The Montgomery advertiser., 1905-03-19
A NEW GATEWAY
 TO NEW ENGLAND
RAILROAD CHANGEsMAYBROOK WILDERNESS A RE---FRE LONGER MANHATTAN ISLAND.

Newburgh, N. Y, March IS. 1905.- One of the most remarkable changes attendant on the present revolutionary railroad improvements in New Eng land is the fact that little village. which has been so insignificant that one may search for 1t in vain on state maps has become a point of supreme strategic importance. Maybrook. a stuall place. about ten miles to the west of this city, consisted only a few months ago of the inevitable dingy rural saloon and few scattered houses the whole shrouded in bucolic calm. To- day scores of men are at work laying tracks and building houses, and the few inhabitants of the old village stare with astonishment at the scene of bus tie and activity. Thirty tenements have been constructed for the workmen and their families to live in and an of flee building is going up in which from seventy-five to hundred clerks will soon be at work. Finally, a great freight transfer station is being estab- lished with a maze of tracks, which, when completed. will have storage fa- cilities for fifteen hundred cars. From a rural wilderness a little town of twelve hundred or more persons is growing, and the insignificant speck on a large-scale map is assuming an important place in economic geography for Maybrook has become a new gate way to New England
 The secret can best be ferretted out on a railroad map. It Is seen at a glance that there a number of rail- road lines meet, lines which run and branch north, south, east and west, to all sections of the country, on the one side to the manufacturing centres of New England and on the other to the wheat fields, mines. and wool-produc- ing sections of the West as well as the cotton fields of the South. To the man familiar with the typographical bar riers of our eastern states the place becomes. at a glance, economically speaking sort of inland Port Arthur to southern New England; and the New York, New Haven and Hartford Rail- road, which acquired the stronghold when 1t took over the New York, On tario and Western, has been fortifying the town by building an extensive depot to become the base for widespread freight movements. For 1t is at May
 brook, or strictly speaking at Campbell Hall, the little junction just below, that the Central New England road. owned by the New York, New Haven and ftdTtIOTO, sweeping III d curve uOWH from the Poughkeepsie bridge over the Hudson River. meets the newly acquired Ontario and Western road. Here. too, come rumbling the long freight trains on the Erie Railroad. and the Lehigh and Hudson carries its cars loaded with commodities to Maybrook to be transferred into New England.
 The significance of the making of Maybrook will soon be felt throughout the whole of southern New England. Formerly that section, received it's raw material and food stuffs from the South and West largely through the choked knothole of Manhattan Island and sent back to the West and South the finished products of It's mills and factories through this same knothole All New England-bound freight, con- verging on New York over the numer- ous railroads with terminals at Jersey City, had to be shipped on barges lowed through the crowded channels of the waterways about Manhattan Is. land, and dumped at the freight ter
 minaI of the New Haven road at thu
 Harlem River, necessarily a tediou: and expensive process.
 Now, with the new gateway opened and improvements all along the line or the Central New England and New Haven roads. southeren New England
 will no longer be dependent on the de
 lays incident to getting traffic abou New York City. The long freigh
 trains will roll rapidly over the Pough
 keepsfe bridge and down to Hopewel Junction. striking into Danbury ant thence, by way of Bottsford, Derby ant l Naugatuck Junction. working down tC New Haven where they will be distri
 buted to all points. The change will be, in degree. revolutionary. A bar rel of flour, shipped from Minneapolis | to be made into bread in Boston, vii save hours, in many cases even days in transit. And in all classes O. freight and in all the manufacturing communities the new freedom of traffic will be felt. At Winstead. Ansonia Waterbury and Torrington, up tho | Naugatuck Valley. the Brass Valley
 manufacturers will get their copper l more quickly from the mines and shiI | away their products in brass to the
 markets with less delay; at Meriden the same will be true in the silver manu factories and the machine shops oi