GENERAL NEWS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVI, Issue 119, 21 April 1936, Page 2

GENERAL NEWS.

There is great activity in the engineering trade at Manchester, where orders have been received for locomotives from India, Nigeria, China, Brazil, and Australia. The Liverpool Corporation Transport Department is to spend £370,000 during the next municipal year on the purchase of buses and tramcars. The Liverpool Investment Building Society has increased its assets more than five times during the past seven years; they now exceed £3.250,000. Loans to house purchasers have similarly increased during the same period.. It is officially announced that a big share of the work for the £1,500,000 contract for the electrification of the Central Railway of Brazil obtained by Metropolitan-A r ickers Electrical Company, Ltd., will be carried out at the firm’s works at Trafford Park, Man■■chester! The . contract is expected to help to keep a huge staff at Trafford Park busy for many months, and many ♦ngineers will go from Manchester to supervise the work in South America. A mill at Clavton-le-Moors, in East Lancashire, which has been closed since November, 1929, has been acquired by a firm of cotton manufacturers and is to be reopened. It contains more than a thousand looms and formerly provided employment for about 400 workpeople. The largest grain silo in the British Isles is now in course of construction at Liverpool for the Liverpool Grain Storage and Transit Company at Brunswick Dock, The giant building represents a new type of reinforced concrete construction, and it is going up at the rate of approximately six feet a day. AVlien completed, there will be 282 separate silo bins, each 116 feet deep. (The owners of an old Roman mine at Pumpsaint (AVest Wales) have confirmed plans for opening up the enterprise on a commercial scale. An official of the company states that before the end of this year gold bars will be regularly sent from the mine to the Bank of England. . Lancashire is to have a new superroad, three and a half miles long, which will provide an additional outlet for heavy industrial traffic from Liverpool and Bootle docks to the northeast. It will begin at Litlierland, about four miles from Liverpool, and continue in a north-easterly direction to link up with the Liverpool-Preston road near Dunnings Bridge. A total width of 120 feet will be provided wherever building development is likely to warrant the construction of service roads; elsewhere an overall width of 100' feet will he secured, and cycle tracks constructed in lieu of service roads. Two footpaths, each six feet wide, and two 27-foot carriagewavs, will be constructed throughout the length of the new highway. The housing committee of the Liverpool Corporation are shortly to begin work at Speke, near the municipal airport, on what will be virtually a selfcontained satellite township. Five hundred acres of land have been set apart for housing, and six thousand houses, together with schools, shops, libraries, and other amenities, are to he erected at a total estimated cost of £2,400,000. Workpeople from the factories of the concerns which are being established on the industrial part of the estate, which is'apart from the residential section, are expected to occupy many of these houses.