66 ESSAYS ON WHEAT 



best record the Canadian Pacific Railway lias yet reached 

 is to haul into Fort William a little more than 1,000 cars 

 of grain a day. Therefore only three or four of these big 

 ships a day are required to take care of all the grain this 

 railway can deliver. These ships are loaded at the rate 

 of from 75,000 to 100,000 bushels per hour and unloaded 

 at the rate of from 20,000 to 40,000 bushels per hour, de- 

 pending on the machinery equipment of the elevators per- 

 forming the service." ^^ 



Transportation of freight by water is always cheaper 

 than by rail. It is the recognition of this principle that 

 has led to the development of Fort William and Port 

 Arthur, and which has brought into existence the busy 

 fleet of freighters on the Great Lakes. A single large 

 vessel costs only as much as a few miles of railway track 

 and it moves upon a medium which is forever renewed 

 by Nature herself, so that it never wears out or needs 

 repairing by man. On a water route, there is no invest- 

 ment in a roadbed or in rails, bridges, telegraph lines, or 

 costly terminal yards. The relative cheapness of lake 

 as compared with rail transportation is shown by a cal- 

 culation of Piper who states that one of the big lake boats 

 " carrying six or seven train loads, will run eleven or 

 twelve miles an hour or about as fast as the average speed 

 of freight trains, with a coal and labor cost of about one- 

 quarter as much as on the railroad." ^* 



XIII. The Lake Shippers' Clearance Association 



At Fort William and Port Arthur there are now four- 

 teen public terminal elevators all of which deliver grain 



23 C. B. Piper, Principles of the Grain Trade, The Empire Ele- 

 vator Company Limited, Winnipeg, 2nd edition, 1917, pp. 19-20. 

 2* Ibid., p. 20. 



