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The steamer Wolvin set a record during the last season by loading a cargo of 12,250 tons in one hour and thirty minutes.

But with a grain boat, the scenes at the shipping places are quite different. Instead of tying Instead of tying up alongside a grimy, rattling coal derrick or ore chute, the vessel lies alongside a great elevator. From small openings in the elevator, pipes are run into the hatches and through these the grain rushes with a pleasant buzzing sound. In an hour and a half, a 10,000-ton freighter can in this way be filled with grain, which runs through the pipes at a rate of about 125,000 bushels an hour. When such a cargo is to be unloaded, pipes similar to those with which the loading is done are run into the hatches of the vessel; but instead of the grain pouring down from the elevator into the ship it now begins to disappear up the pipes, at the other end of which engines are creating a suction of several hundred pounds to

the square inch. A number of Lake vessels now carry as much as 380,000 bushels of grain to a trip, and this vast quantity can be unloaded in from two and a half to three hours. It is interesting to note that the average freight profit of a 10,000-ton vessel is from $7,500 to $8,000, although there are exceptional cases where the freightage was as high as $18,000. These enormous freight bills come at the end of the season, however, when shippers are willing to pay twice the ordinary freight rates in order to be "cleared" before navigation closes and even then their grain and ore are carried for a small fraction of what the railroads would charge.

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since the above article was written, the official report has shown the total Sault Ste. Marie tonnage for 1906 at 51,751,080 tons, against 44,270,680 tons in 1905. Of this, American ships carry from 94% to 96%. The total value of the American ships in 1905 was over $73,000,000, and of Canadian ships $5,429,000.]

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COMING THROUGH THE LOCKS OF THE SOO CANAL

As the water confined in the lock is let out, the ship drops down to the level of the canal on this side

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MR. HARRIMAN 1863

T

IV

SALVAGE OF THE TWO PACIFICS

BY

C. M. KEYS

10 COMPLETE the Harriman record, we must turn from Wall Street to the West, and from the devious methods of finance to the really marvelous policy that has built up the Union Pacific and the Southern Pacific of to-day from the two wrecks which Mr. Harriman and his associates bought in 1898 and in 1901.

Early in 1898, Mr. Harriman went West to look over the road into which he had put his money. What he saw on that minute inspection should have been enough to drive him out of the railroad business for good and all. The Union Pacific of that day was a melancholy imitation of a railroad. On the whole system he found only about 400 miles of road that was graded at all, the rest being merely a collection of ties and rails laid down on a dirt foundation. The station buildings were tumble-down shacks. The cars, as he whizzed past them, looked old and battered, and eloquent of economy in the purchase of paint. West of Cheyenne, on the main line of traffic from the Missouri to Ogden,

MR. HARRIMAN'S HEIR

his train climbed hills by the hundred, hills that would compel every heavy freight train to call upon two engines for its haulage. The engines were old and light. Everything was dirty, decrepit, low-class.

Worse than all this, the men on the road in the company's service were thoroughly disheartened. There was no spirit in the Union Pacific. It lay on the prairies inert, paralyzed, dead. The blight of poverty, political sin, private graft, and official treachery had lain upon it from its very birth. Its men had learned to think of the Union Pacific as a hopeless, helpless pawn in the big games played in Wall Street by Jay Gould and others of his kind. Long since, they had lost all veneration for the road. The devotion of the Burlington men for the Burlington and the absolute affection in which the old Rock Island men held the Cables and their railroad found no counterpart on the Union Pacific. There was no pride nor spirit in the staff.

So, as Mr. Harriman sped over the lines in

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This great trestle across the Great Salt Lake is the most striking monument to the constructive genius of Harriman

this first hurried yet careful survey, he probably cursed the road and its late sponsors many and many a time. Yet, when he could take his eyes from the miserable rails and the ragged cars, he found many things to give him hope and spirit. He looked upon fields that promised the greatest crop in years. New life had begun to stir throughout the mighty West. The people were awakening, and the nightmare of panic faded from their memories. Men spoke hopefully of the future; above all, of the immediate future-the crops and what they meant to the West. The Wall Street

lions. The directors squirmed, objected, argued-then stripped the treasury of cash to give it to the starving railroad. So began what one of the directors at that time called the "madness of Harriman," that splendid executive lavishness which was to make of the old Union Pacific the finest railroad in the West, a terrible pacemaker for every other railroad running from the Rivers to the Pacific Ocean.

Once the ice was broken, Harriman took command of the treasury and all that came into it. In the first year and a half after his

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The boy is mounted on "Parole," Pierre Lorillard's famous old race-horse. The whole family is devoted to outdoor sports

broker was far-seeing enough, great enough, to set against the decrepit railroad the spirit of the West and the heart of the Westerner. From this trial balance he found courage to demand from his board of directors the expenditure of millions of dollars in the purchase of new cars.

The directors were paralyzed by that urgent, peremptory demand. The old directors had been wont to dole out to the road here a few thousand, there a few thousand, for rails, shops, cars. The Harriman demand was. for mil

syndicate bought this road, he compelled the spending of enough money on freight cars alone to increase the carrying capacity of the road nearly 75 per cent. It was the most radical step ever taken by a railroad up to that time. It was based upon just one little thing, an idea that Harriman had gathered from his hurried rush across the prairies in the summer of 1898. The idea was that if the railroad would do its duty by the people, the people might be trusted to do the rest.

How far this idea has carried him may be

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judged from the fact that the capacity of all the freight cars on the whole Union Pacific system in 1906 was close to 750,000 tons, while in 1898 it was less than 390,000 tons. In other words, the Union Pacific is nearly twice as large a carrier of freight as it was in 1898, judged merely by the capacity of its cars.

REBUILDING THE UNION PACIFIC

But the reëquipment of the road was only a small part of the task that Harriman set for himself after that inspection. As he traversed the Wyoming lines, he saw that in this section. the Union Pacific was a failure and always would be a failure unless something radical were done. Westward, it carried its freight up the steep Black Hills, slid down the other side, then came again to other hills that had to be climbed at an enormous cost in fuel, time, and general wear and tear. The road was a series of curves, twists, short steep grades, sudden dips, and rickety bridges over chasms. It looked about the most hopeless bit of trunk-line railroad in the United States.

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MISS MARY HARRIMAN

One of the most expert horse-women of the younger set in New York society

"Rebuild it," said Harriman, "and do it right away!"

The directors came around to this view after a struggle, and finally consented to the plan which Mr. Harriman laid before them, calling for grades from end to end not to exceed forty-four feet to the mile. That, it may be said, is an easy grade for a mountain road, and will permit of carrying pretty heavy trains behind one engine. The grades had formerly run pretty close to eighty feet. Now, it may seem an easy thing to sit in a big leather chair in an office in New York and decide to reduce grades from eighty feet to forty-four feet per mile on a couple of hundred miles of road in Wyoming; but it is quite another matter to do it. The directors practically gave to Mr. Harriman the task of seeing that somebody did it. Their only stipulation seems to have

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