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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. They reported Operating Expenses, Transportation and Operating Expanses, Insurance

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Page 40 through at least Page 42 is missing. (It is unknown how many pages were after page 42 as this was the first page of Summary & Conclusions)

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