Arizona republican., 1908-07-13

completion of the undertaking. Cule- bra finds herself being eaten away by the greedy mouths of a half hundred steam shovels at the rate of more than million cubic yards a month. At that rate Culebra would yield up her last yard of materia! is less than three and 9 half years. But as the cut grows deeper it will of courset grow narrow CT. and the fewer steam shovels they can operate and the fewer dirt train tracks they can lay, the smaller the amount of eXcavated material there will be per month as the years come and go. /l
 The most interesting feature of the work is that under the present manr .agement each month they manage ts make higher record than they mad during the corresponding month of 1T | previous year. For instance, duriI the month of May, in the Culebra lC ! the amount of material removed 'Ws thirty nine per cent greater than fe | amount removed during the corp
 bonding month, of 1907, although le rainfall in May, 1907, was less tn seven inches, as compared with 'neiy thirteen inches during May of thelr- Trent year
 They do things on a big seal on | this Culebra Cut. Go through iihnd | you win, see some two dogenceam ! Ishovels in sight at time, and as any ]
 dirt trains attending them. Y9 will | see some twenty-five or more bSwell 1 drills operated by compressed airrom an air compressor plant, perhaq the largest in the world. Each Of5ttm is
 boring a well of fair diameterIJn the ! course of a year these wells, d on. !! would make one hole in the Found
 14O miles deep. Into these well they | sink tons of dynamite. At nd, or | after the force has stopped wot one | hears a roar from these blasa that | makes him think of a great aillery | duel A few months ago theysft off | Ia blast of nineteen and a half tls of | dynamite, distributed in twent five ! holes whose depths varied frOnthir-
 ty-five to ninety feet. It br& up | over 10000 cubic yards of earth
 It costs something to keep thiHs gO-
 ing in the big cut. It takes abob SO,- 1 900 tons Of coal a year, whichcOsts
 over a half million dollars The | wages paid are said to average hom
 forty to seventy per cent higherthan
 in the states and the coal costs. sSut
 S6.50 per ton as compared witi$S | and $3.50 per ton in the states It
 takes about 200 locomotives, and th-
 CT rolling stock in proportion. to hul the excavated material from CuBra
 Cut. The most of it is hauled aws in
 twenty-ton Lidgerwood dump slrs. | Sixteen of these are made up inl a train. Five shovelsful of the large Fpe of shovels loads a car, eighty sh6tls- full making a train-load. The tra, is
 pushed to the dumps and in ten nin-
 utes the entire load of 32O cubic ards
 of dirt is removed by a mechamil un- loader. |
 When the latest available figures | were made out, it was~costing e gov ernment about eighty-two anda half | cents cubic yard for excaytion in i Culebra Cut. But as the outpubf ma
 terial has been increased by tarly a | half with only a cOmparativei small | increase of force it is probah that ! they have been able to redud these | figures to the neighborhood ( fifty ] cents per cubic yard.
 The work that is being done ' the | dreages is costing very much les. For | instance, there are the big sea- -gfg |