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Show NEW YORK TO OPEN STATE JARGE CANAL New Waterway, Completed at Cost of $150,000,000, Ready for Traffic. ALBANY, N. T.-, May 14. The state barge canal, completed at a cost of more than $150,000,000 will be opened to through traffic between the Hudson river and the great lakes tomorrow. Formal observance of the opening will be held later, probably prob-ably on July 4,. the legislature having made an approriation for a celebration. The main line of the barge canal which follows in part the route on the old Erie canal from Troy to Buffalo, is 352 miles in length, and the tributary Oswego and Cayuga-Seneca canals give an additional mileage of 100. The Champlain canal, connecting Lake Champlain and the Hudson Hud-son is eighty miles in length, making the total mileage of the New York system of navigable inland waterways 532. The main line is the only direct water route between the great lakes and the Atlantic seaboard. The traffic experts and engineers estimate Its capacity at 10,000,000 tons of freight annually, equivalent equiva-lent to a half million freight carloads. Control of the canal traffic was taken over by the federal government April 17 in connection with the administration of all transportation lines. All of the channels have the same general gen-eral dimensions, the minimum depth being be-ing 12 feet and the width varying from 75 feet at the bottom oT the earth sections to 200 feet in the beds of the canalized rivers and lakes. In the construction of the waterway, all available streams and lakes have been utilized, including the Mohawk, Mo-hawk, Oneida, Seneca. Oswego and Hudson Hud-son rivers and Oneida, Cayuga and Seneca lakes. There are 57 locks in the canal, having an inside measurement of 300 by 14 feet. The largest lock at Little Falls has a lift of 40 feet and at Waterford there is a series of Ave locks with a total lift of 169 feet. In its entirety the canal, is essentially a river canalization rather than a land line. In the construction of the barge canal, more than 100.000,000 cubic yards of rock and earth were excavated and more than three million cubic yards of concrete have been used in constructing locks, dams and retaining walls. - |