If the Erie plans will bring to each of its water-side piers in lower Manhattan some 7200 tons of assorted merchandise a day, against about 400 tons as at present accomplished by the old-fashioned and rather awkward device of ferrying the loaded cars themselves across the Hudson River, it would seem to be both a real efficiency, as well as a mere economy. Carried out by other roads using the harbor-side of West Street, Manhattan, it would quickly become a vast efficiency--the storage of freight upon the crowded pier floors ended; motor-trucks coming in, receiving in a time always to be measured in seconds, rather than in minutes, the steel containers upon their stout chasses, and then departing in a quick and orderly fashion. J. J. Mantell, the New York manager of the Erie, who has created this new plan and now has its execution in charge, estimates that carried out upon the lines of his competitors it would mean that the railroads coming into New York from the west would need but seven piers instead of the thirty-five that they now occupy. Twenty-eight piers would be released for steamship service and the necessity of extensive, and expensive, harbor improvements deferred, for a number of years at least. The container idea, having once come into the public eye here in the United States, has steadily and rather rapidly gained in favor. A gentleman in St. Louis has apparently gone the Cincinnati method one better by devising a steel container which is interchangeable not only between motor-trucks and railroad freight-cars, but from these chasses to barge or flat-cars, or into the hold of a steamboat. His scheme already is in actual use, although not in perfected form, in the Federal barge service established three years ago upon the Warrior River. Twenty of the big steel boxes were purchased for use there, and there they are still in use. It so happens that the Warrior River barges have no deck-houses, merely open holds into which the coal from the Alabama hills can easily be poured or unloaded. To make "return load"--always that valuable factor in transportation, either water or rail-merchandise freight must be garnered in New Orleans. And an open-hold barge is hardly comparable to a box-car; not at least in the mind of a shipper, who has some lurking desire to have his goods arrive in fair condition at the far end of the run.