NEW YORK'S RAILWAY STATION

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15252, 15 March 1913, Page 5 (Supplement)

NEW YORK'S RAILWAY STATION

COST £36,000,000. ,„.,.' MARBLE HALLS. Tim- world's largest railway station, covering' 79 acres and coating £36,000,000, will be opened.in New York this month as the terminal of tho New York Central lines at Forty-second Street and Park Avenue. The station is a great marble palace, 672 ft lons, 310 ft wide, and 150 ft high above the street level, and 745 ft long, 455 ft wide, and 45ft deep below the street level. It contains 33 miles of rails and 69 separate tracks, capable of housing 1053 cars. • There are 46 platforms in the station, distributed over an npner level for long-distance trains and a low level for suburban traffic Provision has been made for handling 800 trains arid 100,000 passengers a day. The enormous expense of the terminal has been made possible as a paying venture because modern ingenuity has been able to abolish the waste space of older railway stations. All trains will, enter the now Central station below the street level, and on what is usually the train yard will be erected office buildings, an hotel and club houses, paying high rentals. Every train will enter and leave the station drawn by electric locomotives, the substitution to; steam engines being made at High Bridge, ten miles north of the terminal. By this system, smoke and din aro discarded. The Signal Tower. Tho largest interlocking switch and signal tower in the world controls the arrival and departure of trains. There are 760 levers in the* tower, controlled by a general superintendent. Every forty .levers' has a switchman attendant. The movements of all the trains are indicated by small electric lights on a chart which is a facsimile of the yard. Switches and signals are interlocked, so that no error of an operator can set a signal one way and a switch another. In itself the station is a series of marble halls, corridors, and sloping inclines, all illuminated by superbly designed bronze electroliers. _ A huge ventilating system renews tho air in the station every ten minutes. A special waitingroom has. been constructed for , women, of quartered oak, and containing luxurious club chairs. There are to be maids in attendance, a women's hairdressing parlour, and a women's shoe polishing annexe with girl shoeblacks. An ingenious arrangement obviates tho necessity of using the passenger platforms for luggage. Beneath tho lower level of train tracks a small circular tube luggage railway has been constructed. Tho luggage is taken down to tho luggage level by means of lifts, operated from the luggage rooms. Then the luggage is moved on small electrically propelled trucks through the circular tube below the right platform, where another lift carries it to the train abovcV I . ■