Building the New Rapid Transit System of New York City Classic Reprint

Excerpt from Building the New Rapid Transit System of New York City

It is not generally realized how huge an engineering work it is which is now going forward in the city of New York on extensions of the underground rapid transit railway lines. The best way to compare the relative magnitude of engineering works is to compare the total expenditure involved. The total cost of building and equipping New York's new rapid - transit lines will be in the neighborhood of This is substantially equal to the entire cost of the Panama Canal. It is three times the cost of the New York barge canal. It is a greater amount than the total investment in road and equipment of the Chicago, Milwaukee St. Paul Railway Company, or the Rock Island, or the Chicago North Western, or the Great Northern, or the New York Central Hudson River.

The building of underground rapid-transit lines in great cities is comparatively a new development in engineering. New York was not the pioneer in this field. The first underground city railway lines were those in London, operated for many years with steam locomotives. Underground lines operated by electric traction were built in London and Budapest and Boston before the first New York rapid-transit subway was in operation. The development of the system in New York, however, has far exceeded that in any other city of the world. In fact, with the completion of the new extensions the investment in underground rapid-transit lines in New York will probably be as great as that in all the other great cities of the world combined.

The building of subways, however, is well recognized to be the next step in rapid-transit development for the congested districts of other large cities. Phila delphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and a number of other American cities have subways under way or projected. The work carried on in New York during the past dozen years, and especially that now in progress, has developed a large amount of experience in street excavation with avoidance to traffic interruption, in the underpinning of. Buildings, and in the solution of a hundred different problems in connection with the work of construction which are of general interest to the engineering profession.

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