1918 - Transportation

Transportation

The 63-year-old Grace Line inaugurates direct passenger service between the United States and Peru and Chile, using freight-and-passenger steamships that include the Santa Ana, Santa Luis, Santa Teresa, and Santa Elisa.

The New York Barge Canal that opens to traffic May 15 replaces the 93-year-old Erie Canal while using some of the same natural waterways to connect Albany on the Hudson River with Lake Erie and Lake Champlain (see 1882). Under construction since 1905, it is 12 feet deep, 75 to 200 feet wide, 524 miles long (801.3 miles counting 347.1 miles of connecting rivers and lakes), and has 57 electrically-operated concrete locks whose gates open or close in 30 seconds and lift vessels anywhere from six feet to 40½. Steam power has long since made the old canal obsolete (see St. Lawrence Seaway, 1959).

Shipbuilder and shipping magnate Albert Ballin dies of a sleeping-powder overdose at his Hamburg mansion November 9 at age 61.

The Railway Control Act adopted by Congress March 21 puts all U.S. railroads under federal government management (see 1917; Esch-Cummins Act, 1920).

A head-on collision between two trains on the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railway in Tennessee June 22 kills 99 and injures 171, an all-time high for U.S. railroad mismanagement.

New York's worst subway accident kills 97 and injures 100 November 2 as a train jumps the track at 30 miles per hour approaching the new Prospect Park station of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Service. Manned by inexperienced supervisors in the absence of striking motormen who belong to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the train goes into the treacherous S curve at five times the speed limit, many of its cars are wooden, and it is wrecked at the Malbone Street Tunnel of the Brighton Beach line that runs along Fulton Street and Franklin Avenue to Coney Island.

Stanley Steamer co-inventor Francis E. Stanley dies at Wenham, Mass., July 31 at age 69 following an auto accident. He and his twin brother Freelan formed the Stanley Motor Carriage Co. in 1902 and ran it until last year.

Aeronautical engineer and manufacturer Glenn L. Martin founds the Glenn L. Martin Co., opens a factory at Cleveland, and comes up with an innovative design for a military bomber (see 1909). Now 32, Martin will move his operation to Baltimore in 1929 as he builds planes for the army and navy, training a generation of aircraft designers and engineers (see Douglas, 1920).

German aeronautical engineer Hugo Eckener, 50, returns to commercial production of rigid airships at the Friedrichshafen plant of the late graf von Zeppelin. Eckener helped the count develop his airships in the early 1900s, directed the construction of 88 Zeppelins for the German Navy during the war, and trained pilots to operate them (see 1924).