Coming from the east on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the train first enters the spiral tunnel--they call it the "corkscrew" out in Alberta--under Cathedral Mountain. This first bore is some 3,200 feet in length. Emerging from it, the train runs back east across the Kicking Horse River, then enters the eastern spiral tunnel, and after describing an elliptic curve, emerges, and again crosses the Kicking Horse westward. This whole thing is a perfect maze--the railroad doubling back upon itself twice, tunnelling under two mountains, and crossing the river twice in order to cut down the grade. The work cost $1,500,000. The mere cost of the explosives came to over $250,000. It was one of the really great tunnel jobs of the world. Yet despite the complicated work caused by the spiral shape of the tunnels, they met exactly. The worth of the thing to the Canadian Pacific is shown in the fact that those same trains that formerly required four to six engines, are now handled easily over this Big-Hill grade with but two engines, and at a speed of about twenty-five miles an hour. Other railroads by the dozen, whose lines traverse mountainous or even hilly country, are engaged in this proposition of lowering their grades. F. D. Underwood, president of the Erie, and known as one of the ablest operating heads in this country, has been engaged in cutting off some of the heavy hill-climbs on that old-time route from the seaboard to the lakes. Underwood has already seen Erie's hopes of success in developing the property as essentially a freighter and for the immediate improvement of that portion of its facilities he has built three new relief lines, a small stretch near Chautauqua Lake in western New York, and then through the upper Genesee Valley, the third and most important eastward from a point near Port Jervis and piercing the summit of the Shawangunk Mountains. The line through the Genesee Valley extends from Hunts, on the Buffalo division, about 20 miles west of Hornell, to Hinsdale on the main line, and is 33 miles long. It cuts off a heavy grade between Hornell and Hinsdale on the main line--a little over one per cent--for both east-bound and west-bound freight. At that particular point, Erie's west-bound freight approximates 75 per cent of the east-bound, and so the new line recognizes that fact by establishing the west-bound maximum grade at 3-10 of one per cent, as against a maximum of 2-10 of one per cent in the other direction. Brought to a plain understanding, a single locomotive has no difficulty in handling 80 cars, each bearing 40 tons of coal, over this new low-grade line. To take one-half that load over the old main line required a pusher.