High Road

As boss of the small Akron, Canton & Youngstown Railroad, Harry Bartlett Stewart Jr., 44, had spent half his life shipping coal. But Bart Stewart thought there was a better way to do it than by train. Last week, he formed a company to build the longest conveyor belt in the world to haul coal and ore. It would stretch from Lorain on Lake Erie for 103 miles south to East Liverpool on the Ohio, with branch belts to Cleveland and Youngstown.

Stewart's tubelike conveyor would run on trestles 22 feet above the ground, with "transfer points" (see cut) to shift the coal and iron up & down elevations in the land. Inside the tube would be two belts, one carrying coal north from the coal-mining towns along the Ohio River, the other carrying ore south from lake freighters to the steel mills. There would be enough room in between the belts for workers to tend the machinery. In this way Stewart hoped to move 29 million tons of coal, 30 million tons of iron ore and 3 million tons of limestone a year--at about half the price of present railroad rates.

Yaleman Stewart, who succeeded his father as president of the A.C. & Y., got his transportation know-how by building his road into one of the most successful short-line carriers in the U.S. Last year it netted about $1,000,000. His conveyor belt, he thinks, will do even better. To finance it, he has already lined up backers who will put up the $210 million construction cost, and take bonds which Stewart hopes to pay off in 20 years. Stewart intends to start building his conveyor in a year, have it running in three.

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