Railroad embankment

“ It is no uncommon circumstance for a huge gap to be cut in the railway, showing where the tearing water or descending mass of earth has crashed through the track, sweeping everything before it. Nothing can withstand the force of these onslaughts, and although heavy retaining walls of masonry may serve to check their fury, they are not completely successful. The result is that when the rains are expending their violence, the engineer-in-chief is prepared for some heavy repairing work, for possibly 100,000 tons or more of earthen embankment may be demolished. ”

“ All the passengers are requested to walk. In single file we march over the bridge, and then await the train. It comes across, lightened of its load, slowly and safely. It is quite likely that in America the engineer would have put on all steam, and dashed across in a second, or, if not, he would have gone down a hundred feet, into a frightful chasm, and the verdict, if any were sought, would have been, “nobody to blame.” Fret as we do about the railroad management in Europe, it is safer and surer than ours. ”

“ We have been donating millions of acres of land to new railroads. It is important that the tracks should be laid with steel rails, that the companies should get the rails as cheaply as they can; it is equally as important that the old roads, when repaired, should be repaired with steel rails. This is the only mode by which the railroads can ultimately become laid with these rails. It is estimated that a railroad needs a renewal of the rails once in ten years. ”

“ The way led along upon what had once been the embankment of a railroad. ”

“ It is obvious the care that is bestowed upon a reservoir embankment, such as the damping, punning, rolling, mixing of the material, and raising it in layers, is not necessary in a railway or ordinary embankment; however, certain precautions should be observed and may be effected at a small cost, and it is well to remember that errors of construction will cause undue strain upon particular parts. ”

“ Young men who had begun by chopping in the bush grew into contractors for getting out ties for the track-layers, and finally themselves took contracts for actual building of the railway over rock and boulders, through mountain vastnesses and quaking bogs until the steel reached tide water. It was in itself an act of splendid audacity for a people of less than four millions in number to start on the task of throwing a railway across an immense and almost uninhabited continent to the shores of the Western sea. ”

“ Then, having seen that the painter was securely wound about an iron stake driven into the ground, he scrambled up the bank, walked along for a few yards, shoving aside the entangling undergrowth with his arms, and came to a spot whence he could overlook the scene from which the sounds proceeded. Several hundreds of dusky labourers were engaged in constructing an embankment along the edge of a wood nearly a quarter of a mile away. To the left, the railway line disappeared among the trees. A small engine was drawing a train of trucks filled with earth towards the partly built embankment. ”

“ The expensive bridging has been reduced to the minimum, however, for in some cases where the water is shallow the islands are linked together by a massive solid earthen embankment.
This section of the railway may be said to be amphibious in the full sense of the word. In fact, at one point the passenger in the train is carried beyond the sight of land. The engineer had to build his structure sufficiently strong and solid as to combat the forces of wind and wave, and at a level beyond the reach of the spray. ”

“ Owing to the absence of rock and gravel in the immediate vicinity, it appeared as if the engineer would have to haul trainloads of material for this purpose from long distances, and at great expense, to be dumped into the unstable mass. But he decided otherwise. He conceived a far more rapid, simple and inexpensive means of building the embankment. Two large, square, shallow-draught dredgers were built, with large grabs rising and falling from the upper end of a projecting diagonal wooden girder or jib. These were towed to a point known as Land’s End. ”

“ In direct contrast to these are the splendid engines sent to the Isthmus by the commission—200 locomotives, not of the largest, but about of the medium size one sees on the American railways; 2000 splendidly constructed steel dump cars for the hauling of rock and debris; 300 air-compressed drills for boring into the rocks in blasting operations; 125 steam shovels of 75, 90 and 125 tons capacity; apparatus and machinery for the moving of railroad tracks, so effective that a railroad track can be slung 10 or 12 feet to one side or the other, laid down and spiked almost as fast as a man can walk ”

“ Our drives from up-country are sometimes held up a whole season when a bad jam forms in dry times. Every year in dynamiting these jams thousands of feet of logs are shattered. More are split on the ledges. We have agreed that we need a railroad. Considering our losses, we can afford to pay well for having our logs hauled to the smooth water. If you and your friends will finance and build such a road, we'll give you free right of way, turn over to you annually twenty million feet of timber for your log trains, and give you the haul of all our crews and camp supplies. ”

“ If the railway116 embankment bars its passage the whole obstruction is swept away. Hundreds of feet of completed line have been demolished in this manner. If the rushing river is unable to break through the embankment it swirls around the obstruction, rapidly undermining the foundations, with the result that a bad cave-in ensues, which is in every way as bad as a clean wash-out, except that perhaps the railway metals and sleepers can be retrieved.
Even the mountain-sides, solid though they appear, are not free from Nature’s playful antics. ”

“ Perhaps a fuller account of this catastrophe may be instructive in order to show the risks run by railroad men, the responsibility resting upon the most humble of them, and the enormous amount of suffering a man is capable of enduring and yet live. This gravel train "laid up" for the night at Clyde, and in the morning early, as soon as the freight trains bound west had passed, proceeded out upon the road to its work. It was the duty of the switchman to see that the trains had all passed, and report the same to the men in charge of the gravel train. ”

“ In other times the railroad bought canals to suppress them. But we have learned a larger outlook now and the congestion so recently as a year ago taught us that there are certain kinds of goods, certain types of transportation, that the railways of this country can not afford to do. Certain great items of bulk freight they must always carry. We should starve for steel if we had to depend upon our railroads to bring the ores from Minnesota to Pittsburgh, and the Northwest would be in a hard case if we had always to send coal to them by rail from the region of the East. ”

“ There are establishments in this country and in Europe where they "doctor" such rails by filling up the flaws with a mixture of iron filings, sal ammoniac, and some adhesive substance. Beware of them; a poor cheap rail is dear at any price. The French government stipulates in its contracts for rails, that flaws shall be planed, drilled, or filed out; that the rails shall not be allowed to drop on the ground, but shall be carried by men and slid down. The Lyons railroad does not pay for its rails until 15,000 trains have passed over them. ”

“ If it were possible to show on a chart the rise in cost of replacing the railroad as a whole we would still not be telling the whole story, because the increase would represent not only a higher level of wages and prices but a change in the character of the plant. Rails and ballast are heavier, frogs and switches more powerful, bridges stronger. ”

“ In any event, however, the general introduction of the interlocking apparatus into the American railroad system may be regarded as a mere question of the value of land and concentration of traffic. So long as every road terminating in our larger cities [198] indulges, at whatever unnecessary cost to its stockholders, in independent station buildings far removed from business centres, the train movement can most economically be conducted as it now is. ”

“ The water must be soft, to protect the locomotive boilers; if hard, an apparatus [Pg 42] is erected for the softening process. Grade crossings are to be avoided, highway crossings being built, wherever possible, over or under the railroad.
A railroad crossing another railroad at grade is an abomination not to be permitted nowadays. The universal use of the air-brake has permitted a reduction of the “head-room,”—the necessary clearance between the rail and overhead obstruction—from 20 feet to 14 feet. ”

“ An embankment-bank, or fill, is the reverse of a cutting, being an artificial mound of earth on which the railway is taken across depressions in the surface of the ground. An endeavour is made so to plan the works of a railway that the quantity of earth excavated in cuttings shall be equal to the quantity required for the embankments; but this is not always practicable, and it is sometimes advantageous to obtain the earth from some source close to the embankment rather than incur the expense of hauling it from a distant cutting. ”

“ An iron grabber is lowered by a crane, it pauses as if to examine the ground before it, in search of a good bite, opens a pair of enormous jaws, takes a grab, and, swinging round, empties its mouthful onto a railway truck. The material is loosened for the shovels by blasts of dynamite and, all the day through, the air is shaken by explosions. Alongside each row of shovels stands a train in waiting; over a hundred and fifty trains run seaward each day loaded with spoil. The bed of the Canal is ribboned with railway tracks, which are shifted as required by special track-lifting machines. ”

“ It takes no large amount of imagination to forsee that such a combination—and most railroad executives and broad-visioned bankers will agree that it is a logical one—can greatly simplify operation in southern and western New York and abandon miles of railroad that should have been abandoned many years since. ”

“ Vehicles seek the center of the road when the crown is high both for comfort and safety but two passing vehicles can not be there at the same time. On hard pavements a quarter of an inch per foot will [364] furnish ample drainage, and that is all the crown is for anyway.
Embankments and Guard Rails. —Too many roadways are built on narrow embankments and often there are no guard rails. The embankment should always be wide enough to accommodate the traffic with an ample factor of safety. It is not uncommon for vehicles to slide off embankments with fatal results. ”

“ The little locomotive, purchased second-hand from the big railroad, which had used it almost up to the point of worthlessness, the battered cars, the bridges and trestles so long suffering from a lack of proper maintenance as to render it positively unsafe to run heavy cars over them, all are gasping for their very breath. ”

“ December 26, 1865—Night freight train loses one car, which is left on road in darkness. Next passenger train strikes it at full speed, smashing it and damaging the engine.
When one reflects that the locomotives suffered major damage not only in these publicized accidents but minor damage in numerous smaller mishaps, of which we have no record, plus the exceptionally hard wear inflicted by snow storms such as those of 1856 and 1857, it is no wonder that the engines were largely worn out. ”

“ On the prairies of the West the road-bed is thrown up from ditches on each side, either by men with wheelbarrows and carts, or by means of a ditching-machine, which can move 3,000 yards of earth daily. In this case the track follows immediately after the embankment, and the men live in cars fitted up as boarding-shanties, and moved forward as fast as required. If the country contains suitable stone, the culverts and bridge abutments are built by gangs of masons and stone-cutters, who move from point to point. ”

“ The breaking of rails has been the cause of much attention on the part of railroad and steel engineering experts ever since the tendency toward the construction of heavy locomotives and greater train loads became evident. ”

“ The embankments must be very carefully carried up in layers of about one foot in thickness, laid in hollow form, and in so doing, all hauling or wheeling, whether loaded or empty, must be done over the same. ”

“ There is coming to-day in this country—slowly, but very surely—a reversal of the old-time tradition that the inland waterway is per se a competitor of the railroad. Many years ago the railroads themselves showed how small a figure a river or canal, always more or less subject to seasonal or weather influences, was to the steel highway as a competitor, while the attempts that have been made since then—and generally at large capital expenditure—to bring about the resurrection of the inland waterway as a competitor of the railroad have so far proved abortive. ”

“ Railroads are not like stages or steamboats, which, if furnishing no profit at one place, and under one prescribed rate of transportation, can be taken elsewhere and put to use at other places and under other circumstances. The railroad must stay, and, as a permanent investment, its value to its owners may not be destroyed. ”