1935 - Transportation

Transportation

The French Line passenger ship S.S. Normandie arrives at New York June 3 after crossing from Southampton in a record 4 days, 11 hours, 42 minutes, averaging 29.6 knots per hour, beating the record set last year by the Rex, and winning the Hales Trophy. Built at a cost of $60 million, the sleek 79,280-ton luxury liner is 1,029 feet in length overall and 119 feet in width. The turboelectric engines driving her four propellers can move her at a speed of 32.1 knots, and she has an 80-foot swimming pool, 23 elevators, a 380-seat movie theater, and a dining room modeled after the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The Normandie has seven classes of accommodations, berths for 1,975 passengers and 1,345 crew members; she is the first large ship to have been built according to the 1929 Convention for Safety at Life at Sea, with the forward end of her promenade deck designed to serve as a breakwater and permit her to maintain a high speed even in rough weather, but she will never turn a profit. After being viewed by 9,200 visitors, she leaves on her return voyage June 7, sets a new eastbound speed record June 10 by sailing 711 miles in 24 hours, averages 30.31 knots per hour, and reaches port in 4 days, 3 hours, 28 seconds (see 1937). R.M.S. Mauretania has become too costly to operate and goes to the scrap heap in July after 27 years on the transatlantic run, having made 269 round-trip crossings exclusive of her service as a troop transport and hospital ship during the Great War.

Greek entrepreneur Stavros S. Niarchos, 26, begins a shipping fleet that will rival the maritime empire of Aristotle Onassis (see 1930).

Former shipmaster John C. B. Jarvis of 1891 Jarvis winch fame dies at Bay Shore, N.Y., September 10 at age 78, having seen windjammers eclipsed by steamships; steam-turbine engineer Herbert T. Herr dies at Philadelphia December 19 at age 57.

The Lower Zambezi railroad bridge opens January 14 in Africa and will be the world's longest railroad bridge until December.

Newark's Pennsylvania Station opens March 23. Lawrence Grant White of McKim, Mead and White has designed it.

A railroad bridge designed by McKim, Mead and White opens to span the Cape Cod Canal of 1914 at Buzzards Bay, Mass.

Bridge engineer Gustav Lindenthal dies at Metuchen, N.Y., July 31 at age 85.

A hurricane strikes the Florida Keys September 2, derailing a train that has been sent to pick up more than 400 war-veteran rail workers and vacationers; a surge of water that rises 20 feet above the tracks crushes them all to death and completely wipes out the Florida East Coast Railroad line between Florida City and Key West that was repaired after the hurricane of 1926 (see overseas highway, 1938).

The Huey P. Long Bridge opens to traffic December 10 at Metairie, La. Designed by Ralph Modjeski, it is 4.35 miles in length, making it the world's longest railroad bridge.

General Motors begins a program of dieselizing U.S. railroad locomotives (see 1930; 1941).

Twin new stainless steel Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Zephyrs go into service on the Burlington Route (see 1934). The trains have a cruising speed of 90 miles per hour and cut 3½ hours off the 882-mile round trip between Chicago and the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Moscow's Metropol subway opens in May with 5½ miles of track that will grow to become a 105-mile system with more than 90 stations. The new Moskovskiy Metropoliten has stations modeled after the great U.S. railroad terminals with escalators, magnificent murals, and chandeliers.

Bell Aircraft Corp. is founded at Buffalo, N.Y., by Indiana-born aircraft designer Lawrence D. (Dale) Bell, 41, who went to work in 1912 as a mechanic for his brother Grover, quit a year later when Grover was killed in an airplane crash, but found aviation irresistible and went to work for Glenn L. Martin. He left Martin in 1928 to join Consolidated Aircraft, which has moved from Buffalo to California (see politics [Bell X-1A], 1947).

Aircraft designer Hugo Junkers dies at Gauting, near Munich, February 3 (his 76th birthday), having pioneered the monoplane and all-metal aircraft construction; pilot Wiley Post sets out on a pleasure trip to the Orient with his humorist friend Will Rogers, now 55. Their monoplane crashes near Point Barrow, Alaska, August 15, killing both men (see 1931); pilot Sir Charles Kingsford Smith passes over Calcutta November 8 with his navigator Thomas Pethyridge on a flight from London to Australia but disappears near Aye Island off Burma and is presumed lost.

The first official trans-Pacific airmail flight leaves San Francisco November 22; the China Clipper flying boat of Juan Trippe's Pan American Airways arrives November 29 at Manila after flying 8,210 miles with stops at Honolulu, Midway, Wake, and Guam (see 1930). The new San Francisco-Manila route gives Pan Am a total of 40,000 miles versus 24,000 for Air France, 23,600 for Lufthansa, 21,000 for British Imperial, 11,700 for KLM, 10,500 for Soviet Russia's Aeroflot.

A 37-kilometer (14-mile) expressway opens between Frankfurt and Darmstadt May 19 in the first section of the limited-access Autobahn to be completed under the aegis of Germany's new Nazi regime (see 1933). By the time construction halts in December 1941 the Autobahn will extend for 3,860 kilometers (2,400 miles), with another 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) under construction, and although the road will have no speed limits in this century, its safety record will be excellent.

The world's first parking meter wins approval from Oklahoma City officials in May and is installed on the corner of First and Robinson streets (see 1932). The city installs 174 Dual Park-O-Meters in July, and it orders 300 more when their success is demonstrated (police officers have to explain that no jackpots can be expected by those who deposit coins). When somebody files suit with the claim that it is unlawful for the city to charge rent for parking space, the city counters that it is not renting space but merely collecting a fee to offset the cost of policing the streets. Meters of improved design will appear in streets of major world cities in the next few decades.

". . . And Sudden Death" by Indianapolis-born writer J. C. (Joseph Chamberlain) Furnas, 29, appears in the August issue of The Reader's Digest with alarming figures on automobile fatalities and the need for safer driving. The Digest sends proofs to 5,000 other publications and will ultimately issue 8 million reprints, making it perhaps the most widely circulated article ever written.

English racing driver Sir Malcolm Campbell, 50, drives his Bluebird at 276 miles per hour over sand at Daytona Beach, Fla.

The Motor Carrier Act passed by Congress August 9 places U.S. interstate bus and truck lines under control of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Automaker André Citroën dies at his native Paris July 3 at age 56, having introduced mass production into the European industry and contributed the funds that permitted Paris to light up the Arc de Triomphe and Place de la Concorde; automaker John North Willys dies at Riverdale-on-Hudson, N.Y., August 26 at age 61.