SHIP RAILWAY. A railway on which ships are transported either in a cradle running on wheels, or in the water in a tank carried on a wheeled truck or car. Such railways are de signed to connect two navigable bodies of water separated by an isthmus, and thus save a long detour around the intervening land. They are of very ancient origin. A railway capable of transporting vessels 149 feet long, 16 feet wide. and drawing 5n:. feet of water is said to have been in operation across the Isthmus of Corinth as early as B.C. 427. The Greeks in A.D. 831, the Venetians in 1453 at Lake Garda, and the Turks at Constantinople, used tramways for the conveyance of vessels across intervening land. Coming nearer to modern times, there are various canal inclines and portage railways built in England and in the United States in the early part of the last century. The railway for large vessels was an extension of the canal inclines. and several very ambitious attempts have been made to construct such thoroughfares at various times. None. however, has ever been carried to completion. One of the earliest propositions for a ship railway to carry ocean vessels was the plan submitted to De Lesseps in 1860 for cross ing the Isthmus of Suez. This plan was rejected by the famous Frenchman, who afterwards built the Suez Canal. The plan for the Suez ship railway called for a level track with 10 lines of rails. The ships were to be carried in cradles running on this track at a speed of 20 miles an hour. The promoters estimated the cost of this line to be about one-seventh the cost of a canal. In 1S72 a similar railway across Honduras was proposed to connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, hut the project failed for lack of money. In 1579 Captain James B. Eads proposed a ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Various plans were proposed by Captain Eads for this structure, the earliest being for ships 350 feet long, of 6000 tons, carried in cradles running 1 on 1380 wheels. The length of the road across
the isthmus was about 150 miles, and it was planned to run it at a speed of from six to ten miles an hour. An attempt was made to get Congress to grant financial support to this project, but it failed, and, after a year or two of precarious existence, the project a nat ural death. The most important project ever developed for a ship railway %vas that known as the Chignecto Ship Railway in Nova Scotia. A neck of land only 15 miles wide separates Chig necto Bay. an inlet from the Bay of Fundy, from Bale Vette, leading through Northumberland Strait into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. It was proposed to construct a ship railway across this neck to enable coasting vessels of 1000 tons register and 2000 tons displacement to avoid a stormy detour of 500 miles around the coast of Nova Scotia. The line proposed was 17 miles long and nearly straight throughout. It was level for half its length, and on the remainder the grades did not exceed 1 in 350. The vessels. 235 feet long. 50 feet beam, and 15 feet draught, after being raised out of water by hydraulic runs, were to be conveyed on steel cradles in sec tions 75 feet long, running on 04 solid three-foot wheels on two lines of track of standard gauge spaced 11 feet apart, and laid with 110-pound rails, at a speed not exceeding 10 miles an hour. The construction of this road was begun in 1S55, and was about three-quarters completed in 1891, when work was abandoned for lack of funds. Since the Chignecto railway, no ship railway has been seriously considered, though many individual plans for such roads have been proposed. The literature on ship railways is scattered through the proceedings of the engi neering societies and the volumes of the various engineering periodicals.