make it possible in a military emergency to pour filled train and empty, on short headway, into Long Island. The strategic value to the nation of these tunnels will soon be supplemented by the Hell Gate Bridge over the East River which will bind the Pennsylvania and the Long Island railroads with the main lines of the New Haven and the New York Central. This bridge cannot be completed too quickly. It is of immediate strategic necessity. * * * * * From New York south the same main-stem railroad that served the North so well in the days of the Civil War still stands. It has, however, ceased to be a chain of railroads, with ferriage at Havre de Grace and heartrending transfers by horse cars across Philadelphia and Baltimore, as it was in the days when New England and the York State and the Jersey regiments went down to Washington and over across the Potomac. From Baltimore north, this ancient stem is now the Pennsylvania Railroad, four-tracked or double-tracked the entire distance, rich in surplus locomotives and cars, and halted no longer by either the Delaware or the Susquehanna rivers. Since the close of the Civil War the Pennsylvania has builded its own line from Baltimore to Washington, while the Baltimore and Ohio, which owned that section of the ancient stem, has thrust its own line up into Philadelphia, coming from that point to Jersey City over the main-line rails of the Philadelphia and Reading and the Central Railroad of New Jersey systems. This means that there are today between these parallel railroad systems eight main-line tracks from New York to Philadelphia and from four to six from Philadelphia through Baltimore to Washington. It is a combined railroad trunk of which a nation might well be proud. And this nation may yet be profoundly grateful that it has such a railroad trunk, through the heart of its "vital area."