Effect On River Traffic
In an 1897 article written shortly after their completion, Scientific American was optimistic about the future of the locks, saying:
With cheaper rates, adjacent counties will ship from here, and, considering that this is but one point on a river navigable for several hundred miles, we see that the total of the freight of this country is very large. Doubtless the railroads will still handle a large part of the business, but water transportation is always a most salutary regulator of freight rates, and everything consumed or produced in an area of probably 100,000 square miles (260,000 km2) will be affected by these locks which open the great Columbia River to commerce. In particular will the vast quantity of wheat raised in Eastern Oregon and Washington feel the improved rates of transportation to the coast, whence it seeks a market in Europe. The people of the "Inland Empire" may well congratulate themselves on the completion of the Cascade Locks.
As it turns out, completion of the locks and the 3,000-foot (910 m) canal leading from the east end of the locks, produced some increase in traffic, but not as much increase in riverine traffic as had been hoped. The North Bank railroad was also completed along the Columbia, which took more business away from the boats. As a result, the Regulator Line, which had been running Dalles City, Regulator, and Bailey Gatzert on the lower Columbia, and, through the locks, on the middle Columbia, sold out to James J. Hill, owner of the Great Northern and other railroads. Not long later, in 1912, the Panama Canal Act made it illegal for a railroad to be owned in common with a competing steamboat line, so in 1915, Great Northern sold its boats.
Read more about this topic: Cascade Locks And Canal
Famous quotes containing the words effect on, effect, river and/or traffic:
“Living more lives than one, knowing people of all classes, all shades of opinion, monarchists, republicans, socialists, anarchists, has had a salutary effect on my mind. If every year of my life, every month of the year, I had lived with reformers and crusaders I should be, by this time, a fanatic. As it is I have had such varied things to do, I have had so many different contacts that I am not even very much of a crank.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he can’t go at dawn and not many places he can’t go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walking—one sport you shouldn’t have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)
“If you don’t have a policeman to stop traffic and let you walk across the street like you are somebody, how are you going to know you are somebody?”
—John C. White (b. 1924)