous facts showing that the Ann Arbor road had discriminated in freight rates in favor of the trusts. TheVe were indications that the commission was about to make a thorough investigation of coal-carrying railroads of Ohio. Officials of the Lackawanna railroad announce that they are about ready to dispense with the services of all telegraphers after which they will control the movements of the trains by the automatic block signal system, supplemented by telephone facilities. This will effect the entire system and it will be the first railroad in America to make sweeping change. The Western Pacific Railway Company is perfecting plans to enter California, and when the read is completed It will be one of the greatest railroad engineering feats of modern times. The engineers in charge have instructions to keep one object in view, the line with the least grade. To accomplish this forty-five tunnels will be bored in eastern California, between Oroville and Beckwith Pass. Instead of going around mountains the Western Pacific is going through them. By the time she western wheat crop is ready to move the Canadian Pacific will have a hundred additional engines and 8,000 cars, which will be exclusively used to haul the western crop. Further than that, the roadbed has been and is being •o improved by reducing gfades and curves and double tracking that where formerly trains of five hundred lons were about the limit, in places the engines can now haul fifteen "EunJrecTToh Toa<ls, which means a vast improvement in the capacity of the road. It is claimed that with the recent general reductions in passenger fares in the West and the 2-cent fares in effect in thickly populated States east of the Mississippi river .lift passenger tariffs of the United States are way below those of Europe and among the lowest in the world. A newly incorporated holding company, to bo known as the Beach Creek and Eastern Coal Company, capitalised at $8,000,000, has taken over the Pennsyl-* vanis Coal and Coke Company, the alliance of which with the New York Central was recently investigated by the Intern State Commerce Commission.