The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

CLEVELAND. FEBRUARY 2l, 1907. No. 8 VOL. XXXV. PACKAGE FREIGHT OWNER- SHIPS. Buffalo, Feb. 18--There has been a great amount of guess work informa- tion as to the changes made here in the ownership and management of the package freight lines, all consequent on the moves made by President Heald of the Mutual company. While these are really radical and have put at 'an end one well-known line they are not so large as they have been supposed, as they leave the Lehigh valley line intact and do not by any means ex- tinguish the Union Steamboat Co., of the Erie Railroad Co. The Mutual company, which has for several years owned the six freighters built by James J. Hill for the North- ern Steamship Co., 'has. this bought the four steamers, St. Paul, Minneapolis, W. C. Rhodes and Huron of the Soo line and will include them in the line, though they will mostly be run between Buffalo and _ Gladstone, much as they have always been, cov- ering Green Bay indirectly. the shortest connection between St. Paul and New York and seems to be very satisfactory, as freight shipped by this route westward is sometimes in St..Paul or Minneapolis before a steamer leaving Buffalo at the some time is fairly in Chicago. The six steamers of the Union Steamboat Co., Starrucca, Ramapo, Chemung, Oswego, Tioga and Bing- hamton, are not . absorbed into the Mutual line, but President Heald has merely been given the management of them in a separate way and they will continue in their trade with Chicago as before. The line is the individual property of the Erie company and has no separate existence, corporate or otherwise. President Heald says that there is no foundation of the reports that he was to control the Lehigh valley line. He 'lines, as the winter * This is has nothing to do with them and they will continue as before. This reduces the lines carfrying package freight between Buffalo and the upper lakes to five and makes a decided difference in the general out- look. There used to be a time when every railroad reaching the lakes felt that it needed a line on the lakes and there were also combined lines and in- dividual lines, The combined lines us- ually suffered from disagreements .among the various owners, which were mostly some of the older and larger Lake Superior Transit line, made up of vessels from the Union, Western and Anchor lines to cover the Lake Superior trade, which it did for a considerable time. Then there began to appear the Northern, Lehigh valley, once under a single management in the palmy days of John Gordon, and the Crescent and Union Transit lines, which came. up as the Ward's Detroit & Lake Superior line went down. There were. the shorter-lived Green Bay line, the Lack- awanna. and Wisconsin Central lines and there were the Wabash and Clover Leaf line out of Toledo, all doing bus- iness. with Buffalo, not to mention the Ogdensburg line, covering the upper lakes from that port, Vermont Central line was sometime ago absorbed by the New York Cen- tral's Western 'Transit line, though still managed as.a separate interest. A dozen years ago nearly all these lines were running at the same time, but they began to take a decided de- cline when the older of the still exist- ing lines began to make it hard for the weaker ones to get eastern rail connections, and without which they were entirely helpless. They could do business westward, for they could use the Erie canal if the eastern roads would not affiliate with them, but as.a distributor of eastern freight the canal was not what was needed. over last season. which as the . those bought 'Hours of labor are shorter, pay higher -ment employ 'than There was also the general tendency to concentrate such' interests, which may go on somewhat futther, but looks likely to remain where it is for awhile' When the new Erie Barge canal is finished there will be a fur- ther adjustment because of the chance it will afford for new lines to be run in connection with the lake lines. It the canal is a success it will be too large an interest to be given over to individual boatmen as the old canal has always been. There does not ap- - pear, to be much change in prospect in the three undisturbed lake lines, though they will still try to grow | steadily. ~The Western line is building a new steamer, to be out after midsummer -and it will add two new steamers to 'the Vermont Central line. {te Is: uns derstood that the Anchor line has -chartered the Lackawanna and Scran- -ton for the season. For while the number of lines de- "creases the capacity steadily increases, as there is more business every year. "Tt is believed that there will be quite a good increase of it the coming season JoHN W. CHAMBERLIN. In the last report of the chief of the 'bureau of construction and repair at- tention is called to the fact that ships 'constructed by government force can- not possibly cost as little as those from private builders. . and holidays more frequent in govern- elsewhere. The plea' made for such construction in one yard on the Atlantic coast and one on the Pacific coast is based on an en- - tirely different consideration--the maintenance, which such construction 'permits, of an efficient body of trained . mechanics able to carry out emergency repairs and forming a reliable nucleus -for large gangs in case of military ne- cessity. a