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Show New Pittsburgh-Harrisburg Turnpike Marks Beginning of Superbigbway Era By HERMAN CROCKETT (Released by Western Newspaper Union.. HARRISBURG, PA. Passenger Pas-senger automobiles speed along at 105 miles an hour. Their occupants, unaware un-aware of an excessive rate of motion, travel on a curveless ribbon of concrete that goes through mountains instead of over them a highway without with-out intersections or railroad crossings, without billboards or hazards of snow, ice and fog. A dream of the future? Hardly. Pennsylvania will dedicate such a highway and open it to public travel sometime this fall. It will be 160 miles long, connecting the city of Pittsburgh in the western part of the state with Harrisburg, the capital, capi-tal, near the east. And plans are being made to extend it an additional addi-tional 112 miles to Philadelphia. The road eliminates all the mountain moun-tain hazards between the Ohio river and Delaware tidewater. It will reduce, re-duce, by hours, travel from the Midwest Mid-west to the eastern metropolises. For truckers it will save as much as 15 hours time and an estimated $30 between, two points, compared to use of the present roads. Since the beginning of the westward west-ward march of civilization across the United States, the formidable mountain ridges of the Appalachians have imposed natural barriers on travel and transportation between the Atlantic seaboard and the Middle Mid-dle West. Pennsylvania's two major ma-jor east-west highways solved the problem in a limited way previously. The Lincoln highway crossed the mountains directly on steep grades; the other, the William Penn highway, high-way, followed the winding Juniata river to its headwaters, crossing one mountain and descending to Pittsburgh Pitts-burgh through rolling hill country. Both routes have obvious limitations, limita-tions, the former having many grades as steep as 8 and 9 per cent, and the William Penn having a few steep grades with many curves and a longer route between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Always there has been the dream of a better and shorter road, one that would not add hundreds of miles to the journey by going around the mountains. Follows Abandoned Railroad. The new turnpike follows the line of the old South Penn railroad, a project never completed. It is a four-lane concrete shaft with east and west traffic separated by a 10-foot 10-foot center parkway. Seven tunnels through the mountains, prepared for the railroad, are used to eliminate grades. In all, there are seven miles of these tunnels. Every desire to insure safety, comfort and speed has been installed. Huge fans will constantly supply an adequate amount of pure air. The tunnels will be electrically lighted. On the open pike all crossroads are carried either underneath or overhead. Direct cross-flow is avoided by means of looping ramps, or cloverleaf intersections. All interchanges in-terchanges are so located that approaching ap-proaching traffic can look down on them and readily picture the layout. There will be no traffic lights. Deceleration and acceleration lanes are. provided at each interchange. These are 1,200 feet long and are set parallel to and contiguous with the paving. Carved out of the mountains as a single project, the road is not a merger of previous roads, linked together. to-gether. It is all new. The severest grade anywhere is 3 per oent, that i i j t , " -J j is three feet rise to 100 feet of length. Wherever curves have been necessary neces-sary the road has been banked to accommodate high speeds. Test runs have shown a speed of 105 miles an hour as not dangerous. The superhighway cost $70,050,000 and was financed by a grant of $29,000,000 from the PWA and $41,000,000 in revenue bonds purchased pur-chased by the RFC. Tolls are to be charged ($1.50 for passenger automobiles), but the highway will in time pay for itself and then become be-come a free road, part of the state's highway system. Built in Two Years. Less than two years have been required to complete this ideal speedway, although previous attempts at-tempts to span the mountains go back to the early 1800s. During that time more than a score of attempts were made. First surveys for a railroad were authorized by the Pennsylvania legislature in 1837, but it was not until 1854 that that body empowered a company to raise funds and chartered the Marysville, Landisville and Broad Top railroad. In 1859, the name of the proposed railroad was changed by legislative enactment to the ambitious title, "Pennsylvania Pacific railroad," which was retained until 1863, when it was again changed to the "South Pennsylvania railroad," or "South Penn," as it was popularly called. The project was revived and dropped several times during the next 20 years, but beyond keeping the charter alive, little was done until 1883 when William H. Vander-bilt Vander-bilt took over the company. Then, in that roaring decade of the 1880s, when probably one-fifth of the nation's na-tion's present railroad mileage was constructed, the old South Penn right-of-way, now followed by the turnpike, became the battleground of financial titans. The greatest of all South Penn ventures began in New York in 1883, when the Pennsylvania railroad threatened to enter into competition with the New York Central by building build-ing a parallel line up the west shore of the Hudson river. In retaliation, William H. Vanderbilt, New York Central chief and one-time associate of J. P. Morgan, organized a .company .com-pany to build the South Penn road paralleling the Pennsylvania railroad's rail-road's lines in its home state. Carnegie a Backer. The biggest backer was Andrew Carnegie, Pittsburgh steel king, who contributed $5,000,000. Carnegie welcomed the new line, for he had fought the "Pennsy" unsuccessfully for years to win lower rates for transporting his Pittsburgh steel to the seaboard. "What do you think of it, Carnegie?" Carne-gie?" asked Vanderbilt. "I think so well of it that I and my friends will raise $5,000,000 as our subscription," Carnegie replied. "All right," said Vanderbilt "I'll put in another $5,000,000." Forty millions in stocks and bonds were floated, bought eagerly by the public. Vanderbilt organized the American Construction company, and then gave it the cortracts. Surveys Sur-veys were resumed under the direc-, direc-, tion of Oliver W. Barnes, engi- Pictured above is a section o the new Pennsylvania Turnpike's Turn-pike's 110 -mile straightaway. The diagram at the left shows a cloverleaf intersection which enables en-ables vehicles to enter or leave the highivay without disrupting the normal flow of traffic. Seven tunnels permit the highway high-way to pass through, rather than over or around, the Appalachian mountains, thereby eliminating one of the barriers that has confounded con-founded transcontinental traffic ever since the first western march of the pioneers. neer, and a corps of 300 men. Ten-foot Ten-foot contour maps covering 1,000 square miles were drawn, and 5,000 miles of lines were run. In the fall of 1883, a definite line was adopted, and contracts for the tunnels and largest bridges were let. Three thousand laborers poured Into the mountains. Within two years, bridge piers for the line studded stud-ded the Susquehanna river at Harrisburg; Har-risburg; long cuts gashed the hilltops; hill-tops; mammoth fills scarred the valleys, val-leys, and the towering peaks of the Alleghenies had been pierced by nine tunnels. Then in the fall of 1885 when the job was half finished, the incredible order "stop work" went out. Engineers Engi-neers 'packed up their transits, laborers la-borers dropped their tools. The roadbeds, tunnels, and bridges were abandoned to the ravages of time. Railroad Sold Out. In financial circles behind the scenes, the death warrant of the South Pennsylvania railroad had been written. Alarmed by the prospect pros-pect of a destructive railroad rate "war," J. P. Morgan forced Vanderbilt Van-derbilt and his backers to sell out to the Pennsylvania railroad. Following the World war, came troublous days for the railroads. America was taking to a new mode of traveL Automobiles were being turned out by the millions for a people who went pleasure-bent on trips that took them but hours where their forefathers had spent months. Also came great freight buses that carried the manufactured manufac-tured goods of the nation to the East over hard-surfaced roads. And the demand for better roads and more speed increased. In 1934, William A. Sutherland, then general manager man-ager of the Pennsylvania Motpr Truck association, revived the idea of a road over the mountains; this time a highway instead of a railway. rail-way. For many months he carried the fight alone. But in 1935 a resolution to survey the possibilities of the proposal pro-posal passed the legislature. Financing Financ-ing was a big problem, but the fed- ' eral government finally looked upon the plan with favor, and assistance came from financial agencies set up by congress. The old South Penn line with its already-built tunnels was chosen. Perhaps in the minds of the federal fed-eral authorities was more than a road for industrial use; the road v. has definite military possibilities. In case of emergency it will be a major transportation artery. Men, munitions and other material could be moved across the Alleghenies with the speed so necessary to modern warfare. Just recently a motorized battalion of the Pennsylvania Pennsyl-vania National Guard, in a test run across the still uncompleted road, left Harrisburg and set up a "defense "de-fense area" near the important Bedford Bed-ford steel sector, 135 miles away, in just five hours. It was definitely a blitzkrieg movement, the fastest registered in any nation in any time. Principally, however, the road is for scenic and commercial uses. "Naturally, we shall exclude billboards," bill-boards," said Walter A. Jones, the turnpike commission chairman. Asked how this policy would be enforced, en-forced, he said "First, we own a right-of way 200 feet wide at the narrowest nar-rowest point If. despite our disapproval, disap-proval, some enterprising company erects billboards, we shall plant oh our own land such shrubs and trees as are necessary to hide the signs." Even the oil stations will be under the supervision of the commission. A contract has been let to a leading company, but the 10 stations being erected are the property of the commission. com-mission. Nine of the units will have one-story buildings. The tenth unit will feature a two-story building. |