the Cascades by Cady's Pass, at the head of the Skokomish or north fork of the Snoqualmie River, and join the eastern division west of Spokane. The Columbia and Puget Sound Railroad is a narrow-gauge line connecting Seattle with the Newcastle, Cedar River, and Green River coal-fields, by a system of branches aggregating sixty miles, and sustains an enormous traffic. Its ultimate destination is the Columbia River at Wallula. Of lines projected but not built, the Seattle Southern is to run from West Seattle direct to Portland, to connect with the Southern Pacific system. Thus the Queen City looks to being the terminus of three, if not five, transcontinental roads.
It seems the intention to make West Seattle terminal ground for several roads, the initiative being given in the organization of a West Seattle Terminal and Elevator Company, which is to build on trestles across the bay at its southern end, and erect wheat-elevators on the bluff shore. The height of the elevator above the floor of the warehouse, which is one hundred and twenty by five hundred and thirteen feet ground area, is one hundred and twenty feet. It will have a capacity of seventy thousand bushels, and the warehouse of one million. A shipdock twelve hundred feet long will be constructed, with over five thousand feet of side-tracks and other facilities for receiving and discharging grain, the whole to cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
A belt-line railroad around Lake Washington is reported projected, to be built by the Lake Shore and Eastern and Northern Pacific. The Northern Pacific, it will be observed, is at the bottom of most of the greatest enterprises in the Evergreen State. The Union Pacific would willingly enter into competition, but circumstances have not been favorable in the Puget Sound region, where it is confined to the control of the leased steamboats of the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, but will construct in the near future a line from Tacoma to Olympia and Gray's Harbor, and, if we may believe rumor, several other lines. But it is not for me to say what railroad companies will do; there is more certainty about what they have done, a part of their policy being to puzzle the public about their intentions until they have secured whatever portion of "the earth" seems to promise the largest harvest. Railroads are tricksy things.
