Oh, and you can use famous characters from movies, TV, stage, or cartoons, i.e. Mighty Mouse.
TUNNEL MILESTONE, AND MORE TO COME By KEN BELSONApril 6, 2008TO many commuters, the two tunnels that connect New Jersey and Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan seem so ordinary that they barely give them a second thought — except, perhaps, when their train breaks down inside them.Yet when the Pennsylvania Railroad blasted the final pieces of rock out of the tunnels to complete the underground link a century ago this week, they were hailed by many as an engineering marvel and the product of foresight and gumption.The Gilded Age tunnels have performed remarkably well and defied skeptics — including some of the engineers who built them and doubted their durability. Each business day, about 150,000 passengers ride the 337 New Jersey Transit trains that roll through the 6,100-foot-long cast iron tubes, which are owned and operated by Amtrak, which itself runs 104 trains. Another 39 empty New Jersey Transit trains use the tunnel. But the tunnels reached their peak-hour capacity in 2003 when the Secaucus transfer hub opened. So New Jersey Transit and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey are planning to spend $7.6 billion to build a second set that will more than double, to 48 an hour, the number of trains that can traverse the Hudson.The project, called Access to the Region’s Core, or ARC, is in some ways as monumental as the first tunnels, which cost the Pennsylvania Railroad $111 million, a price tag that included the old Pennsylvania Station and four other tunnels under the East River. (It’s about $2.5 billion now when accounting for inflation.)If federal approval is given this summer and grants are secured later this year, construction will begin in early 2009 and take eight years. Contractors will deploy boring machines the length of football fields to drill through granite, schist and other materials, use laser-guided satellite signals to pinpoint their location, and carve a path under 34th Street so wide that commuters will be able to walk underground to 14 subway lines, and to PATH, Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road trains....
BTW, spent the weekend in Palo Alto, where I'd gone to see my best friend perform as Dickinson in a production of "1776."Came back to find the CD of "Brain from Planet X" in my mailbox. Thanks!
Mary [Tyler] Moore?
