BROOKLYN EASTERN DISTRICT TERMINAL
Coverdale & Colpitts Report
on Present Operations and Future Prospects
of the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal
May 11, 1956
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Please note:
As informative as this report is, it is unfortunately missing the
twelve exhibits as listed on the List of Exhibits pages, as well as
Pages 28 & 29:(Operating Expenses; Transportation and
Insurance)
and Pages 40 through the end of report: (Rates, Operations and Expenses,
Capital Requirements, Summary, and Conclusions)
Also, portions of some pages are partially illegible and / or cockeyed and
cut off.
This is not a scanning error, and this is how it was furnished to Thomas
Flagg in 1976.
We are greatly indebted to Tom Flagg, who generously supplied this report who in turn received it from BEDT President Marion M. McClelland during an interview on December 20, 1976.
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The BEDT commissioned the engineering
consultant firm of Coverdale & Colpitts to survey the operations of the
Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal. Issued on May 11, 1956; this report of
operations and recommendations was furnished to Havemeyer & Elder (parent
organization to the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal) with recommendations
for changes to increase revenue.
This report is perhaps the most important document that has
surfaced to date, as this report contains very concise and detailed summaries
and explanations of each facet of the operations at the Brooklyn Eastern
District Terminal, including but not limited to: properties, equipment,
commodities, freight traffic, freight revenue, operating expenses, and logistics
at each of the locations operated by the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal,
including the operations at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
This report contains many tables denoting types of freight traffic
nd percentages received and shipped, trends, expenditures for maintenance
of way by year and so forth. In spite of this information, I wish I
could say that this report was complete in its entirety; but unfortunately
is it missing all of the twelve associated exhibits, and a couple of pages
pertaining to insurance expenses (which is in all reality is not that grave
to our learning curve) but worse off, it is missing the pages at the end
of the report concerning rates, operations expenses, capital requirements
and the summary and conclusions pages, and one or two pages in the middle
of the document are slightly illegible at the margins due to not being flat
when copied many years ago.
I have since tracked down the successors to Coverdale &
Colpitts, and I was informed that this document is too old to have been kept
in their archives, and their original has been disposed of long ago. If by
some miracle, the copy furnished to the Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal
still exists, it could very well turn up on a research "expedition" I hope
to make to one of several repositories of New York Dock Company records.
At least one of these repositories lists many hundreds of linear feet
of NYD and BEDT documents stored there because, as we all know, NYD
took over BEDT operations and personnel in 1979. We could only hope this
document was transferred with other records.
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Pages 28 and 29 are missing.
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Page 40 through at least Page 42 is missing. |