The New York Rapid-transit Subway

98 DISCUSSION ON NEW YORK SUBWAY. [Minutes of Mr. Boardman tax to work the lifts required. He would summarize his con- ’elusions thus:—Under like conditions the subway should be safer than the tube: the subway attracted more passengers than th tube: serious obstruction to street-traffic was not inherent in subway construction: a tube would not have been justifiable in New York because of its lack of high capacity with reasonable working-cost. Bury agreed with the view that shallow subways wereinfinitely preferaNe to deep tubes and he thought the future for shallow subways was far greater than anything that could be expected for deep tubes. The secret of the success of the Subway in New York was that four tracks had been made, and the fast traffic kept separate from the slow; and the wisdom of that plan was probably confirmed by the experience of many men who had to de with the large volume of traffic in and out of London. It was obvious that London would not tolerate such a condition of thing as had obtained in New York. Whilst he could not help admiring strongly the resourcefulness which had been shown throughout the engineering and structural part of the work, he wished to deal chiefly with the working of the subway and the commercial side of the undertaking. In regard to the stations,he was struck with the short- ness of the platforms, which were only about 350 feet long. On the Great Northern Railway platforms so short would be in many cases of no value at all. The projection of the platform by 20 inches e considered a great advantage. The standard in England on some lines was only 12 inches, but even that was better than it had been formerly. A striking example of the benefit of the projection had been shown a short time ago at Finsbury Park, when, in a dense fog, an elderly lac y fell off the edge of the platform just as a train was coming in. A young man jumped down and pulled her off the track under the ledge of the platform, and so saved her life ; but both the lady and her rescuer would probably have preferred 20 inches to 12 inches, which was the standard With regard to the permanent way, it would be interesting if the Author could say how the rails were wearing. At first the rails had been found to be too soft. He really thought that something would have to be done in the way of making rails harder. That was rather a bold thing to say in the presence of so many eminent permanent- wav engineers, but his excuse must be that he had been < permanet-wvay engineer himself. It was well known that from some unexplained cause electric traction wore the rails a good deal faster than steam-traction, and it would be interesting to know what was the experience on the Rapid-Transit Subway. It would also be useful to know why the sleepers were not creosoted or treated in a y