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Show o ELECTRIFYING STEAM RAILROADS THE Chicago, "Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad has electrified four hundred miles of its line from Harlow-ton, Harlow-ton, Montana, to Avery, Idaho, and has under. construction electric installation from Avery to Seattle, five hundred miles more. Against a cost of $1,750,000 for coal from its own mines to operate the 450 miles, by electricity it costs $550,000 a year, and. on top of this one-third of the equipment of the road was used to haul coal. The" Butte, Anaconda & Pacific railroad rail-road pays $96,000 a year for electric power to operate eighty miles of railroad rail-road as against $270,000 a year for coal for the same line, doing a bigger business. busi-ness. This marks a new era in railroading, to say nothing of the conservation of coal, utilizing our wasting water powers, pow-ers, preventing burning up all the crude oil and choking tunnels with gas. . It takes 10,000 horsepower to operate one hundred miles of single-track railroad, rail-road, and there are 48,700 miles of railroad rail-road in Washington,. Oregon, Califor nia, Utah, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming" North and South Dakota, Arizona, Colorado Col-orado and Nevada. It would require 4,870,000 horsepower horsepow-er of electricity to operate all theserail-roads, theserail-roads, or about one-ninth of total hydro-electric power now wasting, and save millions of tons of coal and oil annually. an-nually. A great portion of the trackage in above states is over mountains, and electricity would eliminate noise, dust, smoke, cinders, gas, danger of mountain moun-tain fires, and asphyxiation in tunnels. The problem is not to get the railroads rail-roads to use electric power but to get capital to develop power plants under restrictive laws, and a system of conservation con-servation that proposes to tax the power where made. n |