452 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



ENGINEERING. 



AMERICAN AND ENGLISH CITY RAPID TRANSIT. 



While we have been talking and arguing about speedy means of intercommu- 

 nication in large cities, a necessity of modern times (not because large cities have 

 not before existed, but because in these days of telegraphs and telephones, of 

 stenographers and typewriters, the rapid interchange of thought and word begets 

 a longing for as rapid transit of matter and of man from point to point), and have 

 given to our own cities and to the world the American surface street railroad or 

 tramway, the slightly more rapid cable road, and the somewhat speedier stilted 

 steam road, our conservative British brethren have quietly studied out the ques- 

 tion of demand and supply, of outlay and profit, and have gone on to construct a 

 work which furnishes to their metropolis what we have longed for but feared to 

 undertake — speedy, safe and convenient intramural transit. And, what is more 

 they have done it without interfering with public property or violating private 

 rights. 



The Metropolitan Underground Railway, which traverses the heart of the 

 most populous city of modern times, has been undertaken by capitalists who did 

 not conceive it to be their first duty to seize upon lands which had been pur- 

 chased by the public for a specific purpose and divert them to another purpose 

 without compensation to the owners of abutting property. They seem to have 

 had the pluck and the foresight to realize that a judicious expenditure to enable 

 them to own the land they occupy, and to construct an enduring work, will prove 

 more remunerative in the long run than a more fragile construction, with the 

 risk, besides, of having to pay damages for encroachment on private rights. 



The last completed section of this magnificent work, from the Mansion 

 House to the Tower, a distance of about three quarters of a mile, has been ex- 

 ecuted within the last twenty months, and runs "beneath residences, warehouses, 

 and roadways, and in all the difificult labors of underpinning, propping and build 

 ing there has not been a single accident." Enormous warehouses, containing 

 iron safes and strong boxes, have been tunnelled under without disturbing their 

 contents, and the statute of King William, which, with its pedestal weighs 179 

 tons, has been underpinned and rests on the arch of the tunnel. Large trees 

 have been undermined and underpinned without removal or injury. The result 

 is that there is a substantial roadway on which the heaviest trains can run at high 

 speed, and passengers can go from point to point in London without creeping 

 along at twelve miles an hour on a structure which sheds bolts and nuts and 

 rivet-heads down on the heads of passers-by, and requires constant repairs, while 

 the gas and smoke and noise offend the innocent dwellers alongside the line of 

 travel. 



