The Boston and Albany is a co-tenant with the New Haven in the huge and murky South Station. It has always been a rich railroad. Twenty-five years ago it was building superb stone bridges and stations, structures of real architectural worth--a full quarter of a century it was in advance of almost every other railroad in America. In those days the Boston and Albany probably did not dream that the time would come when its chief asset would be the value of its right of way across the newer and the finer portion of Boston. "The Albany Road," as the older Bostonians like to term the B. and A., has the extreme possibilities of cost for the electric transformation of its lines all the way from Worcester east, not only met but many times multiplied in the development possibilities of the Back Bay district which it now traverses with its through track and interrupts with its somewhat ungainly storage yards. These yards, now used for the holding of empty passengers coaches, occupy tremendously valuable acres on Boylston Street within a block of Copley Square--the artistic and literary center of the Hub. They are essential, perhaps, to the economical operation of the road's terminal, but when you come to consider the growth of the city, a tremendous waste. They have stood--a noisy, dirty, open space--stretching squarely across the path of Boston's finest possible development. If these were marshlands, like those that used to abound along the Charles River, Boston long ago would have filled them in and added many valuable building sites to its taxable area. For remember that the development of the Grand Central Terminal has proceeded far enough already to show that in these days of heavy steel and concrete construction, and with the absolute cleanliness of electric railroad operation, it is possible to build a hotel over a big railroad yard without one guest in a thousand ever knowing that a train is being handled underneath his feet every thirty seconds or thereabouts. Indeed, in the Grand Central scheme provision is being made already for the construction of an opera house right over the station approach tracks; the congregation of St. Bartholomew's is building over the same railroad yards one of the finest church structures in America.