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To handle this enormous traffic there has been installed in a signal cabin hidden in the depths just beyond the train platforms the largest electric interlocking machine ever built. It is in two sections, one of four hundred levers, the other with three hundred and sixty. The men never see the trains whose movements they direct. There is a director to each section who receives reports of incoming trains by telegraph. Before him is a gaudy chart of the terminal tracks in all the colors of the rainbow. Tiny electric lights burn on every occupied block, dying out as soon as it is vacated. The director decides where he will place the approaching train and calls out the track number and the route to the lever men who repeat the order, then throw the switches and signals by pulling the proper levers.

Incoming and outgoing passengers will be completely isolated from each other. Arrivals may step directly into the street a floor below the departing host, or descend to the various subway systems. Outward bound passengers will enter the station at the second story above Forty-second Street on which the station fronts.

A viaduct will cross this busy thoroughfare forming a continuation of Fourth Avenue opposite the center of the building. The street will continue entirely around the building on a broad terrace at the second story level and continue on up town in a superb new avenue over the center of the tracks.

The departing passenger being naturally concerned primarily with the purchase of his railroad ticket will come to the ticket office first. After securing his ticket he can take his light baggage in both hands and his change between his teeth while he moves a few steps onward in a straight line to the Pullman office where he may secure a berth. From here he will continue a few steps farther to the baggage office. In this modern terminal the passenger will never see his

trunks nor the room that contains them. Instead of that he will hand his ticket and claim check over a counter to a polite attendant who will shoot them through a pneumatic tube to the baggage room far down in the depths and a block or two away. After the trunk has been checked the duplicate will be returned with the ticket by pneumatic tube to the waiting passenger who can now take his seat in the train without having taken one unnecessary step. He will have to descend one floor to reach the through trains but he will not take an elevator nor walk down stairs. The few stairways are for ornamental purposes, not to walk on. Yet trains arrive and depart on different levels. The commuters have a complete station all to themseives underneath the express tracks and about fifty feet below the street surface. Still farther down below the suburban tracks are baggage runways seventy feet below the level of the street.

W

HAT may not inaptly be called the outdoor hothouse of the United States will be rendered enormously productive by that remarkable engineering achievement, the Colorado River "siphon," now just completed.

A great engine at a pumping plant already established on the Arizona side of the Colorado River drives an enormous wheel which operates as a sort of scoop. At every turn it scoops thousands of gallons of water out of a concrete-lined canal, and, lifting it high into the air, pours it out upon the mesa lands through a system of canals and ditches. Every revolution of the wheel is made audible by a click-click of the mechanism, which is music to the ears of the fruit-growers. This, on the Yuma Reclamation Pro

ject, is the hottest region in the United States, barring Death Valley; yet such a thing as a case of sunstroke has never been known there, although the farmers work outdoors all day long. At night they sleep outdoors on porches protected against mosquitoes by wire net. But the Indians and Mexicans, who have done most of the hard labor in constructing the irrigation works, commonly build their houses of a few poles, with a brush roof and two or three blankets on the side where privacy is most desired. Such a dwelling, representing the extreme of the simple life, costs about one dollar.

In the valley lowlands, on the Arizona. side of the river, Egyptian cotton of long, smooth staple is raised on a scale of productiveness unapproached anywhere— though it is found necessary to grow the plant three or four years before it be

comes properly acclimated. There are not less than one hundred thousand acres of lands available for cottongrowing, and it is reckoned that this area is capable of producing enough of the fiber to clothe all the people of the United States.

One of the problems met with for watering these lands along the Colorado arose from the unstable character of the great river, which is constantly shifting and overflowing its banks. When the site for the magnificent structure known as the Laguna Dam, some distance upstream, had been decided upon, it remained to be determined how the water there impounded should be carried down. The first idea was to carry it through a big canal along the Arizona side of the river; but this would have made it necessary to fetch the water across, or beneath, the Gila, which flows into the Colorado from the east.

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year it may be flowing a mile away from the channel through which its current today is passing. In consideration of which fact, it was decided to bring the water from the Laguna Dam down on the California side to a point below the mouth of the Gila, and then carry it beneath the Colorado River by means of a tunnel -the lands to be irrigated being mainly in Arizona.

This tunnel, with the vertical pipes leading to it on the two sides of the river, is the famous "siphon," which is now just finished. The vertical pipes, lined with concrete, are 140 feet deep, and are connected by a cylindrical tunnel, likewise lined with concrete, with an inside diameter of fourteen feet. The tunnel, one thousand feet in length, is driven through sandstone rock fifty feet below the river bed.

The Gila, unfortunately, is even more irregular in its habits than the Colorado. One never knows where to find it. Next

At first it was attempted to do the boring with open headings, but the material was so porous, and so much water flowed in, that it was necessary to resort to the compressed-air method.

A

T every town and village along the lines of the Frisco railway system large colored lithographs of circus poster style are being pasted up on fences and dead walls, announcing the expected arrival of the government Good Roads Special Train, which left Brownsville, Texas, on March 25 for a four months' trip, to cover about fifteen thousand miles in the States of Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Alabama.

The posters read: "Coming! Good Roads Train. Under Auspices of Government Department of Agriculture." And each one displays two striking pictures, the first showing a man driving a wagonload of grain over a fine, smooth road, with comfort and cheerfulness, the second representing a luckless farmer with his wagon-wheels mired in a slough. These are labeled respectively: "What We Must Have," and "We Have a Lot Like this."

Now, the trip of the Good Roads Special has for its object the education. of the public in the advantages of good roads and in methods whereby such roads may be built. But, incidentally, it furnishes a whole lot of entertainment, as may be judged from

the fact that it carries along with it a sort of museum on wheels, together with a complete outfit for popular lectures illustrated with magic lantern pictures. One of the cars, indeed, is fitted up as a traveling lecture hall, with a seating capacity for eighty people. The fact that the entire show is free lends to it an additional attractiveness.

The train consists of a locomotive and four coaches. The first coach abaft the tender contains sleeping quarters for the train crew; also a kitchen outfit to prepare meals for all hands, including the crew, two representatives of the government Office of Roads, one official of the railway, one man from the Texas State Highway Department, and one officer of the American Association for Highway Improvement.

In addition, this forward coach is provided with a gasoline engine and dynamo to furnish an electric current for operating fans and electric lights, and for running-in the exhibition car -certain miniature models of road machinery, etc., which are among the most interesting items of the whole outfit. These are in effect toys, but they serve to illustrate ideas that have an important