TRAMPING ON LIFE Now I am writing these things just as I was told them by my grandmother. For I have utterly no remembrance of my mother. Consumption ran in her family. And bearing and giving birth to me woke the inherited weakness in her. She was not even strong enough to suckle me. I was born in the early eighties, in Mornington, Ohio, in a section of that great, steel-manufacturing city which was... more...

CHAPTER I INTO THE COOLER SOUTH You are really in Mexico before you get there. Laredo is a purely—though not pure—Mexican town with a slight American tinge. Scores of dull-skinned men wander listlessly about trying to sell sticks of candy and the like from boards carried on their heads. There are not a dozen shops where the clerks speak even good pidgin English, most signs are in Spanish, the lists... more...

Location of Work.—The area covered by the work of the Terminal Station-West is bounded as follows: By the east line of Ninth Avenue; by the south side of 31st Street to a point about 200 ft. west of Ninth Avenue; by a line running parallel to Ninth Avenue and about 200 ft. therefrom, from the south side of 31st Street to the boundary line between the 31st and 32d Street properties; by this line to... more...

These observations are written with the purpose of outlining briefly, as far as the writer was concerned, the evolution of the scheme of bringing the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Long Island Railroad into New York City, and also, as Chief Engineer of the North River Division of the New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to record in a general way some of the leading features of the... more...

The New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad diverges from the New York Division in the Town of Harrison, N. J., and, ascending on a 0.5% grade, crosses over the tracks of the New York Division and the main line of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. Thence it continues, with light undulating grades, across the Hackensack Meadows to a point just east of the Northern Railroad... more...

Some time before the appointment of the Board of Engineers which supervised the designing and construction of the New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad, the late A. J. Cassatt, then President of the Company, said to the writer that for many years he had been unable to reconcile himself to the idea that a railroad system like the Pennsylvania should be prevented from entering the most... more...

I—DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, "and what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversations?" So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she... more...

THE NEW YORK TUNNEL EXTENSION OF THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD. By Alfred Noble, Past-President, Am. Soc. C. E. A general outline of the work included in this Division has been given by General C. W. Raymond, M. Am. Soc. C. E., in the first paper of the series. The few pages following are intended only as a note to connect his paper with the more detailed descriptions of the execution of the work, which... more...

This paper will be limited to a consideration of the construction of the tunnels, the broader questions of design, etc., having already been considered in papers by Brig.-Gen. Charles W. Raymond, M. Am. Soc. C. E., and Alfred Noble, Past-President, Am. Soc. C. E. The location of the section of the work to be considered here is shown on Plate XIII of Mr. Noble's paper. There are two permanent... more...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the preliminary work for and the preparation of that portion of the site for the Terminal Station in Manhattan, of the New York Tunnel Extension of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was constructed under the direction of the Chief Engineer of the East River Division, including the disposal of material excavated from all parts of the Terminal construction and the... more...