A WONDERFUL TUNNEL.

Dunstan Times, Issue 1240, 4 December 1885, Page 3

A WONDERFUL TUNNEL.

Deep down under the rustling cornfields, green meadows, and peaceful woods, by the faint yellow light of innumerable smoky lamps, and the intermittent cold gleaming from white electric lamps, 6000 grimy men are tiling night and day so that the water supply of New' York may flow through 28 miles of solid rock. It never ceases, this grinding and cranking, and whirring, and dull 1 coming of powder explosions, save for two hours out of the twenty-four, when 3000 men drowsily crawl out of the dim shafts on the surface of the earth to eat their meat and bread and go to sleep, while 3(100 other men take their places. Since the first of the year these cold, trickling caverns and shafts have been drilled and powerful steam drills, driven by streams of compressed air from wonderful shining engines, eat into the hard rook like ao many steel parasites, and mountains of torn gneiss and shining mica have been piled up around the shafts as work went on. In two years from next September a tunnel of thirty-one miles will stretch from Croton Lake to the reservoir in Cential Park, New York, through the brick and stone lining of which will gush a body of crystal water more than enough to supply the metropolis plenteously. For all these blessings and the proud distinction of owning the longest rock tunnel in the world, the city will have to pay at least L 6,600,000, or perhaps

L 12,000,0007 The tunnel

seven ami one'half miles lone; and cost; about L 3,000,000 ; while the St Gothard tunnel is nine and one-fourth miles long, and cost very little more. Few people have very little 'tdjSa'* of the marvellous rapiditv with which the aqueduct tunnel is: being-mvie.-r (leer 801)0,men are employed in the work. 1 6000 underground and 2000 on the surface. At the bottom of the shaft-the miners work in two. directions so while one set of men are drilling south ward, there .is another set of men in another shaft working northward to meet them. These shafts are about one mile apart ; yet so delicate and accurate are the plans of the engineers that in no case they declare will the line.of tunnel be 'more than one -inch out of the way when the miners in the {meet} each other underground. ,V.i o; rj.ijjj