ELECTRIC OVERHEAD RAILWAY.

Wairoa Bell, Volume V, Issue 192, 7 April 1893, Page 3

ELECTRIC OVERHEAD RAILWAY.

In Liverpool, England, there has recently been completed an electric overhead railway. It is carried its entire length of seven miles on an iron viaduct. It is the first instance of an electric current transmitted from a central generating station over a system seven miles in length and directly applied to the traction of a railway train of full size, and it is the first ease of a railway worked by electrical automatic signal. This overhead electric railway at Liverpool traverses the whole length of the docks at such a height as to interfere in no way with the traffic. It was built at a cost of a little over half a million sterling, or rather more than £70,000 a mile, and absorbed some 25,000 tons of steel and wrought iron, of which it is almost entirely constructed. The average spans are of fifty feet, and the rails are laid on an ingeniously designed iron flooring, thus avoiding the necessity of ballasting. The motive power for the trains and signals, and the •lectric light for thirteen stations, are supplied by four dynamos at one central station : and though the train will travel at from 30 to 35 miles an hour, so cheap is the motive force that a train is run at the consumption of only seven pounds of coal per mile, and the entire signalling apparatus has been estimates to cost in the working about the wages of a single signal.