The New York Rapid-transit Subway

DISCUSSION ON NEW YORK SUBWAY. [Minutes of Discussion. The President. The President observed that he was sure it would be the wish of the members that the best thanks of The Institution should be accorded to the Author for his extremely interesting and valuable Paper. The Author had been a Member of The Institution for 15 years, but the present was his first appearance at any of its meetings. The members were very pleased to welcome him that evening, and were the more gratified that his first appearance should be associated with so valuable a communication as that which he had laid before them. Wolle Barry. Sir John Wölfe BARRY, K.C.B., Past-President, observed that it gave him great pleasure to be allowed to say a few words. The Author could scarcely be looked upon as anything but half an Englishman and half an American ; at any rate, the members looked upon him as a brother in engineering. All of them could learn lessons from the monumental Paper which the Author had set before them, descriptive of what could, without exaggeration, be described as a monumental work. He took peculiar pleasure in being present, from the fact that he had been associated with the Author for a good many months as one of the Board of Advisory Engineers to the Royal Commission on the Traffic of London, the members of wliich had derived great advantage from the Author’s experience in New York ; and Londoners were grateful to him for the help he had given in trying to solve a problem which was still unsolved, and wliich had been neglected in a way that nobody could have anticipated. He presumed the Author would not deny that in designing the very interesting work described in his Paper he had received some benefit from the experience of London. He had been able to see a large amount of shallow-railway work which had been previously done in London, some of it dating back 40 or 50 years, and a good deal of it not dissimilar to some of the work undertaken in New York. In many respects the Author had wisely improved upon some of the work executed in London so long ago ; nevertheless, in respect of the main features of the New York subway, the Author would agree that he had gained some assistance from the construc- tors of the Metropolitan, the Metropolitan District, the Thames Tunnel, and other lines of that kind. He congratulated the Author very sincerely on his decision to adopt a shallow form of construc- tion. He himself had been convinced for the last 30 or 40 years