The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1913-06-07
SMOKE ELIMINATED
 IN NEW FREIGHT YARD
New Haven's Big Terminal At Harlem
 River is Now Electrified.

AS ANOW AACCLE1A1Cu@
 New EnEIand's greatest gateway. the portal through which passes near ly all of her imported food stuffs and by far the largest part of her raw ma
 terfals and likewise through which she sends her manufactured goods, is the
 great Harlem River freight terminal
 of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, stretching along
 the Harlem River and part of the Sound shore in the eastern part of the Bronx, New York City.
 One of the largest freight terminal yards in this country, covering half
 of a square mile and containing to-
 tai of eighty-six miles of track, this
 will be the first noise1ess and smoke less freight yard of any size in this
 country.
 For the past few months fifty per cent. of the freight in this immense
 yard has been moved by electricity
 Within six months all of the terminal will be so operated, and not only that
 but the forty and ffty-car freight trains which enter and leave 1t every hour bound to and from New Eng land will then be hauled by 150 ton electric freight locomotives all the way between the yard and New Haven, a distance of seventy-three miles.
 To one Accustomed to the usual freight yard with it's array of tracks an electrified terminal presents strange sight. indeed, particularly 1T the system employed is the overhead system, such as that on the New Ha- ven.
 Standing upon one of the highway bridges which span the yard 1t looks for all the world as if some gigantic snider had spun his web as a covering for the ganglia of railroad tracks pe- meath. This mesh of wires, rnls spidery-like structure stretching in all directions as far as the eye can .s see 1Sats ts whence the smokeless freight yard gets it's motive power. Your eye follows these wires just as 1t follows the tracks At intervals of 300 rect throughout the yard, poking up anoVe the roofs of the thousands of Irelght ears are the big steel towers rom which hangs this web like structuie of steel and copper wires. They nave to he very strong, these towers, TOT the pull on them of this WelsnL ot wire is great. Scattered tnrougnout fhfs big and busy terminal they LOOK like so many sentinels suaruihs scene of wonderful activity.
 Here and there under the wires as 1,o7, look down through the meshes oA this web below you cars are n1oElns singly and in trains A tram or peL per. is11sf1e fruit from the South. just foa+ed around from the Pennsylvania railroad. is being classified" prepar- o+orv to heinz rushed to Boston, ProV- idence and other New England clIies' That means that 1t is being separateo' broken up on different Irachs o a+ x,yo,,1d sort a hand of cards. But not a sound comes to indicate whose hand is doing all this. There isn't cIouo of black smoke rising and spreauins out over the yard as is usually the case to show where the sWllcn ehS1hS IaIoors at its task. These cars loaoeo viii, the commerce of the country are heinz shunted on to tracks by some invisible hand, as it were. The only noise from the yards comes rom the occasional squeak of wheel or the coupling of the cars.
 enough you will finally discern through the maze oR wires and amid the TOOLS of the myriad freight cars a queer looking object, a cheese box on Wheels, gliding noiselessly about, picking up 2 car and dropping it again. This is inc electric switch locomotive moth CT hubbards'' they call them because Of their peculiar appearance in con trast with the electric passenger loco motives It goes about its task with out showing any of those signs Of ais tress so common in the steam switch engine no exhausted breathing, no puf1ng and panting, no cloud of smoke ascending in the air to mark It's loca- ton. It seems the embodiment Of power and efficiency.
  Harlem River terminal-the Harlem | River yard proper, the Oak Point wards adjoining it and running along the Sound shore and the auxiliary classification yards at Van Nest and westchester a few miles east. The of this immense ter rninaI covering all these yards has taken about a year and a haf Edec- tricaI operation was begun in a small 1 way last fall and within the last few | months all of the terminal has been energized with the exception of the | Harlem River yard proper. where the | .tiuice'' will be turned on in a short | time Then the last of the steam switch engines with their noise and | smoke will probably be retired.
 At the present time there are seven electric switch engines working in the terminal and the same number of steam engines As the electric switch | engines are able to do more work than the others there is really at present more than fifty per cent. of the total ear movement accomplished by means of electrical propulsion. When 1t is considered that the total car move ment in this yard averages 5000 cars a day it will be seen what this means already in the elimination of smoke and noise.
 The system by which these yards have been electrified differs but slight-i