Improvement Brings the City Another Tremendous Stride To Its Ultimate Position as the Supreme Electric City of the World.
A milestone in the progress of Niagara Falls towards its ultimate goal of supremacy as the all-electric city of the world was reached and passed this week, when the Niagara Junction Railway turned over from steam to electric operation.
In addition to immensely facilitating the handling of freight over this terminal switching line the transportation, doing away with the unsightly steam locomotives and their sooty clouds of smoke, makes for the City Beautiful, towards which the civic and administrative interests of Niagara Falls are now bending their energies.
The transition from steam to electric propulsion has been in process of development for several months. It became a fact on Wednesday when the first of the new high-power electric locomotives made its appearance on the Junction Railway tracks and began hauling strings of freight cars. Two of the electric engines have arrived and are now in dally commission. They will replace the two steam switching engines heretofore used. The latter will remain in service, in conjunction with the electric, for a short time and will then so into the discard.
The electrification of the road is not entirely complete but practically so, the trolley poles, guy wires, feed wires and bear wires, having been erected and connected up along all but a short stretch of the company’s entire terminal route, covering upwards of 18 miles of tracks, which honeycomb the Buffalo avenue Industrial zone and belt the city around in the north end, connecting with both the Suspension Bridge freight yards and the Fourth street yards it the south end. Linemen are putting the finishing touched on the short uncompleted stretch in the Buffalo avenue district and within a few days the system will be complete in its new electric equipment.
Th total cost of the transformation has bean $100,000. The two electric engines cost $20,000 apiece. They are of sixty tons capacity each and are of the direct-current Westinghouse type. The two will, according to officials of the company, be able to handle with ease as much switching work as three or four of the steam locomotives which have heretofore been in use.
The decision of the company to turn over to electricity for their motive power was reached when they found that the steadily increasing amount of freight which the road has been handling with inadequate facilities necessitated either the introduction of added steam locomotives on the line, with resultant disfigurement of the face of the city, or electrification, with its material and ethical advantages.
The decision of the company was quickly reached and was greatly to the advantage of the city. It is freely predicted in quarters where developments of this nature are closely watched and their effects noted that the electrification of the Niagara Junction Railway will prove to be the forerunner of electrification of all present steam lines within the city limits.
Terminal electrification of steam roads is being introduced in the big cities and proving a big success. It will probably nor come to Niagara Falls until the city has grown considerable larger and its great grade crossing problem been worked out but that the proposed new terminal arrangements will, when they become a fact, include electrification of entering steam lines is a prophecy worthy of fulfillment.
Some idea of the service which the two new electric engines will be required to give can be gained form fact that 25,000 car loads of freight are now handled yearly on the line of the Niagara Junction Railway. The material and workmanship entering into the installation of the trolley poles and wiring of the system have been of the highest class. Wooden poles are employed to carry the overhead wires over the greater portion of but on the handsome grounds of the Niagara Falls Power Company and along Buffalo avenue to the plant where the Junction Railway crosses that thoroughfare ornamental iron poles have been installed, enhancing rather than dispelling the appearance of that attractive portion of the city’s industrial zone.
Credit for this big forward step in the city’s terminal facilities belongs primarily to E. A. Wickes, president of the Niagara Junction Railway; Philip P. Barton, vice-president; F. L. Lovelace, secretary; W. Paxton Little, treasurer and assistant secretary and A. McSweeny, agent of the line.
Source: Niagara Falls [NY] Gazette, 9 August 1913, p. 10, NYS Historic Newspapers.