Ogden Daily Standard | 1915-03-30 | Page 4 | What the Panama Canal is Doing

JV 1 WHAT THE PANAMA CANAL IS DOING. During the first six months of the Panama canal, traffic totaled two and a half million tons of cargo, from which the government obtained ?L 150,000 as tolis. A writer famiiiar with the canal business says 4n per rent of the shipping was Amenran coastwise traffic, traf-fic, and makes these comments: The opening of I he canal last Au i-usi wa.s followed by a period of active act-ive competition among the wator lines nnd between the coastwise and rail carriers Each of the coastwise lines established rat independently of the other lines and put into effect oi-cptionally oi-cptionally low tariffs of charges in order lo induce shippers to patronise the coastwise lines Instead of the rail reads. The coastwise lines qulckl secured a large tonnage of traffii As an illustration of the character of the traffic secured by the coastwise coast-wise lines, reference ma he made to the commodities carried upon a steamer steam-er that sailed from Boston on August 22. This vessel had In its cargo 10ft carioads of nail6 from Worcester. Mass . 140 carloads of structural iron from Pennsylvania, 50 carloads of wire fencing from Pennsylvania, automobile au-tomobile tiros and printers' ink from Massachusetts, paper from Maine, electrical machinery from New York and Massachusetts, nnd boilers from Massachusetts. Among shipments that have been made by the canal have been 12O0 tons of rails from Ixraln. O ; lo.uOO tons of wrought iron from Youngstow n, O , and large quantities of wrought iron pipe from Wheeling, W. Ya The canal is drawing draw-ing its traffic not only from the Atlantic At-lantic seaboard, but, to an appreciable extent, from points west of the Allegheny Al-legheny mountains Active competition of the coastwise coast-wise lines with the railroads caused the transcontinental railroad lines that connect the middle west with the Pacific seaboard to petition the Interstate In-terstate commerce commission, last autumn, for permission to reduce ratc-3 between the middle west and the Pacific seaboard on over one hundred hun-dred different commodities. On January Jan-uary 29, the Interstate commerce commission com-mission granted the petition ol the Pacific railways and permitted them to lower their rates witnout reducing the tariffs to and from intermediate intcrmountaln points.