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

30 THE NEWARK SHIP CANAL. (From the Engineering Record.) The project for making Newark, N. qe an important port has recently been pushed ahead vigorously. Last October the state legislature passed an act authorizing the city to con- struct docks and canals and acquire land for this purpose. The direction of the undertaking came under the board of street and water commis- sioners, which, in February, referred the subject to an advisory commis- sion comprising Messrs. E. P. Good- rich, James Owen, Isaac P. Roe, George T. Hand, C. G Elliott and Morris R. Sherrerd, the last named being engineer of the board. week this commission reported gen- eral plans for the work, which the board adopted and ordered filed with the secretary of state. Mr. Sherrerd was authorized to begin negotiations for all of the necessary land. The project is tunusual because it com- bines in one undertaking two entirely different objects. The first of these is. the reclamation of about 4,000 . acres of unoccupied salt meadows within 'the city limits which is ad- mirably located for several purposes but is now a waste on account of its low elevation above tide water. The second object is the connection of Newark by a deep channel with New- ark Bay, so that materials may be re- ceived. and dispatched in sea-going vessels. 2 In order to ascertain the amount of water frontage necessary for ship- ping purposes, the commission made studies of the probable growth in the city's population and reached the conclusion that it would be about 1,500,000 by 1950, an estimate that agrees fairly with the results of studies of the growth of cities in the vicinity made by other commissions. To arrive at an estimate of the ap- proximate amount of wharfage which it would be advantageous to provide, an analysis of what has been. con- structed. and what is now in use in and about the port of New York was made. The shipping of a port was classified as follows: (a) Vessels carrying foreign imports and exports; (b) Coastwise traffic; (c) River and canal traffic; (d) Inter-harbor traffic, such as ferries, etc. The present available wharfage of the port of New York is about 1,000,- 000 lin. ft. Of this total only about 10 per cent: is given to ocean-going vessels. The department of docks and ferries of New York City and private owners have created about 15,000 lin. ft. of additional wharfage east: TAE MarRINE REVIEW per year for the past 10 years. Most of this increase is to accommodate commission. ocean vessels, and the believes that it is apparently provid- ing for the present rate of increase of this class of tonnage. 3 The possibilities of a continued in- crease of wharfage on upper New York Bay at a rate sufficient to»care for the probable increase in ocean tonnage were investigated. Aside from possible alterations and the re- sulting additions in the room on the Hudson river, only cer- tain tracts 'of the Brooklyn and Staten Island shores were found to be available without very great ex- pense. The latter aggregate about 50,000 lin. ft. of water front and could be made to provide 250,000 ft. of wharfage. The committee believes that that, together with what will be made available on the Hudson river, will probably provide wharfage room to care for all requirements for the next 15 years, but the railroad con- nections, both on the upper Hudson and the Brooklyn and Staten Island shores, cannot be as advantageously made and cannot as easily connect with as many trunk line carriers, the report states, nor can available land for railroad transfer yards be pro- vided in any of these locations, as would be the case on the Newark meadows. The present practice of rehandling a large portion of the tonnage of ocean-going vessels by the use of lighters and transfer barges could in a very great measure be eliminated from a development such as proposed in the project under consideration. For the coastwise traffic, the present facilities are somewhat extensive, but there does not now exist in the port of New York any central point where trans-shipment to and from railroads can be made to. embrace more than one or two trunk line railroads, whereas on the Newark meadows the possibility of getting these trans-ship- ment facilities to all the eastern trunk line railroads seems to be self-evident. In New York harbor the railroad fa- cilities are now poorly adapted for economical handling from vessels to cars, necessitating additional receiving docks and freight houses, and_practi- cally all shipments of less than car load lots are lightered from the rail- toad shipping piers "to the other freight piers in Manhattan. Other car load shipments are transferred to the steamship piers by trucks, A very large portion of the freight handled by the numerous railroads, both east and west bound, is either wharfage - import or export trade and this could be much more 'economically trans- ferred to and from vessels with a saving of millions of dollars in extra dock and floating equipment by such a development as proposed on the Newark meadows, combined with a terminal operating company to pro- vide for transfer of cars from all of the trunk line railroads. The steam- ships at the Newark docks could have ears of any of the trunk dine: pailee roads placed alongside, thus eliminat. ing expensive lighterage and _ the maintenance of this class of 'harbor ~ equipment. If Newark were provid- -- ed with such a convenient method for handling foreign and coastwise traf- fic, the result woud soon be a cen- tralization of this class of commerce at the port of Newark. The princi- pal reason why the facilities in New York are and will always be inade- quate for handling cargo shipments 'is because a small percentage of any cargo shipment is carried by any one railroad, and up to the present time the various railroads have been un- able to induce ship owners to dis- charge vessels carrying mixed car- goes, first at one railroad dock and then at another, practically all of this class of work being handled by light- erage which could be avoided in the Newark project. | River and canal traffic would nat- urally follow the centralization of foreign and coastwise trans-shipment facilities except as the same may be needed for local consumption. Referring 'to intra-harbor _ traffic, particularly such as is now handled by lighterage and transfer barges, the location of shipping facilities. on the Newark meadows, giving immedi- ate railroad connections to the north, © west and southwest would éertainly prove of immense advantage in re- ducing this class of harbor work to a minimiim, and thereby reduce the cost of transportation in general. To obtain the most favorable re- sults to make the development pro-' posed on the Newark meadows at- tractive to meet the conditions which are confronted in providing facilities for water transportation, two impor- tant factors must be considered; first, there must be ample wharfage room and deep wide channels leading to it which will not be liable to obstruc- tion by bridges, ice floes or other im- pediments; second, there must be ad- equate railroad connection directly to the docks, and this. must include, if possible, some intercommunication with all of the trunk line railroads. One method of arriving at the prob-