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highest peaks, are to be "cribbed, cabined, and confined" and forced to furnish electric power for pulling Harriman's freight-trains up and over the mountain passes.

At the start a third rail electric system is to be put in over about eighty miles of the road. A huge power house is to be built on the California side of the pass, where a practically unlimited supply of water is always available. Once the enormous initial expense of building the power plant and equipping the road is out of the way, electric motors will take the place of steam locomotives, in the trip over the mountains, at a great saving in cost and time. It will no longer be necessary to make up short and light trains. The roaring mountain streams will furnish plenty of power to pull the heaviest freight trains over the mountains at a rate of speed impossible heretofore.

The great initial cost does not daunt Mr. Harriman, who has shown, in the building of the Lucien cut-off across Salt Lake and in other similar enterprises, an apparent disregard of first cost, so long as a permanent saving in running expense and in running time is in sight. His engineers have been at work for months. They have made all the necessary surveys and have fixed the location of the power-house and of the dam. which is to gather the necessary water supply.

At the present time several of the largest electric corporations in the country are figuring on the contract for building the power plant and installing the road, and it is expected that the active work of construction will begin when the snow goes out in the spring.

True to the policy of secretiveness, which has made him famous among great railroad men, Harriman has instructed his lieutenants to give out no details of the plan for electrifying the Sierra Nevadas. "All announcements at the present time, are unauthorized and premature," writes one of the engineers, but, even before this article is printed, the contract may be let.

In putting in this third rail system, as in adopting all-steel passenger cars for the same road, Mr. Harriman shows his determination to put the Southern Pa

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