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Construction Work is Going Forward Steadily and Has Not Been Seriously Delayed on Account of the War ONSTRUCTION work of the new Welland canal, connecting Lakes Erie and Ontario, has* been: fol- lowed with keen interest recently in both coast and lake marine circles. As pointed out in preceding issues of The Marine Review, the great demand for ocean tonnage has led coast operators to seek lake boats which can be adapted for ocean service. The pres- ent canal seriously limits the number of lake boats that can be transferred to the ocean and the comprehensive canalization plans of the Canadian government have assumed new im- portance to both ocean and lake oper- ators in the last few months. J. L. Weller, engineer in charge of building the new Welland canal, has furnished the following information, showing the present status of this project. Mr. Weller divides the work into four sections. He refers to sec- tion. 1, as follows: The new harbor at the Lake On- tario: entrance to the canal is now well under way, The entrance chan- nel is being formed. by the construc- tion of two earth embankments that will extend 1% miles into the lake; these embankments. have now reached a spoint about 5,000 ‘feet : from: the shore line and contain approximately 1,800,000 cubic yards of material. Fair progress is being made with dredging operations in the entrance ‘channel, three dredges having . been engaged .at this work all. last season, - and the same number are at present employed, but owing to the hard na- ture of the underlying material: prog- ress is necessarily slow. The reinforced concrete. cribs that will form the substructure of the entrance piers at the end of the em- bankments are being built at Port Dalhousie, the entrance to the present canal, three miles west of Port Weller. _ These cribs are 110 feet long, 38 feet wide, and 34 feet high, and 53 of them will be required for the entrance piers and the docking in the harbor. One crib was constructed last season ‘and three more have been completed so far this year. The contractors expect to build about 18 of these cribs during the present season. The construction of the reinforced concrete retaining wall, which will extend along the west side of the harbor for 2,000 feet, is nearing com- pletion. The contractors are at pres- ent engaged in building the west lock ~excavated to wall of lock No. 1, and concreting on this structure has been rapid during the past few months. The standard lock wall is a mass concrete structure 81 feet 6 inches in height and 46 feet wide at base. The dry excavation on section No. 1 is practically completed, the ma- terial having all been disposed of in the east harbor fill. A good deal of the excavating plant has been rented to the contractors for section No. 2, who are disposing of their excavated material in the west harbor embank- ment, and a cross-over is at present being constructed to enable these con- tractors to dump on the east side of the harbor. The upper-entrance walls to lock No. 1 will be built upon a timber-pile foundation, the piles for which have all been driven. Lock Breast Wall The work on section No. 2 during the present season, outside of ordi- nary. dry excavation, has consisted of the construction of the breast wall atthe’ head of lock” No. 2. The. pit ‘for this. wall-was taken down 69 feet to. rock. The method of excavation adopted was to drive steel sheet piling to refusal and excavate material to the bottom of the piling, after which piling was re-driven and the material rock... Concreting . on this wall is now up to ground level, and the remaining 6 feet will be com- pleted soon. The upper. entrance walls to lock No. 2 also will be built on a pile foundation, the piling for which has been driven and the seat. prepared, and concreting in the west-entrance wall is now under way. The con- tractors for this section have removed approximately 2,500,000 cubic yards of earth excavation during the past year, the bulk of it being disposed of in the harbor embankments. The next structure to be started will be the breast wall of lock No. 3, and the method of construction will be sim- ilar to that employed at lock No. 2. Some work has been done on the concrete protection to banks, this con- sisting of a 6-inch slab of concrete laid upon 8 inches of broken stone, and extending 5 feet below and 5 feet above the waterline, the base of this concrete protection resting on a 5-foot berm in the canal bank. Section No. 3 comprises the flight locks Nos. 4, 5 and 6, in pairs, single lock No. 7, and two diversions of the 31 Grand Trunk railway. These railway diversions have been completed, and the contractors are making good prog- ress now with rock excavation on the site of the twin locks. This work involves the excavation of solid rock to a. depth of approximately 80 feet for twin locks Nos. 4 and 5 and single lock No. 7. There are five steam shovels engaged in this work at pres- ent and.a number of electric drilling machines, and material is being re- moved at the rate of about 75,000 cubic yards per month. All of the good rock excavated is being crushed for concrete, the contractors having been obliged, under their agreement, to erect a rock-crushing plant with a capacity of 4,000 tons per day. This plant has been in operation for some months, and stone for concrete is now being supplied to the contractors for sections Nos. 1 and 2, The dam at the head of lock No. 6 is progress- ing satisfactorily, two drag-line ma- chines being engaged in re-handling material from storage piles, either side, into the dam, the material being compacted. by steam rollers. The dam is now built up. to a height of about 15 feet above the natural ground level. The upper west en- trance wall to lock No. 6, which was started during the fall of 1914, has been completed. Pile-driving is now being carried on for the east entrance wall of lock No. 6, and concreting in this wall will be started. within a short time. Work on section No. 4, which con- sists of widening and deepening the present canal, is progressing rapidly, five steam shovels being employed in the dry excavation to widen the pres- ent canal banks, and to June 1, 1,250,- 000 cubic yards of material have been removed and disposed of on the low land to the west of the present canal. No further sections have been placed under contract to date. A construc- tion railway to haul excavated ma- terial to the dump in the lake and. crushed stone from the _ crushing plant on section 3 is completed, with interlocking and block signal system, telephone dispatching, etc., and is be- ing operated at present to almost its full capacity. Mr. Weller believes the $50,000,000 waterway will be ready to open in 1918. While the war has had: the effect of delaying the letting of some of the contracts, in other particulars