Word: transitional
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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...years most New Yorkers have agreed on a program for bettering the lot of the subway sardine: 1) unification of the city's three systems (Interborough Rapid Transit. Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, the city-owned Independent) under municipal ownership & operation; 2) maintenance of the 5? fare; 3) more subways to relieve congestion. But the history of Unification reads like a machine-age edition of Pilgrim's Progress. The city had to find ways & means of setting aside contracts with IRT and BMT (good until 1967, 1969), raising money enough to buy out private interests. After nearly 20 years...
This brought under city ownership the longest underground transit system in the world-130 miles of subway routes (London. 75 miles; Paris, 70). Together with an additional 120 miles of elevated lines, it carried 2.255,000,000 passengers during the last fiscal year, more than were carried by any other railroad. But the below-cost 5? fare-politically inexpedient to change -has piled deficit upon deficit on New York's subways. Not until 1982 will the last of the present transit debt be paid off. Fortnight ago, an apprehensive Citizens Budget Commission put the total ultimate cost...
...Avenue route, four and a half years abuilding, cost $60,000,000, is the world's most expensive subway mile for mile. As an engineering feat, it is probably the most complex in railroad history. Within its short 2.2 miles, contractors burrowed under or over six other rapid transit tunnels, had to hold up the heavy overhead Sixth Avenue El (since torn down) and most of the buildings along the route with piles driven down to bed rock. The cut & cover method (trench-like excavation covered with wooden flooring) necessitated digging through a tangle of telephone cables, power lines...
...19th-Century stargazer once said that Mercury "seems to exist for no other reason than to throw discredit on astronomers." Last week the little planet (diameter 3,100 miles) was scheduled for a transit across the blazing face of the sun. From complicated formulas and tables, scientists had carefully determined the time. But when astronomers at Mt. Wilson's famed observatory shot the passage with motion-picture film synchronized with a clock, they found Mercury was 30 seconds late for its performance...
...Madrid buzzed reports of a Cabinet squabble said to have occurred about the time Dictator Franco decided to play put-&-take with his brother-in-law. The then Spanish Foreign Minister, Colonel Juan Beigbeder, was said to have rushed to the Generalissimo in a passion because transit visas through Spain which he had given to Refugee Belgian Premier Hubert Pierlot and Foreign Minister Paul-Henri Spaak had not been honored by the immigration police of Brother-in-Law Serrano Suñer's Ministry of Government. "It is an affair of honor!" the Colonel reportedly told the Generalissimo...