undertaking and it is only due to the untiring energy and patience of Mr. McAdoo and his assistants that the task has been achieved.
Mr. McAdoo in a speech delivered February 25, 1908, gives the following description of some of the obstacles met with:
"At the deepest part of the river near the New York side a ledge of rock was encountered at the bottom of the river. This ledge was only twelve feet high while the tunnel was eighteen feet. The problem that was presented was having to build the bottom of the tunnel through rock and the top through silt and at the same time support a river more than one mile wide and sixty-two feet deep, with a cover of only fifteen feet of silt between the top of the tunnel and the bottom of the river. It was necessary to blast the rock in the bottom and hold the silt at the top. This problem was considered so serious that for many years doubts have been entertained by eminent engineers as to whether or not it was possible of solution. This was, however, solved by the chief engineer, Mr. Charles M. Jacobs, and inside of a year the eight hundred feet of rock had been blasted out and the successful construction of the tunnels under the Hudson River was assured."
The physical difficulties were not the only ones that had to be met and overcome. The financing of such a gigantic scheme was not an easy matter, and the enterprise had just gotten fairly under way when the panic of 1903 struck the business world with disastrous effect, and it seemed for a time as though the undertaking would have to be temporarily abandoned. This crisis, however, was weathered successfully, but in the meantime other difficulties presented themselves. Various railroad and street traction interests, fearing the competition of the tunnel system, contested the right of way of the tunnel companies and endeavored to prevent their obtaining the necessary permits for extending the lines under the Jersey shore and in New York. All these attempts to defeat the enterprise were finally overcome, largely through Mr. McAdoo and his powerful arguments before the New York Rapid Transit Commission. In spite of all these obstacles the tunnels were finally completed, the first section running from Hoboken to New York being opened to the public February 25, 1908, that from Jersey City to New York on July 19, 1909.
The tunnels consist of two tubes entirely separate from each other about fifteen feet in diameter inside. The tubes are made of iron rings securely bolted together. These rings measure sixteen feet in diameter and weigh five tons each. In most places they are covered with a coating of concrete, so the interior of the tube is smooth. The tunnel tubes are from sixty to ninety feet below the surface of the Hudson, and the distance between the roof of the tunnel and the bed of the river is from fifteen to forty feet. The tubes are about thirty feet apart.
The tunnel as originally planned was to have been a single tube from Hoboken to Christopher street and Ninth avenue, New York, a
