Railhead

“ And along the road which skirts the shore there go men and women, horses and vehicles, and there is always something strange to note in costume and appearance. And close by runs the railway, its course marked by the painted wicker balloons hanging aloft on the signal posts, and the bright colour of the jutting rocks through which the way is hewn, or by a train dashing past with echoing snort and tail of cloud. ”

“ On shot the locomotive, like an arrow from the bow, the men throwing over the ties until the train was well nigh unloaded, when just as they were close to the curve by which the train arrives at the station, they saw the dreaded cars strike a tie, or something equally of service, and with a desperate plunge rush down the embankment, some fifteen feet, to the little valley, and creek below. ”

“ Like the steamship, the railway is cosmopolitan in its character. The range of its operations may be as extensive as the globe itself; and throughout that sphere of activity, be it what it may, the locomotive engine is scattering thickly the seeds of civilisation, as well as of wealth. ”

“ Is any spectacle really more interesting than a railway train in motion? Why, even the stolidest laborer in the field, or the most blasé switchman off duty, takes a moment off to stare at it. By night, with its dazzling headlight, its engine eating fire and breathing steam and smoke, its flashes of red light upon the trees as its furnace doors are opened and closed, its long line of gleaming windows, the roar and clang of its progress—not in the world is anything more fascinating, more artistic nor, but for its familiarity, more picturesque. ”

“ Think of swinging a train round a curve of only thirty degrees, on a very stiff grade, and with a bridge directly in the center of the turn! That is what this audacious railway does every few hours in the “toe” of the Muleshoe. From our lonely night-gripped dot of a house on the wild hill side, we could see squarely facing us both the Cyclopean blaze of the fierce headlight, and the two watchful red eyes glaring scornfully from the rear platform; by that we knew that the train had doubled on its own length of only six cars. ”

“ The prairies have a monotony of their own. Your eye searches all round the horizon for the joyous blue peak of a far-off mountain. You cannot even see a tree. The railway itself is tiresome in its straight-lined and dead-level uniformity. A deep cut, a high embankment, a heavy grade, or a sharp curve, would be a relief. The only variety we had was that of the violent motion caused by the displacement of the ties by frost. This was so great at times as to set all the cars dancing, and almost to throw the passengers from their seats. ”

“ If you look back at the picture on page 19, you will see how one railroad solved the problem. The rails are laid so that they spiral upward, making a loop. When a very long train travels along the loop, it’s like a huge snake coiled around over its own tail!
Unless it’s absolutely necessary, the builders try not to make curves. Trains run faster along rails that are straight as well as flat. Every bend means that the engineer has to slow down a little. ”

“ YOUNG TRAIN DISPATCHER
CHAPTER I THE NEW POSITION
Stretching from the Atlantic seaboard on the east to the Mississippi River on the west, lies the great P. & O. Railroad, comprising, all told, some four thousand miles of track. Look at it on the map and you will see how it twists and turns and sends off numberless little branches; for a railroad is like a river and always seeks the easiest path—the path, that is, where the grades are least and the passes in the mountains lowest. ”

“ The railroad which connects the two coils about this rugged ascent like a steel lariat thrown by a dextrous hand, now winding in and out where some bottomless abyss is encircled like a huge letter U upon the landscape, or anon clinging upon the rim of some sharp-pointed rock, where the same train creeps around the angle, showing mortal fear by its snail-like pace. ”

“ The genius loci must look with wonder on the gigantic offspring of the little railway, which has swallowed up its own sire. Lean mules no longer crawl leisurely along the little rails with trucks of stone through Croydon, once perchance during the day, but the whistle and the rush of the locomotive are now heard all day long. ”

“ One can see the railway growing in the fullest sense of the word—can see the thin, sinuous ribbon of steel crawling over the flat prairie, across spidery bridges, through ravine-like rock-cuts, gloomy tunnels, and along lofty embankments. ”

“ It enters into the construction of rails, locomotives, box cars, passenger coaches, telegraph wires, block signal devices, and all the countless other things that, in this age of steel and wheels, go into that great expression of the triumph of mind over matter—the modern railroad. ”

“ Never before had a railroad been built across so bleak a plain, a treeless and waterless expanse, stretching for hundreds of miles in a dead level, over which the winds drove at will the shifting sands, constantly threatening to bury any work which man ventured to lay upon the desert's broad breast. ”

“ The railway to-day is one of the matter-of-fact associations of our active life. We use it so constantly that it requires some little effort to think of it as a wonderful thing; a creation of man's inge [48] nuity, which did not exist when our grandfathers were young. Its long bridges, high viaducts, and dark tunnels may be remarked and remembered by the traveller, but the narrow way of steel, the road itself, seems but a simple work. ”

“ The first task in the building of a railway is the construction of the roadbed or permanent way. In its broadest meaning the permanent way of a railway comprises all structure upon which track is laid, but the term is often given a more limited application which excludes culverts, trestles, viaducts, bridges, etc. ”

“ From sea level to the summit of the range, the railroad is conspicuous for its heavy grade—about four per cent.—its sharp curves, its cuts and tunnels, but above all for the magnificent scenery everywhere visible. From the car window one may look over precipitous cliffs into yawning abysses far below the track on which the train slowly and carefully winds its way. On the beetling rocks above, in the dark and wild gorge below—what a wealth of vegetation, what luxuriance of growth, what a gorgeous display of vari-colored fruit and flower, of delicate fern and majestic palm! ”

“ The distant hazy mountains form a soft and beautiful background, with their dark sides and white, snow-crowned peaks; while in the foreground we behold as fine an example of railroad engineering as can be seen anywhere in the world. In climbing the mountains it is necessary for the tracks to wind and zigzag and cross themselves back and forth, until the train which first passes beneath the bridge a few minutes later dashes across the top of it a hundred feet or more higher up. ”

“ The out-train having been despatched, we must now beg our readers to be so good as to walk, or rather to scramble, with us from the scene of its departure across five sets of rails, on which are lying, like vessels at anchor in a harbour, crowds of railway-carriages preparing to depart, to the opposite platform, in order to witness the arrival of an incoming train. ”

“ At dawn I was obliged to leave the express and wait at a junction for the local train which should bring me to my journey's end. Against a misty sky, filled with clouds, in the uncertain glimmering light, the silhouettes of the mountains softly massed themselves, surrounding with a vast amphitheatre the hideous buildings of the station, the long lines of empty cars, the idle locomotives. Near by some factory chimneys, tall and unsymmetrical, sent their smoke into the morning twilight. ”

“ MONO-RAILWAYS A ONE-RAIL railway! What kind of novelty can that be, emanating no doubt from the prolific brain of some enthusiastic engineer possessed with an idea, a fad, a craze—call it what you will! We are accustomed to highly respectable trains running in an orthodox manner on double rails. A projected, many-railed track we have also heard of to carry ships bodily across the Isthmus of Panama. ”

“ Nothing, perhaps, is so typical of the ingenuity, skill and colossal power of our modern civilization as the railroad train—a solitary man holding the lever which controls this tremendous mass of wood and metal, with its freight of goods and passengers rushing past us at the rate of a mile a minute. ”

“ The "railway" had the start of the locomotive by a couple of centuries, and derives its parentage from the clumsy wooden way-leaves or tram-roads which were laid down to lessen the labour of dragging the coal-waggons to and from the place of shipment in the Newcastle colleries. ”

“ The children of this day can hardly imagine what rude and simple affairs the earliest railroads were. Instead of the long smooth steel rails which now carry the great trains, with their luxurious cars, in their never-ceasing flight, day in and day out the whole year round, flat bands of iron, spiked to wooden rails, formed the path of the small carriages drawn by a locomotive of the size and shape of a threshing-machine engine. ”

“ The tiniest, prettiest little railroad you could imagine."
"A toy railroad?" queried Bert.
"Not at all; a veritable railroad running all around the store, filled with freight, passengers, and—money."
"Oh, aunty, 'upon your word and honor,' honest, now, was it a real true railroad with cars on it?" cried Harry. ”

“ How the railway is to drag itself up and round all those thousand and one spurs running into each other, with no distinct valley or flat between, is best known to the engineers and surveyors, who have declared it practicable. ”

“ The chariots shall rage in the streets [a railway is merely an elaborate, scientifically constructed street, or highway] , they shall jostle one against another in the broad ways [the clanking and bumping of the cars together is one of the significant items of railway travel] . They shall seem like torches [a railway train at night, rushing through a distant field, looks like nothing so much as a vast torch, going at flying speed] , they shall run like the lightnings. ”

“ The ingenuity with which two narrow rods of iron are made to bear whole trains of wagons, laden with many hundred tons of commerce, and bounding across a wide, semi-fluid morass, previously impassable by man or beast, is beyond all praise and deserving of eternal record. p. 63Only conceive a slender bridge of two minute iron rails, several miles in length, level as Waterloo, elastic as whalebone, yet firm as adamant! Along this splendid triumph of human genius—this veritable via triumphalis—the train of carriages bounds with the velocity of the stricken deer ”

“ Only two strokes for such as Casey or Neale! Ten spikes to a rail—four hundred rails to a mile! ... How many million times had brawny arms swung and sledges clanged!
Forward every day the work-trains crept westward, closer and closer to that great hour when they would meet the work-trains coming east.
The momentum now of the road-laying was tremendous. The spirit that nothing could stop had become embodied in a scientific army of toilers, a mass, a machine, ponderous, irresistible, moving on to the meeting of the rails. ”

“ Railway Crossings.—Bridges are seldom thought necessary to carry the common highways across the railroads where they intersect, gates are even in many cases dispensed with, and a notice of "Look out for the locomotive when the bell rings," is considered a sufficient warning, and wayfarers are left to take care of themselves. Sharp curves and steep inclines are frequently submitted to for the sake of economy. ”

“ They glide over the broad, smooth and perfectly kept roadways, through the depths of the ether, or along the waters, with the same imperceptible motion, and can be put to a rate of speed that makes our limited railway trains seem like lumbering farm wagons. ”

“ They will resemble the termini of railways only in so far as they must have waiting-rooms, restaurants, bars and cab-ranks on one side, and traffic halls, machine shops, gas plants, and a lot of parallel railway tracks on the other. The railway tracks will be for the accommodation of small trucks and locomotives used in the manɶuvring of waiting air-ships—for an air-ship on the ground is as clumsy as an eagle ! ”

“ The first dawn of the idea of a railway was, no doubt, about the beginning of the seventeenth century, when some inventive genius hit upon the plan of laying down parallel blocks of timber to form tram-roads in the vicinity of mines, to enable the mineral products to be drawn more easily by horses to the riverside. ”

“ To see waggons with flat wheels drawn over cast-iron rails one yard long by a horse, cannot fail to interest those who watch the workings of railways, and it most clearly shows the great improvements made and the perseverance which has been required to develop the present gigantic railway system out of such small beginnings. ”

“ Into the very heart and depth of this, and politely bending with the bends of it, your railway introduces its close-clinging attention. The rocks are not big enough to be tunnelled, they are cheerily blasted away; the brook is not wide enough to be bridged, it is comfortably covered in, and is thence-forward no physical obstacle to an enterprising Railway Company. ”

“ Each railway is in a long tunnel, perfectly straight: so of course the middle of it is nearer the centre of the globe than the two ends: so every train runs half-way down-hill, and that gives it force enough to run the other half up-hill. ”