THE MODERN RAILROAD

Ready for the day’s run

THE
MODERN RAILROAD

BY
EDWARD HUNGERFORD
AUTHOR OF “LITTLE CORKY,” “THE MAN WHO STOLE A
RAILROAD,” ETC.

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1911

Copyright
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1911

Published November, 1911
Entered at Stationers’ Hall, London, England

PRESS OF THE VAIL COMPANY
COSHOCTON, U. S. A.

TO MY FATHER
IN RECOGNITION OF HIS
INTEREST AND APPRECIATION
THIS BOOK
IS DEDICATED

PREFACE

To bring to the great lay mind some slight idea of the intricacy and the involved detail of railroad operation is the purpose of this book. Of the intricacies and involved details of railroad finance and railroad politics; of the quarrels between the railroads, the organizations of their employees, the governmental commissions, or the shippers, it says little or nothing. These difficult and pertinent questions have been and still are being competently discussed by other writers.

The author wishes to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors and publishers of Harper’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, and Outing in permitting the introduction into this work of portions or entire articles which he has written for them in the past. He would also feel remiss if he did not publish his sincere acknowledgments to “The American Railway,” a compilation from Scribner’s Magazine, published in 1887, Mr. Logan G. McPherson’s “The Workings of the Railroad,” Mr. C. F. Carter’s “When Railroads Were New,” and Mr. Frank H. Spearman’s “The Strategy of Great Railroads.” Out of a sizable reference library of railroad works, these volumes were the most helpful to him in the preparation of certain chapters of this book.

E. H.

Brooklyn, New York,
August 1, 1911.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The railroad is a monster. His feet are dipped into the navigable seas, and his many arms reach into the uplands. His fingers clutch the treasures of the hills—coal, iron, timber—all the wealth of Mother Earth. His busy hands touch the broad prairies of corn, wheat, fruits—the yearly produce of the land. With ceaseless activity he brings the raw material that it may be made into the finished. He centralizes industry. He fills the ships that sail the seas. He brings the remote town in quick touch with the busy city. He stimulates life. He makes life.

His arms stretch through the towns and over the land. His steel muscles reach across great rivers and deep valleys, his tireless hands have long since burrowed their way through God’s eternal hills. He is here, there, everywhere. His great life is part and parcel of the great life of the nation.

He reaches an arm into an unknown country, and it is known! Great tracts of land that were untraversed become farms; hillsides yield up their mineral treasure; a busy town springs into life where there was no habitation of man a little time before, and the town becomes a city. Commerce is born. The railroad bids death and stagnation begone. It creates. It reaches forth with its life, and life is born.

The railroad is life itself!

THE MODERN RAILROAD

CHAPTER I

THE RAILROADS AND THEIR BEGINNINGS

Two Great Groups of Railroads; East to West, and North to South—Some of the Giant Roads—Canals—Development of the Country’s Natural Resources—Railroad Projects—Locomotives Imported—First Locomotive of American Manufacture—Opposition of Canal-owners to Railroads—Development of Pennsylvania’s Anthracite Mines—The Merging of Small Lines into Systems.

Fifteen or twenty great railroad systems are the overland carriers of the United States. Measured by corporations, known by a vast variety of differing names, there are many, many more than these. But this great number is reduced, through common ownership or through a common purpose in operation, to less than a score of transportation organisms, each with its own field, its own purposes, and its own ambitions.

The greater number of these railroads reach from east to west, and so follow the natural lines of traffic within the country. Two or three systems—such as the Illinois Central and the Delaware & Hudson—run at variance with this natural trend, and may be classed as cross-country routes. A few properties have no long-reaching routes, but derive their incomes from the transportation business of a comparatively small exclusive territory, as the Boston & Maine in Northern New England, the New Haven in Southern New England, both of them recently brought under a more or less direct single control, and the Long Island. Still other properties find their greatest revenue in bringing anthracite coal from the Pennsylvania mountains to the seaboard, and among these are the Lackawanna, the Lehigh Valley, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, and the Philadelphia & Reading systems.

The very great railroads of America are the east and west lines. These break themselves quite naturally into two divisions—one group east of the Mississippi River, the other west of that stream. The easterly group aim to find an eastern terminal in and about New York. Their western arms reach Chicago and St. Louis, where the other group of transcontinentals begin.

Giants among these eastern roads are the Pennsylvania and the New York Central. Of lesser size, but still ranking as great railroads within this territory are the Chesapeake & Ohio, the Baltimore & Ohio, and the Erie. Several of the anthracite roads enjoy through connections to Chicago and St. Louis, breaking at Buffalo as an interchange point, about half way between New York and Chicago. There are important roads in the South, reaching between Gulf points and New York and taking care of the traffic of the centres of the section, now rapidly increasing its industrial importance.

The western group of transcontinental routes are the giants in point of mileage. The eastern roads, serving a closely-built country, carry an almost incredible tonnage; but the long, gaunt western lines are reaching into a country that has its to-morrow still ahead. Of these, the so-called Harriman lines—the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific—occupy the centre of the country, and reach from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The Santa Fe and the Gould roads share this territory.

To the north of the Harriman lines, J. J. Hill has his wonderful group of railroads, the Burlington, the Great Northern, and the Northern Pacific, together reaching from Chicago to the north Pacific coast. Still farther north Canada has her own transcontinental in the Canadian Pacific Railway, another approaching completion in the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway. The “Grangers” (so called from their original purpose as grain carriers), that occupy the eastern end of this western territory,—the St. Paul, the Gould lines, the Northwestern and the Rock Island—are just now showing pertinent interest in reaching the Pacific, with its great Oriental trade in its infancy. The first two of these have already laid their rails over the great slopes of the Rocky Mountains and so it is that the building of railroads in the United States is nowhere near a closed book at the present time.

The better to understand the causes that went to the making of these great systems, it may be well to go back into the past, to examine the eighty years that the railroad has been in the making. These busy years are illuminating. They tell with precise accuracy the development of American transportation. Yet, as we can devote to them only a few brief pages, our review of them must be cursory.

When the Revolution was completed and the United States of America firmly established as a nation, the people began to give earnest attention to internal improvement and development. Under the control of a distant and unsympathetic nation there had been very little encouragement for development; but with an independent nation all was very different. The United States began vaguely to realize their vast inherent wealth. How to develop that wealth was the surpassing problem. It became evident from the first that it must depend almost wholly on transportation facilities. To appreciate the dimensions of this problem it must be understood that at the beginning of the last century a barrel of flour was worth five dollars at Baltimore. It cost four dollars to transport it to that seaport from Wheeling; so it follows, that flour must be sold at Wheeling at one dollar a barrel for the Baltimore market. With a better form of transportation it would cost a dollar a barrel to carry the flour from Wheeling to Baltimore, making the price of the commodity at the first of these points under transit facilities four dollars a barrel. It did not take much of that sort of reasoning to make the States appreciate from the very first that a great effort must be made toward development. That effort, having been made, brought its own reward.

The very first efforts toward transportation development lay in the canal works. Canals had already proved their success in England and within Continental Europe, and their introduction into the United States established their value from the beginning. Some of the earliest of these were built in New England before the Revolution. After the close of that conflict many others were planned and built. The great enterprise of the State of New York in planning and building the Erie, or Grand Canal, as it was at first called, from Albany to Buffalo—from Atlantic tidewater to the navigable Great Lakes was a tremendous stimulus to similar enterprises along the entire seaboard. Canals were built for many hundreds of miles, and in nearly every case they proved their worth at the outset. Canals were also projected for many, many hundreds of additional miles, for the success of the earliest of these ditches was a great encouragement to other investments of the sort, even where there existed far less necessity for their construction. Then there was a halt to canal-building for a little time.

The invention of the steamboat just a century ago was an incentive indirectly to canal growth but there were other things that halted the minds of farsighted and conservative men. Canals were fearfully expensive things; likewise, they were delicate works, in need of constant and expensive repairs to keep them in order. Moreover, there were many winter months in which they were frozen and useless. It was quite clear to these farsighted men from the outset that the canal was not the real solution of the transportation problem upon which rested the internal development of the United States.

They turned their attention to roads. But, while roads were comparatively easy to maintain and were possible routes of communication the entire year round, they could not begin to compare with the canals in point of tonnage capacity, because of the limitations of the drawing power of animals. Some visionary souls experimented with sail wagons, but of course with no practical results.

At this time there came distinct rumors from across the sea of a new transportation method in England—the railroad. The English railroads were crude affairs built to handle the products of the collieries in the northeast corner of the country, to bring the coal down to the docks. But there came more rumors—of a young engineer, one Stephenson, who had perfected some sort of a steam wagon that would run on rails—a locomotive he called it,—and there was to be one of these railroads built from Stockton to Darlington to carry passengers and also freight. These reports were of vast interest to the earnest men who were trying to solve this perplexing problem of internal transportation. Some of them, who owned collieries up in the northeastern portion of Pennsylvania and who were concerned with the proposition of getting their product to tidewater, were particularly interested. These gentlemen were called the Delaware & Hudson Company, and they had already accomplished much in building a hundred miles of canal from Honesdale, an interior town, across a mountainous land to Kingston on the navigable Hudson River. But the canal, considered a monumental work in its day, solved only a part of the problem. There still remained the stiff ridge of the Moosic Mountain that no canal work might ever possibly climb.

To the Delaware & Hudson Company, then, the railroad proposition was of absorbing interest, of sufficient interest to warrant it in sending Horatio Allen, one of the canal engineers, all the way to England for investigation and report. Allen was filled with the enthusiasm of youth. He went prepared to look into a new era in transportation.

In the meantime other railroad projects were also under way in the country, short and crude affairs though they were. As early as 1807 Silas Whitney built a short line on Beacon Hill, Boston, which is accredited as being the first American railroad. It was a simple affair with an inclined plane which was used to handle brick; and it is said that it was preceded twelve years by an even more crude tramway, built for the same purpose. Another early short length of railroad was built by Thomas Leiper at his quarry in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. It has its chief interest from the fact that it was designed by John Thomson, father of J. Edgar Thomson, who became at a much later day president of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and who is known as one of the master minds in American transportation progress. Similar records remain of the existence of a short line near Richmond, Va., built to carry supplies to a powder mill, and other lines at Bear Creek Furnace, Pennsylvania, and at Nashua, N. H. But the only one of these roads that seems to have attained a lasting distinction was one built by Gridley Bryant in 1826 to carry granite for the Bunker Hill Monument from the quarries at Quincy, Mass., to the docks four miles distant. This road was built of heavy wooden rails attached in a substantial way to stone sleepers imbedded in the earth. It attained considerable distinction and became of such general interest that a public house was opened alongside its rails to accommodate sightseers from afar who came to see it. This railroad continued in service for more than a quarter of a century.

But the motive power of all these railroads was the horse; and it was patent from the outset that the horse had neither the staying nor the hauling powers to make him a real factor in the railroad situation. So when Horatio Allen returned to New York from England in January, 1829, with glowing accounts of the success of the English railroads, he found the progressive men of the Delaware & Hudson anxiously awaiting an inspection of the Stourbridge Lion, the first of four locomotives purchased by Allen for importation into the United States. Three of these machines were from the works of Foster, Rastrick & Co., of Stourbridge; the fourth was the creation of Stephenson’s master hand. The Lion arrived in May of that year, and after having been set up on blocks and fired for the benefit of a group of scientific men in New York it was shipped by river and canal to Honesdale.

Allen placed the Stourbridge Lion—which resembled a giant grasshopper with its mass of exterior valves, and joints—on the crude wooden track of the railroad, which extended over the mountain to Carbondale, seventeen miles distant. A few days later—the ninth of August, to be exact—he ran the Lion, the first turning of an engine wheel upon American soil. Details of that scene have come easily down to to-day. The track was built of heavy hemlock stringers on which bars of iron, two and a quarter inches wide and one-half an inch thick were spiked. The engine weighed seven tons, instead of three tons, as had been expected. It so happened that the rails had become slightly warped just above the terminal of the railroad, where the track crossed the Lackawaxen Creek on a bending trestle. Allen had been warned against this trestle and his only response was to call for passengers upon the initial ride. No one accepted. There was a precious Pennsylvania regard shown for the safety of one’s neck. So, after running the engine up and down the coal dock for a few minutes, Allen waved good-bye to the crowd, opened his throttle wide open and dashed away from the village around the abrupt curve and over the trembling trestle at a rate of ten miles an hour. The crowd which had expected to see the engine derailed, broke into resounding cheers. The initial trial of a locomotive in the United States had served to prove its worth.

The career of the Stourbridge Lion was short lived. It hauled coal cars for a little time at Honesdale; but it was too big an engine for so slight a railroad, and it was soon dismantled. Its boiler continued to serve the Delaware & Hudson Company for many years at its shops on the hillside above Carbondale. The fate of the three other imported English locomotives remains a mystery. They were brought to New York and stored, eventually to find their way to the scrap heap in some unknown fashion.

Mr. Allen held no short-lived career. His experiments with the locomotive ranked him as a railroad engineer of the highest class, and before the year 1829 closed he was made chief engineer of what was at first known as the Charleston & Hamburg Railroad, and afterwards as the South Carolina Railroad. This was an ambitious project, designed to connect the old Carolina seaport with the Savannah River, one hundred and thirty-six miles distant. It achieved its greatest fame as the railroad which first operated a locomotive of American manufacture.

This engine, called the Best Friend of Charleston, was built at the West Point Foundry in New York City and was shipped to Charleston in the Fall of 1830. It was a crude affair, and on its trial trip, on November 2, of that year, it sprung a wheel out of shape and became derailed. Still it was a beginning; and after the wheels had been put in good shape it entered into regular service, which was more than the Stourbridge Lion had ever done. It could haul four or five cars with forty or fifty passengers at a speed of from fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour, so the Charleston & Hamburg became the first of our steam railroads with a regular passenger service. A little later, a bigger and better engine, also of American manufacture and called the West Point, was sent down from New York.

Word of these early railroad experiments travelled across the country as if by some magic predecessor of the telegraph. Other railroad projects found themselves under way. Another colliery railroad, a marvellous thing of planes and gravity descents, was built at Mauch Chunk in the Lehigh Valley, and this stout old road is in use to-day as a passenger-carrier.

But it was already seen that the future of the railroad was not to be limited to quarries or collieries. Up in New England the railroad fever had taken hold with force; and in 1831, construction was begun on the Boston & Lowell Railroad. This line was analogous to the Manchester & Liverpool, which proved itself from the beginning a tremendous money-earner. Boston, a seaport of sixty thousand inhabitants was to be linked with Lowell, then possessing but six thousand inhabitants. Still, even in those days, Lowell had developed to a point that saw fifteen thousand tons of freight and thirty-seven thousand passengers handled between the two cities over the Middlesex Canal in 1829.

Then there developed the first of a new sort of antagonism that the railroad was to face. The owners of the canals were keen-sighted enough to discover a dangerous new antagonist in the railroads. They protested to the Legislature that their charter gave them a monopoly of the carrying privileges between Boston and Lowell, and for two years they were able to strangle the ambitions of the proposed railroad. This fight was a type of other battles that were to follow between the canals and the railroads. The various lines that reached across New York State from Albany to Buffalo, paralleling the Erie Canal, were once prohibited from carrying freight, for fear that the canal’s supremacy as a carrier might be disturbed. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, struggling to blaze a path toward the West, was for a long time halted by the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which proposed to hold to its monopoly of the valley of the Potomac.

The Boston & Lowell, however, conquered its obstacles and was finally opened to traffic, June 26, 1835. Within a few months similar lines reaching from Boston to Worcester on the west, and Providence on the south had also been opened. By 1839 Boston & Worcester had been extended through to Springfield on the Connecticut River, where it connected with the Western Railroad, extending over the Berkshires to Greenbush, opposite Albany. The Providence Road was rapidly extended through to Stonington, Connecticut. From that point fast steamboats were operated through to New York, and a quick line of communication was established between Boston and New York. Before that time the fastest route between these two cities had been by steamboat to Norwich, then by coach over the post-road up to Boston. Norwich saw the railroad take away its supremacy in the through traffic. Finally it awoke to its necessity, and arranged to build a railroad to reach the existing line at Providence.

Between New York and Philadelphia railroad communication came quickly into being, the first route opened being the Camden & Amboy, which terminated at the end of a long ferry ride from New York. Even after more direct routes had been established and the Delaware crossed at Trenton, it was many years before the trains ran direct from Jersey City into the heart of the Quaker City. The cars from New York used to stop at Tacony, considerably above the city and there was still a steamboat ride down the river.

The railroad route to Baltimore was only a partial one. A steamboat took the traveller to New Castle, Delaware, where a short pioneer railroad crossed to French Town, Maryland. After that there was another long steamboat ride down the flat reaches of the Chesapeake Bay before Baltimore was finally reached. A little later there developed an all-rail route between Philadelphia and Baltimore although not upon the line of the present most direct route.

From Philadelphia an early double-track railroad extended west to Columbia, upon the Susquehanna River. An early route extended due north from Baltimore to York, and then to Harrisburg; the parent stem of what afterwards became the Northern Central. A branch from this line was extended through to Columbia, and the New Castle and French Town route lost popularity.

But the Columbia and Philadelphia route was destined to more important things than merely affording an all-rail route to Baltimore. At Columbia it connected with the important Pennsylvania State system of internal canals and railroads, affording a direct line of communication with Pittsburgh and the headwaters of the Ohio River.

This was accomplished by use of a canal through to Hollidaysburgh upon the east slope of the Alleghanies, and the well-famed Alleghany Portage Railroad over the summit of those mountains to Johnstown, where another canal reached down into Pittsburgh and enjoyed unexampled prosperity from 1834 to 1854. The Alleghany Portage railroad was a solidly constructed affair and its rails after the fashion of almost all railroads of that day were laid upon stone sleepers, rows of which may still be seen where the long-since abandoned railroad found its path across the mountains. The Portage Railroad was operated by the most elaborate system of inclined planes ever put to service within the United States; one has only to turn to the pages of Dickens’s “American Notes” to read:

“We left Harrisburg on Friday. On Sunday morning we arrived at the foot of the mountain, which is crossed by railroad. There are ten inclined planes, five ascending and five descending; the carriages are dragged up the former and slowly let down the latter by means of stationary engines, the comparatively level spaces between being traversed sometimes by horse and sometimes by engine power, as the case demands.... The journey is very carefully made, however, only two carriages travelling together; and while proper precaution is taken, is not to be dreaded for its dangers.”

The Portage Railroad was the first to surmount the Alleghanies although in course of time its elaborate system of planes disappeared, as they disappeared elsewhere, under the development of the locomotive.

An interesting feature of the operation of the eastern end of this route of communication across the Keystone State, which was afterwards to develop into the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad, was the communal nature of the enterprise. The railroad was regarded as a highway. Any person was supposedly free to use its rails for the hauling of his produce in his own cars. The theory of the Columbia & Philadelphia Railroad was simply that of an improved turnpike. For ten years after the opening of the line in 1834, the horse-teams of private freight haulers alternated upon the tracks between steam locomotives hauling trains. A team of worn-out horses hauling a four-wheeled car, loaded with farm produce could, and frequently did keep a passenger train hauled by a steam locomotive fretting along for hours behind it. In the end the use of horses was abolished on the Philadelphia & Columbia—the name of the road had been reversed—and in 1857 the road was sold by the State to the newly organized Pennsylvania Railroad Company. The Pennsylvania had already built a through rail route from Columbia over the Alleghanies, and, by the aid of the wonderful Horse Shoe Curve and the Gallitzin Tunnel, through to Pittsburgh; it had created its shop-town of Altoona and abandoned for all time the Alleghany Portage Railroad. But before the consolidation came to pass, two companies had been organized to control freight-carrying upon the tracks of the Philadelphia & Columbia Railroad. One of these was the People’s line, the other the Union line; and in them was the germ of the private car lines, which in recent years have become so vexed a problem to the Interstate Commerce Commission.

There were other short railroad lines in Pennsylvania, most of them built to bring the products of the rapidly developing anthracite district down to tidewater. Across New York State another chain of little railroads, which were in their turn to become the main stem of one of America’s mightiest systems, was under construction. The first of this chain to be built was the Mohawk & Hudson, extending from the capital city of Albany, by means of a sharply graded plane, to a tableland which brought it in turn to a descending plane at Schenectady. At this last city it enjoyed a connection with the Erie Canal, and for a time the packet-boat men hailed the new railroad as a great help to their trade. It shortened a great time-taking bend in the canal, and helped to popularize that waterway just so much as a passenger carrier.

Afterwards the packet-boat men thought differently. Hardly had the Mohawk & Hudson been opened on August 9, 1831, by an excursion trip behind the American built locomotive DeWitt Clinton, when the railroad fever took hold of New York State as hard as the canal fever had taken hold of it but a few years before. Railroads were planned everywhere and some of them were built. Men began to dream of a link of railroads all the way through from Albany to Buffalo and even the troubles of a decade, marked with a monumental financial crash, could not entirely avail to stop railroad-building. The railroads came, step by step; one railroad from Schenectady to Utica, another from that pent-up city to Syracuse, still another from Syracuse to Rochester. From Rochester separate railroads led to Tonawanda and Niagara Falls; to Batavia, Attica, and Buffalo. But the panic of ’37 was a hard blow to ambitious financial schemes, and it was six years thereafter before the all-rail route from Albany to Buffalo was a reality.

Even after that it was a crude sort of affair. At several of the large towns across the State the continuity of the rails was broken. Utica was jealous of this privilege and defended it on one occasion through a committee of eminent draymen, ’bus-drivers, and inn-keepers, who went down to Albany to keep two of the early routes from making rail connections within her boundaries. At Rochester there was a similar break, wherein both passengers and freight had to be transported by horses across the city from the railroad that led from the east to the railroad that led towards the west. This matter of carrying passengers across a city has always stimulated local pride. Along in the fifties Erie, Pa., waged a bitter war to prevent the Lake Shore Railroad from making its gauge uniform through that city and abandoning a time-honored transfer of passengers and freight there.

But there seems to be no stopping of the hand of ultimate destiny in railroading. The little weak roads across the Empire State were first gathered into the powerful New York Central, and after a time they were permitted to carry freight, the privilege denied them a long time because of the power of the Erie Canal. After a little longer time there was a great bridge built across the Hudson River at Albany, and soon after the close of the Civil War shrewd old Commodore Vanderbilt brought the railroad that had been built up the east shore of the Hudson, his pet New York & Harlem, and the merged chain of railroads across the State, into the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, his great lifework. That system spread itself steadily. It built a new short line from Syracuse to Rochester, another from Batavia to Buffalo. It absorbed and it consolidated; gradually it sent its tentacles over the entire imperial strength of New York State.

CHAPTER II

THE GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE RAILROAD

Alarm of Canal-owners at the Success of Railroads—The Making of the Baltimore & Ohio—The “Tom Thumb” Engine—Difficulties in Crossing the Appalachians—Extension to Pittsburgh—Troubles of the Erie Railroad—This Road the First to Use the Telegraph—The Prairies Begin to be Crossed by Railways—Chicago’s First Railroad, the Galena & Chicago Union—Illinois Central—Rock Island, the First to Span the Mississippi—Proposals to Run Railroads to the Pacific—The Central Pacific Organized—It and the Union Pacific Meet—Other Pacific Roads.

All the railroad projects already related were timid projects in the beginning, with hardly a thought of ultimate greatness. Yet there were men, even in the earliest days of railroading, whose minds winged to great enterprises, whose dreams were empire-wide. Of such men was the Baltimore & Ohio born.

Baltimore, like Philadelphia, had greedily watched the success of the Erie Canal upon its completion, and noted with alarm its possible effects upon its own wharves. Philadelphia, with the wealth of the great State of Pennsylvania behind, had sought to protect herself by the construction of the long links of canal and railroad to Pittsburgh, of which you have already read. But Baltimore had no great State to call to her support. She must look to herself for strength. Out of her eminent necessity for self-preservation came men of the strength and the fibre to meet the emergency. Baltimore might have retreated from the situation, as some of the New England towns had retreated from it, and become a somnolent reminiscence of a prosperous Colonial seaport. She did nothing of the sort. Instead she made herself the terminal and inspiration of a great railroad, laid the foundations of a great and lasting growth.

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was born February 12, 1827. On the evening of that day, a little group of citizens of the sturdy old Southern metropolis gathered at the house of George Brown. Mr. Brown together with Philip E. Thomas, a distinguished merchant and philanthropist of Baltimore, had been making investigation into the possibilities of railroads. The fact that the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which was already well advanced in construction, would have its eastern terminus at the Potomac River, near Washington, brought no comfort to the merchants of Baltimore. Wonder not then, that the stern old traders of that city assembled to consider “the best means of restoring to the city of Baltimore that portion of the western trade which has lately been diverted from it by the introduction of steam navigation and other causes.” From that February day to this the corporate title of the Baltimore & Ohio has been unchanged, despite the career of the most extreme vicissitudes—long years of shadows that were almost complete despair, other years that were brilliant with success.

It was decided at the outset that the commercial supremacy of Baltimore rested on her conquest of the Appalachian Mountains, of her reaching by an easy artificial highway the almost limitless waterways of the West that linked themselves with the navigable Ohio. But for the beginning it was agreed that Cumberland, long an important point on the well-famed National Highway, and even then a centre in the coal traffic, was a far enough distant goal to be worthy of the most ambitious enterprise. Indeed a long cutting through a hill in the first section of the road proved a serious financial obstacle to the directors of the struggling railroad. But these last were men who persevered. They started to lay their track for the thirteen miles from Baltimore to Ellicott’s Mills on July 4, 1828. That occasion was honored by an old-time celebration in which the chief figure was Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, who laid the first stone of the new line. After his services were finished he said to a friend:

“I consider this among the most important things of my life, second only to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that.” Of that act President Hadley, of Yale, has written: “One man’s life formed the connecting link between the political revolution of the one century and the industrial revolution of the other.”

No sooner had actual construction begun on the new line, than the directors found themselves beset by many difficulties. Their enterprise was then so unusual, that they went blindly, stumbling ahead in the dark. Even the construction of the track itself was experimental. It was first planned to use wooden rails hewn from oak, and these were to be mounted upon stone sleepers set in a rock ballast. The money spent in such track was obviously wasted. All such construction had to be torn out before the traffic was at all sizable, and replaced by iron rails and wooden sleepers.

But the track was the least of the company’s problems. It had gone ahead to build a railroad with a very vague conception as to its permanent motive-power. It was soon seen there, too, that horses were out of the question for hauling the passengers and freight any considerable distance. The Baltimore & Ohio Company gravely experimented at one time with a car which was carried before the wind by means of mast and sail.

Sturdy old Peter Cooper, of New York, finally solved that motive-power problem. He had been induced to buy three thousand acres of land in the outskirts of Baltimore for speculation. Requests sent by his Baltimore partners for remittances, for taxes and other charges, became so frequent that he went to the Maryland city to investigate. One glance showed him that the future of his investment rested upon the future of the struggling little railroad which was trying to poke its nose west from Baltimore. He came to the aid of its directors in their problem of motive-power.

That problem consisted, for one thing, in the practical use of a locomotive around curves of 400 feet radius. Cooper went back to New York, bought an engine with a single cylinder, rigged it on a car—not larger than a hand-car, geared it to the wheels of that car and solved the chief problem of the B. & O. His little engine—the Tom Thumb—was a primitive enough affair, but it pointed the way to these Baltimore merchants who were pinning their entire faith to their railroad project.

Two years after the beginning of the work, “brigades” of horse-cars were in regular service to Ellicott’s Mills; by the first of December, 1831, trains—steam-drawn—ran through to Frederick, Md.; five months later, to a day, they had reached Point of Rocks on the Potomac, seventy miles from Baltimore. At Point of Rocks the road was halted for a long time. The power of the powerful Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, which had been great enough to keep State or national grants from struggling railroads, was raised to defend its claim to a monopoly of the Potomac Valley, by right of priority. This right was sustained in the courts, and the railroad held back two years, until it could buy a compromise.

In 1835, a highly profitable branch was opened to Washington, while early in the following year, trains were running through to Harpers Ferry, at the mouth of the Shenandoah.

During that same Summer of 1835, definite steps were taken toward the extension of the railroad to Pittsburgh, as well as Wheeling. But it was three years later before the struggling company was ready to make a surveying reconnaissance of these extensions of the road. All through that time actual construction work was slowly but quite surely progressing westward from Harpers Ferry, and on November 5, 1842, trains entered Cumberland, the one-time objective point of the enterprise.

An early locomotive built by William Norris for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad

The historic “John Bull” of the Camden & Amboy Railroad—and its train

A heavy-grade type of locomotive built for the
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1864. Its flaring
stack was typical of those years

But beyond Cumberland the road gradually left the comfortable valley of the Potomac, and these early railroad builders found themselves confronted with new difficulties. To build a railroad across the range of the Appalachians, with the primitive methods and machinery of those days was no simple task. For nine years the construction work dragged. In 1851 the line had only been finished to Piedmont, twenty-nine miles west of Cumberland, and its builders were well-nigh discouraged. Let us quote from the ancient history of the B. & O., from which we derive these facts, in an exact paragraph:

“In the Fall of 1851, the Board found themselves, almost without warning, in the midst of a financial crisis, with a family of more than 5,000 laborers and 1,200 horses to be provided for, while their treasury was rapidly growing weaker. The commercial existence of the city of Baltimore depended on the prompt and successful prosecution of the unfinished road.”

In October, 1852, it was found that there had been expended for construction west of Cumberland, $7,217,732.51. But the road was going ahead once more. Its Board had dug deep into their pockets and the commercial crisis that hovered over Baltimore was passed. Two years later the road entered Wheeling, and its corporate title was no longer a misnomer.

A little later, a more direct line was built to Parkersburg, West Virginia, and direct connection entered with the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad, which reached St. Louis. The railroad was beginning to feel its way out across the land.

War between North and South had been declared before the long delayed extension to Pittsburgh was finished. In that time a real master-hand had come to the Baltimore & Ohio. In its early days the names of Philip E. Thomas, Peter Cooper, Ross Winans, and B. H. Latrobe were indissolubly linked with this pioneer railroad; in its second era John W. Garrett gave brilliancy to its administration. Even before, as well as throughout the four trying years of the war, when the road’s tracks were being repeatedly torn up and its bridges burned, Mr. Garrett was laying down his masterly policy of expansion. It was a discouraging beginning that confronted him. The two expensive extensions to the Ohio River had been a severe drain on the company’s treasury, traffic was at low ebb, the great financial panic of 1857 had been hard to surmount.

But Mr. Garrett was one of the first of American railroaders to see that a trunk-line should start at the seaboard and end at Chicago or the Mississippi. He pushed his line to Pittsburgh, to Cleveland, to Sandusky, to Chicago. It began to reach new and growing traffic centres. The Baltimore & Ohio entered upon an era of magnificent prosperity.

The first cloud upon that era came in the early seventies, when its powerful rival, the Pennsylvania, secured control of the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore, the B. & O.’s connecting link on its immensely profitable through route from New York to Washington. Pennsylvania interests tunnelled for long miles through the rocky foundations of Baltimore, purchased an independent line to Washington—the Baltimore & Potomac—and the B. & O. found itself deprived of its best congested traffic district. For eleven years it was unable to retaliate, though not a soul believed the Baltimore & Ohio to be other than a splendid, conservative property. It owned its own sleeping-car company, its own express company, its own telegraph company. The name of Garrett was behind it. Logan G. McPherson says:

“When it was desired to obtain additional funds, bonds were always issued instead of the capital stock being increased. Interest on bonds has always to be met, whereas dividends on stocks can be passed. It was announced, however, that the retention of the stock capitalization at less than fifteen millions of dollars was an evidence of conservatism, as the continuance of semi-annual dividends of five per cent was thereby permitted.”

John W. Garrett died in 1884, and was succeeded in the presidency by his son Robert Garrett, who announced himself ready to continue a policy of expansion. The younger Garrett sought to regain an entrance for his traffic to New York. To that end he built a line into Philadelphia and prepared to strike across the State of New Jersey. He failed in that end by the failure of one of his confidential aides; the line that he had counted on for entrance into the American metropolis was snapped up by his greatest rival just as his own fingers were almost upon it. Later the B. & O. was permitted a trackage entrance into Jersey City, but the terms of that entrance were so stringent as to mean a practical surrender upon its part.

If Baltimore & Ohio had won that battle, a different story might have been chronicled. As it was, it stood a loser in a fearfully expensive fight; the English investors in the property became investigators—of a sudden the bottom dropped out of things. The stock went slipping down as only a mob-chased stock in Wall Street can drop; the road that had been the pride of Baltimore became, for the moment, her shame. It was shown, upon investigation, that the road had long gone upon a slender standing: millions of dollars that should actually have been charged to loss had been charged against its capital and included in the surplus. Ten years after Mr. Garrett’s death the road found itself in even more bitter straits. It was a laughing stock and a reproach among railroad men. Its profitable side-properties—the sleeping-car company, the express company, the telegraph company,—the first two of which should never be permitted to go outside of the control of any really great railroad company—had been sold, one after another, in attempts to save the day of reckoning. Just before the Chicago Fair the road reached low-water mark. Its passenger cars were weather-beaten and ravaged almost beyond hope of paint-shops; it was sometimes necessary to hold outgoing trains in the famous old Camden station at Baltimore, until the lamps and drinking glasses could be secured from some incoming train. In that day of low-water mark it was actually and seriously proposed to abandon the passenger service of the road!

Out of that chaos came the B. & O. of to-day, a substantial and well-managed railroad property. Mr. Garrett was the first of the railroaders to construct a single property from the Atlantic seaboard to the Mississippi; John F. Cowan, L. F. Loree, Oscar G. Murray, and Daniel Willard have been his successors in the revamping of the B. & O., eliminating its costly grades, enlarging yard and terminal facilities, and making the historic road a carrier of the first class.

The history of the Erie Railroad is hardly less dramatic than that of the Baltimore & Ohio; its financial disasters were not owing to the errors that come of crass stupidity. For the Erie did its good part in the making of railroad law. Built and operated in the earliest railroad days as a single enterprise through the southern tier of counties of New York State from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, while the roads to the north that were eventually to be welded by Commodore Vanderbilt into the great New York Central were still quarrelling among themselves, it was wrecked time and time again by unscrupulous schemes of high finance. It was made to wear mill-stones in the shape of outrageous bonded indebtednesses that acted as a fearful handicap for many years and prevented a remarkably well located property from standing to-day as the peer of the Pennsylvania or of the New York Central. The story of these outrages has been told and retold—they are integral parts of the financial history of the country. Suffice it to say here and now that the Erie has been operated with more or less success by no less than four struggling corporations; that it has never come closer to achieving success than under its present president, F. D. Underwood; and that no one save those who have stood close to Underwood has known or appreciated the heritage of handicap that was given to him to shoulder. For it has been part of our railroad principle in this country—a mighty sad part, too—that no matter how villainously stocks and bonds may have been issued at any time—only to bring failure swiftly and inevitably,—such bogus paper has always been protected in reorganization. A railroad which becomes bankrupt cannot be abandoned. That has been done only in rare cases. Even the Baltimore & Ohio, at the end of its rope less than twenty years ago, was not permitted to abandon its passenger service. It must pull itself up out of the difficulties, and—in America at least—it must pull its trashy paper up too, in order that no holder of such paper may be unprotected. The paper can no more be abandoned than the right-of-way. The result is seen in railroads staggering under vast and questionable capitalization (there is no cleaning of the slate); but the sins of those that have gone before are truly visited upon the third and the fourth generation, as well as upon the poor humans who, under such burdens, are trying to operate a railroad property.

From the beginning the story of Erie has been a story of difficulties. The original scheme of building a New York railroad from Piermont-on-Hudson to Dunkirk on Lake Erie—some 450 miles—seems in the face of the resources of the State at that time and the engineering difficulties to be solved, almost quixotic. But the road was built step by step, section by section, until in May, 1851, a triumphal first train was operated over its entire length. President Fillmore was the guest of honor on the train, but shared attention with Daniel Webster on the trip. Webster, in order that he might see the country, insisted on making the entire tedious journey in a rocking-chair, which was lashed upon a flat-car. Another flat-car was occupied by a railroad officer who was designated to receive the flags. C. F. Carter, in his interesting sketch on the early days of the Erie, writes:

“By a singular coincidence, the ladies at every one of the more than sixty stations between Piermont and Dunkirk had conceived the idea that it would be as original as it was appropriate to present a flag wrought by their own fair hands to the railroad company when the first train passed through to Lake Erie. As it would have consumed altogether too much time to make a stop for each of these flag presentations, the engineer merely slowed down at three-fourths of the stations long enough to permit the man on the flat-car to scoop up the banners in his arms, much like the hands on the old-fashioned Marsh harvesters gathered up armfuls of grain for binding. At the end of the journey the Erie Railroad had a collection of flags that would have done credit to a victorious army.”

Mr. Carter has also told how in that same eventful year 1851 the telegraph came into use on the Erie, first of all railroads: A crude telegraph line, built for commercial purposes, had been stretched along the eastern end of the road. People did not think very much of the telegraph in those days. It was only seven years old; and when a man wired another man he wrote his message like a letter, beginning with “Dear sir” and ending with “Yours truly.” The railroads scorned its use. Their trains ran by hard and fast train rules. Then, as now, north and east-bound trains held the right-of-way over those south and west-bound, and the meeting places on single-track lines were each carefully designated on the time-card. If a train was waiting for another coming in an opposite direction, and the train came not after an hour, the first train proceeded forward “under flag.” That meant that a man, walking with a flag in his hand preceded the train to protect it. The locomotive and its train of cars necessarily proceeded at snail’s pace.

It was not so very long after that observation-car trip that Daniel Webster took in the rocking-chair up to Dunkirk, before the Erie’s superintendent, Charles Minot, was taking a trip up over the east end of the road. The train on which he was riding was due to meet a west-bound express at Turner’s. After waiting nearly an hour there, without seeing the opposing train, Minot was seized with an inspiration. He telegraphed up the line fourteen miles to Goshen to hold that west-bound train until he should arrive there. He then ordered his train-crew to proceed. They rebelled. Engineer Isaac Lewis had too much regard for his own precious neck to break the time-card rules, even under the superintendent’s orders. So finally Minot took charge of the engine himself, while Lewis cautiously seated himself in the last seat of the last car and awaited the worst.

It never came, of course. When they reached Goshen, the agent had received the message, and was prepared to hold the west-bound train. But it had not arrived, and Minot by repeating his method was enabled first to reach Middletown and then Port Jervis before meeting the delayed train. By the use of the telegraph he had saved his own train some three hours in running time; and it was not long thereafter until the operation of trains by telegraph order became standard on the Erie and all others of the early railroads.

At the beginning, one of the promoters of the Erie announced his belief that the road would eventually earn, by freight alone, “some two hundred thousand dollars in a year,” and his neighbors laughed at him for his extravagant promise. Yet, in the first six months’ operation of the road the receipts—mostly from freight—were $1,755,285.

To tell the full story of Erie would require a sizable book. It has not yet been told. It is a story of intrigue and deceit, of trickery and of scheming; the story of Daniel Drew and Jim Fisk and Jay Gould; the monumental tragedy of the wrecking of a great railroad property—a property with possibilities that probably will never now be realized. The present management of the road has labored valiantly and well. It has seen the future of Erie as a great freighting road, has carefully laid its lines for the full development of the property as a carrier of goods, rather than of through passengers.

The history of the railroad divides itself sharply into epochs. In the beginning, the different roads—such as Erie, Pennsylvania, Baltimore & Ohio, and New York Central—were being pushed west over the Alleghany Mountains to the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. There followed an era where the railroads were reaching Chicago and St. Louis. That was the era which saw the weird railroads of the Middle West, the strange stock-watering companies that made the very names of Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois financial bywords in the late forties and the early fifties. The first railroad in Ohio was the old Mad River & Lake Erie, which was built in 1835, from Sandusky, south about a hundred miles to Columbus, the State capital. The pioneer engine on the road, the Sandusky, was the first locomotive ever equipped with a whistle.

The first railroad of the prairies was the Northern Cross railroad—now a part of the Wabash—extending from Merodosia on the Illinois River, to Springfield. It was started in 1837, and late in the following fall a locomotive built by Rogers, Grosvenor, and Ketchum of Paterson, N. J.,—the founders of a famous locomotive works—was landed from a packet-steamer at Merodosia. Then was the first puff of a locomotive heard upon the prairies of the great West. A contemporary account says:

“The little locomotive had no whistle, no spark-arrester, no cow-catcher, and the cab was open to the sky. Its speed was about six miles an hour, and where the railroad and the highway lay parallel to each other there was frequently a trial of speed between the locomotive with its ‘pleasure cars’ and the stage-coaches. Sometimes the stage-coaches came in ahead. Six inches of snow were sufficient to blockade the trains drawn by this American engine.”

In 1846 James M. Forbes was building the Michigan Central west from Detroit, 145 miles to Kalamazoo. A little later it was extended to the east shore of Lake Michigan, at New Buffalo; eventually it reached Chicago with its own rails. While the Michigan Central was pushing its rails, its chief competitor to the south, the Michigan Southern,—afterwards a part of the Lake Shore, and eventually united with its traditional rival in the extended New York Central system—was also pushing toward Chicago as a goal. Both roads reached Chicago in 1852. But railroad building was slow work. The country expanded too quickly after the golden promises of the railroad promoters. Money came too easily; then there would come a fearful financial time, and the reputable railroad enterprises would be halted beside the “fly-by-night” schemes. As late as 1850, Ohio had only the single trunk-line connecting Sandusky and Cincinnati; but the railroad to Cleveland that was afterwards the main stem of the Big Four and the trunk-line connection east to the Baltimore & Ohio, were nearing completion.

Chicago’s first railroad was the Galena & Chicago Union, and it was the cornerstone of the great Chicago and Northwestern system, one of the really great railroads of America. The Galena & Chicago Union was incorporated in 1836, but not until eleven years later was work begun in laying tracks, for a short ten-mile stretch from the Chicago River to Des Plaines; and its first locomotive, the Pioneer, had been bought second-hand from the Buffalo & Attica Railroad, away east in New York State. The rails were second-hand, too, of the strap variety, which the Western railroads were already discarding in favor of solid rails. But it was a railroad, and it was with a deal of pride that John B. Turner, its president, used to ascend to an observatory on the second floor of the old Halsted Street depot to sight with a telescope the smoke of his morning train coming across the prairie. The Chicago and Northwestern, itself, was organized in 1859. For a time it was so desperately poor that it could not pay the interest on its bonds, and there was a time when its officers had to meet the pay-roll out of their own pockets; but it succeeded in absorbing about six hundred miles of railroad at the beginning. In another decade the Union Pacific Railroad, first uniting the Far West with the populous Middle and Eastern States, was completed. The Chicago and Northwestern formed one of the most direct links between the Lakes and the eastern terminal of the Union Pacific at Council Bluffs. The business that came to it because of that linking was the first strong impulse that led to the ultimate greatness of the Northwestern.

The distinctive mid-Western road was and always has been the Illinois Central. Originally incorporated in 1836, it was nearly twenty years later when, through substantial aid from the State whose name it bears, construction actually began. The first track was laid from Chicago to Calumet to give an entrance to the Michigan Central in its heart-breaking race to the Western metropolis against the Michigan Southern. The main line through to Cairo was pushed forward rapidly, however, and was ready for traffic at the end of 1855. A large number of Kentucky slaves promptly showed their appreciation of the new railroad enterprise by using it to effect their escape to the North.

Of course with the railroad pushing its way westward all the while (the Rock Island in April, 1859, was the first to span the Mississippi with a bridge), it was only a question of time when some adventurous soul should seek to reach the Pacific coast. Indeed it was away back in 1832, while there was still less than a hundred miles of track in the United States, that Judge Dexter of Ann Arbor, Michigan, proposed a railroad through to the Pacific Ocean, through thousands of miles of untrodden forest. Six years later, a Welsh engineer, John Plumbe, held a convention at Dubuque, Iowa, for the same purpose. The idea would not down. Hardly had Plumbe and his convention disappeared from the public notice when Asa Whitney, a New York merchant of considerable reputation, began to agitate the Pacific railroad. Whitney was a good deal of a theorist and a dreamer; but he was a shrewd publicity man, and he held widely attended meetings for the propagation of his idea, in all the Eastern cities. Eventually, like Judge Dexter and John Plumbe, he was doomed to disappointment. After Whitney had died broken-hearted and bankrupt because of his devotion to an idea, came Josiah Perham, of Boston. Josiah Perham was the Raymond & Whitcomb of the fifties. He began by organizing excursions for New England folk to come to Boston to see the Boston Museum and the panoramas, which were the gay diversion of that day. In one year he brought two hundred thousand folk into that sacred Massachusetts town, and he began to be rated as a rich man. He absorbed the Pacific railroad idea and freely spent his money in its propagation. He organized the People’s Pacific Railroad,—and a part of his scheme formed the foundation of the Northern Pacific. Perham, like the others, spent his money and failed to see the fruition of his plan. There seemed to be something ill-fated about that plan of a railroad to the Pacific. Even the citizens of St. Louis, who had gathered on the Fourth of July, 1851, to see soil broken for the first real transcontinental railroad, found that it could only manage to reach Kansas City by 1856. That particular railroad—the Missouri Pacific—through its western connection, the Western Pacific, only succeeded in reaching the coast within the past year.

When Theodore D. Judah brought himself to the seemingly hopeless task of trying to build a Pacific railroad, he brought with him all the enthusiasm of Asa Whitney, and with it the experience of a trained railroad engineer. The thing was beginning to take shape. The men, like Whitney and Perham, who had been before Congress at session after session, finally brought that august body, even when the nation stood on the verge of civil war, into making an appropriation for a survey for a scheme, which nine out of ten men regarded as a mere visionary dream. Theodore D. Judah, filled with enthusiasm for his mighty plan, went West that he might roughly plan the location of the railroad. He went to San Francisco and he went to Sacramento, where the little twenty-two-mile Sacramento Valley Railroad had been running since 1856. The Californians listened to him with interest, but they proffered him no financial aid. Then Judah went up into the high passes of the Sierras, through which a railroad to the east would certainly have to reach, to find a crossing for the line in which he believed so earnestly. He found it—making a route that would save 148 miles and $13,500,000 over that proposed by the Government authorities. When he went back to Sacramento, to the hardware store of his old friends, Huntington & Hopkins, in K Street, it was with a rough profile of that pass in his pocket. What Judah said to Collis P. Huntington and Mark Hopkins has never been known, but certain it is that in a little time they were sending for the three other capitalists of Sacramento—the Crocker brothers, who had a dry-goods store down the street, and Leland Stanford, a wholesale grocer. Out of the efforts of those six men the Central Pacific Railroad was organized with a capital of $125,000. Work began on the new line at Sacramento on the first day of 1863, while California shook with laughter at the idea of a parcel of country store-keepers building a railroad across the crest of the Sierras.

How they built their railroad successfully and amassed six really great American fortunes is all history now. Sufficient is it that they turned a deaf ear to the ridicule (the project was considered so visionary that bankers dared not subscribe to the stock of the road for fear of injuring their credit), found their route through the mountains just as Judah had promised, brought their materials around the Horn, imported ten thousand Chinese laborers, hurled thousands of tons of solid rock down among the pines by a single charge of nitro-glycerine, bolted their snow-sheds to the mountains, and filled up or bridged hundreds of chasms and valleys. “Two thousand feet of granite barred the way upon the mountain-top where eagles were at home. The Chinese wall was a toy beside it. It could neither be surmounted nor doubled; and so they tunnelled what looks like a bank swallow’s hole from a thousand feet below. Powder enough was expended in persuading the iron crags and cliffs to be a thoroughfare, to fight half the battles of the Revolution.”

While the Central Pacific was being built east from the coast, the Union Pacific was pushing its rails west from the Missouri River to meet it. A Federal subsidy was paid to each road for each mile of transcontinental track it laid, and the result was the Credit Mobilier, the worst financial blot upon the pages of American government transactions. Early in the Spring of 1868 the companies were on equal terms in this great game of subsidy getting. Each finally had ample funds and each was about 530 miles away from the Great Salt Lake. So in 1868 a construction campaign began that has never been approached in the history of railroad building. Twenty-five thousand men, and 6,000 teams, together with whole brigades of locomotives and work-trains, were engaged in the work; in a single day ten miles of track was laid and that was a world-beating record. The result of such speed was that the two railroads met, May 9, 1869. Leland Stanford, who was ridiculed when he first turned earth for the Central Pacific at Sacramento six years before, drove the last spike, and was for that moment the central figure in an attention that was world-wide.

After the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific came the Southern Pacific, and after them came Collis P. Huntington binding them into a tight single railroad. But close on the heels of the Southern Pacific, and right into its own territory, reached the Santa Fe, while to the north, first the Northern Pacific and then the Great Northern was built from the lake country straight to Puget Sound. On a November day in 1885 the last spike was driven in the great transcontinental Canadian Pacific, the first and so far the only railroad to lay its rails from the North Atlantic to the Pacific. Within a year the Western Pacific—the westernmost of the chain of Gould roads—has begun to run its through trains to the Golden Gate. As this volume goes to press finishing touches are being placed upon the Puget Sound extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, probably the last transcontinental to be stretched across these United States for a number of years to come. Far to the north, the Grand Trunk Pacific is finding its way across the wilderness of the Canadian Rockies, creating a great city—Prince Rupert—at its western terminal. It should be ready for its through traffic within the next three years.

This then, in brief, is the history of American railroading—an eighty-year struggle from East to West. The railroad has passed through many vicissitudes; days of wild-cat financing, and days when men refused to invest their money under any inducements whatsoever. It has been assailed by legislatures and by Congress; it has been scourged because of the so-called “pooling agreements,” and it has cut its own strong arms by building foolish competing lines. But it has survived masterfully, while the highroads have become grass-grown, and the once proud canals have fallen into decay. Railroading is to-day in the full flush of successful existence. Science has been brought to each of the infinite details of the business; and for the first time the country sees practically every line, large or small, honestly earning its way. The railroad receiver has all but passed into history.

CHAPTER III

THE BUILDING OF A RAILROAD

Cost of a Single-track Road—Financing—Securing a Charter—Survey-work and its Dangers—Grades—Construction—Track-laying.

The railroad has its beginning in the inspiration and in the imagination of men. Perchance a great tract of country, rich in possibilities, stands undeveloped for lack of transportation facilities. The living arm of the railroad will bring to it both strength and growth. It will bring to it the materials, the men, and the machinery needed for its development. It will take from it its products seeking markets in communities already established.

In that way the first railroads began, reaching their arms carefully in from the Atlantic and the navigable rivers and bays that emptied into it. In the beginning there was hardly any inland country. All the important towns were spread along the sea-coast or along those same navigable tributaries, and it was sorry shrift for any community that did not possess a wharf to which vessels of considerable tonnage might attain. Where such communities did not possess natural water-ways, they sought to obtain artificial ones; and the result was the extraordinary impetus that was given to the building of canals during the first half of the nineteenth century—a page of American industrial history that has been told in another chapter.

It was found quite impossible to handle bulky freight economically by wagon, no matter how romantic the turnpike might be for passenger traffic in the old-time coaches. The canal was so much better as a carrier that it was hailed with acclaim, and waxed powerful. In the height of its power it laughed at the puny efforts of the railroad, and then, as you have seen, sought by every possible means to throttle the growth of the steel highway. Within eighty years it was powerless, and the railroad was conqueror. There were hundreds of miles of abandoned canal within the country, many of them being converted into roadbeds of railroads; and the water-highway, with its slow transit and its utter helplessness during the frozen months of the year, was not able to exist except where quantities of the coarsest sort of freight were to be moved.

Without railroads, the United States to-day would, in all probability, not be radically different from the United States of a hundred years ago. All the large towns and cities would still be clustered upon the coast and waterways, and back of them would still rest many, many square miles of undeveloped country; the nation would have remained a sprawling, helpless thing, weakened by its very size, and subject both to internal conflict and to attacks of foreign invaders. It has been repeatedly said that if there had been a through railroad development in the South during the fifties, there would have been no Civil War. France for five hundred years before the signing of our Declaration, was a civilized and progressive nation. Yet century after century passed without her inland towns showing material change; and her seaports, lacking the impetus of interior growth, remained quiescent. Such a metropolis as Marseilles is to-day, became possible only when the railroad made this seaport the south gate of a mightily developing nation.

Let us assume that we are about to build a railroad. If we are going to strike our road in from some existing line or some accessible port into virgin country, we may hope for land or money grants from the State, county, town, or city Government. That is a faint hope, however, in these piping days of the twentieth century. So much scandal once attached itself to these grants that they have become all but obsolete. We shall have to fall back upon the individual enterprise and help of the persons who are to benefit by the coming of the railroad. They may be folk who simply regard our project as a good investment, and place their money in it with hopes of a fair return.

Even if we are not going into virgin territory to give whole townships and counties their first sight of the locomotive, but are going to strike into a community already provided with railroad facilities but seemingly offering fair opportunity for profit in a competitive traffic, we shall find capital ready to stand back of us. A railroad will cost much money, the mere cost of single-track construction generally running far in excess of $35,000 a mile; and it should have resources, particularly in a highly competitive territory, to enable it to carry on a losing fight at the first.

For the money it receives it will issue securities, upon incorporation and legal organization, almost invariably in the form of capital stock and of mortgage-bonds. The stock will probably be held by the men who wish to control the construction and the operation of the line; the bonds will be issued to those persons who invest their money in it, either for profit or as an aid to the community it seeks to enter. The bonds are, in almost all cases, the preferable security. They pay a guaranteed interest at a certain rate, and at the end of a designated term of years they are redeemable at face value, in cash or in the capital stock of the company. There are other forms of loan obligations which the railroad issues—debenture bonds, second-mortgage bonds, short-term notes, and the like. To enter upon a description of these would mean a detour into the devious highways and byways of railroad finance—an excursion which we have no desire to make in this book.

In building our line we will issue as few bonds in proportion to our stock as will make our company fairly stable in organization, and its proposition attractive to investors. For we shall have to pay our interest coupons upon the bonds from the beginning. We can begin even moderate dividends upon our stock after our enterprise has entered upon fair sailing. The all-important initial problem of financing having been at least partly settled, we will go before the Legislature and secure a charter for our road. In these modern days we shall probably have also to make application to some State railroad or public utility commission. It will consider our case with great care, granting hearings so that we may state our plans, and that folk living in the territory which we are about to tap may urge the necessity of our coming, and that rival railroads or other opponents may state their objections. After the entire evidence has been sifted down and weighed in truly judicial fashion, we may hope for word to “go ahead,” from the official commission, which, though it assumes none of our risk of loss in projecting the line, will gratuitously assume many of the details of its management.

Perhaps the politicians will poke their noses into our plan; they sometimes do. If we have plenty of capital behind us; if it becomes rumored that the P—— or the N—— or the X——, one of the big existing properties, is back of us, or some “big Wall Street fellow” is guiding our bonds, we can almost confidently expect their interference. After that it becomes a matter of diplomacy—and may the best man win!

Let us assume that some of these big obstacles have already been passed, that the politicians have been placed at arm’s length, that the money needed is in sight—we are ready to begin the construction of our line. The location is the thing that next vexes us. A few errors in the placing of our line may spell failure for the whole enterprise. Obviously, these errors will be of the sort that admit of no easy correction.

If our line is to link two important traffic centres and is to make a specialty of through traffic it will have to be very much of a town that will bend the straightness of our route. If, on the other hand, the line is to pick up its traffic from the territory it traverses we can afford to neglect no place of possibilities. We must make concessions, even if we make many twists and turns and climb steep grades; we cannot afford to pass business by. Perhaps we may even have to worm our way into the hearts of towns already grown and closely built, and this will be expensive work. But it will be worth every cent of that expense to go after competitive business.

We roughly outline our route, and the engineers get their camping duds ready, particularly in these days when new railroads almost invariably go into a new country. Their first trip over the route will be known as the reconnaissance. On it they will make rough plotting of the territory through which the new line is to place its rails. Our engineers are experienced. They survey the country with practised eyes. The line must go on this side of that ridge, because of the prevailing winds and their influence upon snowdrifts (it costs a mint of money to run ploughs through a long winter), and on the other side of the next ridge, because the other side has easily worked loam, and this side heavy rock. There must be passes through hills and through mountains to be selected now and then, and all the while the engineer must bear in mind that the amount of his excavation should very nearly balance the amount of embankment-fill. Bridges are to be avoided and tunnels must come only in case of absolute necessity.

There will be several of these reconnaissances and from them the engineers who are to build the line, and the men who are to own and operate it, will finally pick a route close to what will be the permanent way.

Construction engineers blaze their way across the face of new country

The making of an embankment by dump-train

“Small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless engines”

Then the real survey-work begins. The engineers divide the line, if it is of any great length, and the several divisions prosecute their work simultaneously. Each surveying party consists of a front flag-man, who is a captain and commands a brigade of axe-men in their work of cutting away trees and bushes; the transit-man, who makes his record of distances and angles and commands his brigade of chain-men and flag-men; and the leveller, who studies contour all the while, and supervisors, rod-men and more axe-men. Topographers are carried, their big drawing boards being strapped with the camp equipment; and a good cook is a big detail not likely to be overlooked.

In soft and rolling country this is a form of camp life that turns back the scoffer: busy summer days and indolent summer nights around the camp-fire, pipes drawing well and plans being set for the morrow’s work. Another summer all this will be changed. The resistless path of the railroad will be stepped through here, the group of nodding pines will be gone, for a culvert will span the creek at this very point.

Sometimes the work of these parties becomes intense and dramatic. The chief, lowered into a deep and rocky river cañon, is making rough notes and sketches, following the character of the rock formation, and dreaming the great dreams that all great engineers, great architects, great creators must dream perforce. He is dreaming of the day when, a year or two hence, the railroad’s path shall have crowded itself into this impasse, and when the folk who dine luxuriously in the showy cars will fret because of the curve that spills their soup, and who never know of the man who was slipped down over a six-hundred-foot cliff in order that the railroad might find its way.

It is then that the surveying party begins to have its thrills. Perhaps to put that line through the cañon the party will have to descend the river in canoes. If the river be too rough, then there is the alternative of being lowered over the cliffsides. Talk of your dangers of Alpine climbing! The engineers who plan and build railroads through any mountainous country miss not a single one of them. Everywhere the lines must find a foothold. This is the proposition that admits of but one answer—solution. Sometimes the men who follow the chief in the deep river cañons, the men with heavy instruments to carry and to operate—transits, levels, and the like—must have lines of logs strung together for their precarious foothold as they work. Sometimes the foothold is lost; the rope that lowers the engineer down over the cliffside snaps, and the folk in the cheerful dining-room do not know of the graves that are dug beside the railroad’s resistless path.

It is all new and wonderful, blazing this path for civilization; sometimes it is even accidental. An engineer, baffled to find a crossing over the Rockies for a transcontinental route saw an eagle disappear through a cleft in the hills that his eye had not before detected. He followed the course of the eagle; to-day the rails of the transcontinental reach through that cleft, and the time-table shows it as Eagle Pass.

Possibly there are still alternative routes when the surveyers return in the fall and begin to make their finished drawings. Final choices must now be made, and land-maps that show the property that the railroad will have to acquire, prepared. The details, of infinite number, are being worked out with infinite care.

The great problem of all is the problem of grades; in a mountainous stretch of line this is almost the entire problem. Obviously a perfect stretch of railroad would be straight and without grades. The railroad that comes nearest that practically impossible standard comes nearest to perfection. But as it comes near this perfection, the cost of construction multiplies many times. Most new lines must feel their way carefully at the outset. Moreover it is not an impossible thing to reconstruct it after years of affluence—of which more in another chapter.

A three-per-cent grade is almost the extreme limit for anything like a profitable operation; even a two-per-cent grade is one in which the operating people look forward to reconstruction and elimination. Yet there are short lengths of line up in the mining camps of Colorado, where grades of more than four per cent are operated; and it is a matter of railroad history that away back in 1852, when the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad was being pushed through toward Parkersburg, and the great Kingwood tunnel was being dug, B. H. Latrobe, the chief engineer of the company, built and successfully operated a temporary line over the divide at a grade of ten per cent—528 feet to the mile. A locomotive which weighed 28 tons on its driving-wheels carried a single passenger car, weighing 15 tons, in safety and in regular operation over this stupendous grade for more than six months. The ascent was made by means of zigzag tracks on the so-called switchback principle. That scheme succeeded earlier planes operated by endless chains; an instance of which is the quite famous road of Mauch Chunk, originally operated for coal, and now a side scenic trip for passengers. Other planes of this sort, you will remember, were in operation at Albany and Schenectady on the old Mohawk & Hudson route, now a part of the New York Central lines; but all of them involved a change of passengers and freight to and from their cars, and the zigzag switchback was considered quite an advance in its day. Two of these ancient switchbacks are still in regular use for passengers and freight—one at Honesdale, Pa., and the other at Ithaca, N. Y.

The matter of grades being settled, and with it as a corrollary the question of minor curves, minor details next claim attention. Perhaps the water supply along the new line is defective. Then arrangements must be made for impounding, and perhaps suitable dams and waterworks will be built for this purpose. The water must be soft, to protect the locomotive boilers; if hard, an apparatus 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. The old “head-room” was necessary to protect the brakeman who worked atop of the box-cars. This reduction of six feet in clearance was a matter of infinite relief to engineers, particularly in the bridging of one railroad over another.

The entire problem of bridges is so intricate a phase of American railroad construction as to demand attention in a subsequent chapter. In actual railroad practice it is apt to demand a separate branch of engineering skill, both in construction and in maintenance. We turn our attention back to the main problem of the building of our railroad.

When all plans are finished, contracts remain to be divided and sub-divided; for it would be a brave contractor, indeed, who in these days would consent to essay himself, any considerable length of railroad line. In fact, in recent work of heavy nature, the price is almost invariably placed at an indefinite figure, a certain definite percentage of profit being allowed the contractor on each cubic yard of rock or soil. In such a case the contractor’s business becomes far less a game of chance; he is, in effect, the railroad’s agent supervising its construction at a certain set stipend.

Let us say that the construction on our railroad begins in the early spring. As a matter of real fact it would not be halted long because of adverse weather conditions. Even up in the frozen and uninhabitable wilds of the Canadian Northwest, work has been prosecuted on the new Grand Trunk Pacific throughout the entire twelve months. But in summer the construction gangs rejoice. The great proposition of bringing mile after mile of future railroad to sub-grade—the level upon which the cross-ties are to be set—fairly sweeps forward under the genial warmth of the sun. The construction is under the supervision of competent engineers, who are, of course, under the direct supervision of the railroad’s own organization. Every six to twelve or fifteen miles of new line is divided into sections, better known as residencies, for each is under the eye of its own resident engineer. He reports to the construction engineer, who in turn reports to the chief engineer of the railroad, an officer who reports to no less person than the president of the company.

This great force—for each engineer has gathered about him a competent staff of young men as expert with compass, with level, and with transit as were the men who first projected the line—is in the field as quickly as the contractor. They are to see him bring the line to sub-grade; to see him place bridges and culverts, bisect high hills with cuttings, bore tunnels through even higher hills and mountains, span deep valleys with great embankments. To facilitate quick construction the residencies are made numerous; work begins at as many initial points as possible. These points, of course, are situated, where possible, close to water communication or existing railroad lines, in order that material may be brought with the least possible delay and expense.

Of course, if the country has a sharp contour, the ordinary difficulties of line-construction multiply very rapidly. The great cuttings through the hills may have to be carved out of resisting rock, a work that is carried on through many levels, known to the engineers as ledges or as benches. If there are high hills to be notched there will probably be great hollows where the circumstances do not justify carrying the line on bridge or trestle. In these cases come the fills, or embankments. We have already shown how the locating engineer in the first instance has tried to plan his line so that the earth or rock from his cutting will be as nearly as possible sufficient to form the near-by embankments. Sometimes it is not, and then the resident engineers must locate borrow-pits, where the hungry demand of the railroad for dirt will cause a great hollow to show itself on the face of the earth. The borrow-pit must be carefully located—convenient of access, far enough from the track not to be a danger spot to it. This is one of the infinity of problems that come to the construction engineer.

For these big jobs laborers’ camps will be established close to them; and small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless dummy-engines and forcing their narrow-gauged rails here and there and everywhere, will be busy for long weeks and months. There will not be much hand-cutting in the ledges. Steam shovels, mounted like locomotives upon the rails, and pushing forward all the while, will fairly eat out the hillside. One of these will catch up in a single dip of his giant arm more than a wagon load of soft earth or of rock that has been blasted apart for his coming.

To make the fills the engineers must often build rough wooden trestles out of the permanent level of the line. The dummy-engines, with their trails of dump-cars, coming from the back of the steam shovels in the cutting, or from the nearest borrow-pit, will hardly seem in a single day to make an appreciable effect upon the fill. But the days and weeks together count, and the dumping multiplies until the rough trestle has completely disappeared, and the railroad has a firm and permanent path across the edge of the dizzy embankment. And these embankments can be made truly dizzy. The passenger going west from Omaha on the new Lane cut-off of the Union Pacific finds his path for almost twenty miles through deep cuttings of the crests of the rolling Nebraska hills, across the edge of the long fills over wide valleys. The Lackawanna railroad building a great cut-off on its main line where it passes through New Jersey has just finished the largest railroad embankment ever built—an earthen structure for two tracks, three miles long and seventy-five to one hundred and ten feet in height.

Cutting a path for the railroad through the crest of the high hills

A giant fill—in the making

The finishing touches to the track

This machine can lay a mile of track a day

As the line goes forward, the track follows. The new railroad has probably popularized itself from the outset by hiring the near-by farmers and their teams to grade the line through their localities, particularly where an almost level country makes the grading a slight matter. Sometimes in level country, grading machines, drawn by horses, or by traction engines, have been used to advantage. These machines are equipped with ploughs which loosen the soil and place it on conveyor belts. Material can be deposited twenty-two feet away from the line, and a four-foot excavation can be made by these machines with ease.

But the laying of the track—the line having been finished at sub-grade with a top width of from 14 to 20 feet for each standard gauge track to be laid—the line begins to assume the appearance of a real railroad. Upon the first stretches of completed track, locomotives and cars employed in construction service begin to operate. As the track grows, their field of operation increases. Then comes the day when the track sections begin to be joined; the railroad is beginning to be a real pathway of steel.

To build this pathway is comparatively a simple matter, once the sub-grade is finished. A mile a day is not too much for any confident contractor to expect of his construction gangs. There was that time, back in ’69, when a world’s record of ten miles of track laid in a single day was established on the Central Pacific. For that mile of standard track the contractor will need 3,168 ties—eight carloads; 352 rails—five carloads; and a carload of angle irons, bolts, and spikes, as fasteners.

The track-layers are as proud of their profession as any man might be of his. Their skill is a wondrous thing. Two men who follow the wake of a wagon roughly place the ties as fast as they are dropped upon the right-of-way. Another man aligns them with a line that has been strung by one of the young engineers, a fourth with a notched board, marks the location of one rail. That rail—the line side—follows close to the location marks. It is roughly banded and lightly fastened in place. The other rail—the gauge side—quickly follows. The wonderfully accurate gauge representing the 4 feet, 8½ inches that is almost the standard of the work, and which is tested every morning by the engineers, is in constant use. The railroad track must be true; there is not room for even the variation of a fraction of an inch in the gauge of the two rails.

In fastening the two long lines of rails, the profession of track-laying rises to almost supreme heights. The men who fasten the rail with angle iron and a single roughly-adjusted bolt in each rail-end are head-strappers and past masters in their art. After them in due season come the back-strappers, finishing that fine work of solidly bolting the rail against the vast strain of a thousand-ton train being shot over it at lightning speed. And after the back-strappers and the men who have spiked the rail to the ties, comes the locomotive itself, bringing more ties, more rails, more angle-bars and bolts, and more spikes to the front. Then sometime later the road-bed is ballasted and the line made ready for heavy operation.

But track-laying is frequently machine systematized these days; and in this, as in so many smaller things, the mechanical device has supplanted the man. A real giant is the track-laying machine. It is mounted upon railroad tracks and is a form of overhead carrier with a tremendous overhang. The carrier is fed with the cross-ties from supply cars just back of the machine and the ties are dropped, each close to its appointed place, as a locomotive slowly pushes the entire apparatus forward. In a smaller way the heavy steel rails are delivered from under the overhang of the carrier. A gang of men make short work of the fastening of the rail to the cross-ties and the machine moves steadily forward. It has been known to make two miles a day at this work.

Culverts have been laid for each small run or kill or creek; the bridge-builders along the new line finish their work and cart off their kits; the day comes when there is an unbroken railroad from one end of the new line to the other. It links new rails and new towns; its localities produce for new markets, commerce from strange quarters pours down upon the land that has known it not. Passenger trains begin regular operation, the fresh-painted depots are brilliant in their newness, the shriek of the locomotive sounds where it has never before sounded.

Life is awakened. The railroad, which is life, has reached forth a new arm, and creation is begun.

CHAPTER IV

TUNNELS

Their Use in Reducing Grades—The Hoosac Tunnel—The Use Of Shafts—Tunnelling Under Water—The Detroit River Tunnel.

Sometimes the construction engineer of the railroad brings his new line face to face with a mountain too steep to be easily mounted. Then he may prepare to pierce it. Tunnels are not pleasant things through which to ride. They are, moreover, expensive to construct, and when once constructed are an unending care, necessitating expensive and constant inspection. But—and that “but” in this case is a very large one—they reduce grades and distances in a wholesale fashion; and when you reduce grades you are pretty sure to be reducing operating expenses. A railroad man will think twice in his opposition to a smoky bore of a tunnel that will cost some three to five million dollars, when his expert advisers tell him that that same smoky bore will save him a hundred thousand tons of coal in the course of a year.

From almost its very beginnings the American railroad has been dependent upon tunnels, and thus has closely followed European precedent. The Alleghany Portage Railroad, to which reference has already been made, passed through what is said to have been the first railroad tunnel in the United States. It pierced a spur in the Alleghany Mountains, and it was 901 feet in length, 20 feet wide, and 19 feet high within the arch, 150 feet at each end being arched with cut stone. The old tunnel, built in 1832, which has not echoed with the panting of the locomotive for more than half a century, is still to be found not far from Johnstown, Pa. It simply serves the purpose to-day of calling attention to the durable fashion in which the earliest of our railroad-builders worked.

Of the building of the Baltimore & Ohio, tunnel-construction formed an early part, several paths being found across the steep profiles of the Alleghanies. The Kingwood Tunnel, which B. H. Latrobe drove, was nearly a mile long and the chief of these bores. But when the Hoosac Tunnel was first proposed—piercing the rocky heart of one of the greatest of the Berkshires—the country stood aghast. Four miles and a half of tunnel! That seemed ridiculous away back in 1854, when the plan was first broached and folk were not slow to say what they thought of such an absurd plan. For twenty years it looked as though these scoffers were in the right—the work of digging that monumental tunnel was a fearful drain on the treasury of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was lending its aid to the project. But the tunnel-diggers finally conquered—they almost always do—and the Hoosac remains to-day the greatest of all mountain tunnels in America. The system of continuous tunnels, by which the Pennsylvania Railroad recently reached its terminal in New York, stretches from Bergen Hill in New Jersey to Sunnyside, Long Island, a distance of some ten miles. In fact the largest feature of recent tunnel-work in this country has been in connection with terminal and rapid-transit development in the larger cities. For a good many years New York and Baltimore, in particular, have been pierced with these sub-surface railroads; it is a construction feature that increases as our great cities themselves increase. No river is to-day too formidable to be conquered by these underground traffic routes. A river such as the Hudson or the Detroit may sometimes halt the bridge-builders; it has but slight terror for the tunnel engineers.

The tunnel-work is apt to be a separate part of the work of building a railroad. It calls for its own talent, and that of an exceedingly expert sort. If the tunnel is more than a half or three-quarters of a mile long it will probably be dug from a shaft or shafts as well as from its portals. In this way the work will not only be greatly hastened but the shafts will continue in use after the work is completed as vents for the discharge of engine smoke and gases from the tube. The work must be under the constant and close supervision of resident engineers. The survey lines must be corrected daily, for the tunnel must not go astray. It must drive a true course from heading to heading. In the shafts plumb lines, with heavy bobs, to lessen vibration, will be hung. Sometimes these bobs are immersed in water or in molasses.

From the portals and from the bottoms of the shafts the headings are driven. If the tunnel is to accommodate no more than a single track it will be built from 15 to 16½ feet wide, and from 21 to 22 feet high, inside of its lining; so the general method is first to drive a top heading of about 10 feet in height up under the roof of the bore. The rest of the material is taken out in its own good season on two following benches or levels.

Piercing a granite mountain is no rapid work. When the Pennsylvania Railroad built its second Gallitzin Tunnel in 1903, 13 men, working 4 drills in the top heading, were able to drill 16 holes, each 10 feet deep, in a single day. The engineers there figured that each blast removed twenty-three cubic yards of the rock. At night, when the “hard-rock men” were sleeping and their drills silent, a gang of fourteen “muckers” removed the loosened material.

Slow work that. The Northern Pacific finding its way through the crest of the Cascade Mountains by means of the great Stampede Tunnel, nearly two miles in length, demanded that the contractor work under pressure and make 13½ feet of tunnel a day. The contractor, working under the bonus plan, did better. With his army of 350 “hard-rock men,” “muckers,” and their helpers, and his tireless battery of 36 drills he sometimes made as high as eighteen feet a day from the two headings. On a three-year job he beat his contract time by seven days. The Northern Pacific paid the price, $118 for each lineal foot of tunnel. That was a high price, occasioned largely by the fact that the work was carried forward in what was then an almost unbroken wilderness. The Wabash finding its way through the great and forbidding hills of Western Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh a dozen years later was able to dig its succession of tunnels at an average cost of $4,509 for 100 feet. Of that amount $2,527 went for labor; and $260 was the price of a ton of dynamite.

When the tunnel engineer finds that his bore is not to pierce hard-rock, of whose solidity he is more than reasonably assured, he prepares to use cutting-shields. These shields, proceeding simultaneously from the portals and from the footings of the shafts, are steel rings of a circumference only slightly greater than that of the finished tunnel. With pick and with drill and dynamite, they constantly clear a path for it, whereupon it is pressed forward in that path. Dummy tracks follow the cutting-shield; and dummy locomotives—more likely electric than steam in these days—are used in removing the material. Electricity has been a boon to latter-day tunnel-workers. Its use for light and power keeps the tunnel quite clear of all gases during the work of boring.

In rare cases, the rock through which the shield has been forced is strong enough to support itself; in most works the engineers prefer to line the bore, with brick and concrete, as a rule. This lining is set in the path of the cutting-shield before its protection is entirely withdrawn; and so the heavy roof-timbering which was formerly a trade-mark of the successful tunnel engineer is no longer used.

Tunnel-boring becomes doubly difficult when the railroad is to be carried under a river or some broad arm of the sea. Men work in an unnatural environment when they work below the surface of great waters, and the record of such work is a record of many tragedies. At any instant firm rock may cease, silt or sand or an underground stream may make its appearance and the helpless workmen find a ready grave. In work where there is even the slightest expectation of such a contingency the air-lock, with its artificial pressure to hold back the soft earth and moisture is brought into use. In another chapter we shall see how the caisson is operated. Suffice it to say now that the necessity of “working under the air,” brings no comfort to any one. It vastly hinders and complicates the work of construction, and adds greatly to the expense. Moreover, it has its own record of tragedies. Still it remains, to the infinite credit of a national persistence, that there is no record in the annals of American engineering where the workers have finally given up a tunnel job. Lives have been sacrificed, good-sized fortunes swept away, but in the end the resistless railroad has always found its underground path.

The tunnel-workers can tell you of the accident when the subway was being driven under the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn, three years ago. The cutting-shield, which was advancing from the Brooklyn side, suddenly slipped out from the rock into the unprotected soft mud of the river bottom. The heavily compressed air shot a geyser straight up to the surface of the river some fifty feet above. A workman shot through the geyser, pirouetted gayly for a fraction of a second above the river, then dropped, to be picked up by the crew of a passing ferryboat. In a week he was back at work again inside the cutting-shield. His fortune was the opposite of that which generally awaits a man caught in a tunnel accident.

“It ain’t as bad as it used to be,” one of them informs you. “When I first got into this profession, they didn’t have the electricity for lights or moving the cars or nothing. We used to try and get along with safety lamps an’ near choke to death. It was more like hell then than it is now.”

“Sometimes the construction engineer ... brings his line face to face with a mountain”

Finishing the lining of a tunnel

The busiest tunnel point in the world—at the west portals of the Bergen tunnels,
six Erie tracks below, four Lackawanna above

The Hackensack portals of the Pennsylvania’s great tunnels under New York City

But your interest in the man who was blown from the tunnel to the surface of the river and escaped with his life is not entirely satiated, and you ask more questions. What do they do when they strike soft mud like that?

“We get down and pray,” he of the experience in this weird form of construction engineering tells you. “We try to get the boys safely back through the air-lock, and then we quit boring till we can fix things up from outside. If it’s a real bad case we’ve got to make land to bore through. It’s generally done by dumping rock and bags of sand from floats just over where she blows out. It’s a pretty rough way of doctoring her up, but it has to go, and generally it does. All we want is to get it to hold until we can set the rings of the tunnel.

“That ain’t always the worst. I’ve been driving a bore under water this way, when we struck stiff rock overhead and soft mud underneath the edge. That’s something that makes the engineers hump. You can’t rest a cast-iron tunnel like this on mud and you get a wondering if you’ve got to quit after all this work under the durned old river, and let the boss lose his money.

“The last time we struck a snag of that sort, the boss didn’t give up. He wasn’t that kind. He had a chief engineer that was brass tacks from beginning to end. What do you suppose that fellow did? He bored holes in the bottom of the lining and drove steel legs right down to the next ledge of solid rock below. There’s that tunnel to-day, carrying 32,000 people between five and six o’clock every night perched down there seventy feet underground like a big caterpillar sprawled under the wickedest ledge o’ rock you ever see.”

It takes a real genius of an engineer for this sort of work. He who drives his bore into the unknown must be on guard for the unexpected. Emergencies arise upon the minute, and the tunnel engineer must be ready with his wits and ingenuity to meet them. Finally the day does come when the bores from either shore are hard upon one another. If there has been blasting under the bed of the river it is reduced to a minimum. The drills work at half-speed, the fever of expectancy hangs over the men. Those who are close at the heading catch faint sounds of the workmen on the other side of the thin barrier—the last barrier of the river that was supposed to acknowledge no conqueror.

The first tiny aperture between the two bores is greeted with wild cheers. On the surface far above, the whistles of the shaft-houses carry forth the news to the outer world; it is echoed and reëchoed by the noisy river craft. The aperture grows larger. It is large enough to permit the passage of a man’s body; and a man, enjoying fame for this one moment in his life, crawls through it. The men knock off work and have a rough spread in the tunnel. At night the engineers and contractors banquet in a hotel. “Not so bad,” the chief engineer says quietly. “We were ⅜ of an inch out, in 8,000 feet.” It was not so bad. It spoke wonders for his profession. To carry forth two giant bores from the opposite sides of a broad river, and have them meet within ⅜ of an inch of perfect alignment, was an achievement well worth attention.

After that, the last traces of the rough rock and silt are removed, the iron rings of the tunnel made fast together, the air pressure released, the cutting-shields, that formed so essential a feature of the construction, removed. Then there remains only the work of installing conduits and wiring and laying the tracks before the tunnel is ready for the traffic of the railroad.

The Michigan Central has recently finished a tunnel under the busy Detroit River, at Detroit, which eliminates the use of a car-ferry at that point. The tunnel was built in a manner entirely new to engineers. The river at Detroit is about three-quarters of a mile wide, and its bed is of soft blue clay, making it difficult to bore a tunnel safely and economically. To meet this obstacle a new fashion of tunnel-building was created.

The tunnel itself consists of two tubes, each made from steel ⅜ of an inch in thickness and reinforced every twelve feet by outer “fins.” The channel was dredged and a foundation bed of concrete laid. The sections of the tunnel, each 250 feet long, were then put in position one at a time. The section-ends were closed at a shore plant with water-tight wooden bulkheads. They were then lashed to four floating cylinders of compressed air and towed out to position. After that it was merely a matter of detail to drop the sections into place, pour in more concrete and make the new section fast. The wooden bulkheads next the completed tube were then removed and the structure was ready for the track-layers. The sub-aqueous portion of the new Detroit Tunnel is 2,600 feet long; it joins on the Detroit side with a land tunnel 2,100 feet long, and on the Canadian side with a land tunnel of 3,192 feet.

It takes more than a river, carrying through its narrow throat the vast and growing traffic of the Great Lakes—a traffic that is comparable with that of the Atlantic itself—to halt the progress of the railroad.

CHAPTER V

BRIDGES

Bridges of Timber, then Stone, then Steel—The Starucca Viaduct—The First Iron Bridge in the U. S.—Steel Bridges—Engineering Triumphs—Different Types of Railroad Bridge—The Deck Span and the Truss Span—Suspension Bridges—Cantilever Bridges—Reaching the Solid Rock with Caissons—The Work of “Sand-hogs”—The Cantilever over the Pend Oreille River—Variety of Problems in Bridge-building—Points in Favor of the Stone Bridge—Bridges over the Keys of Florida.

When the habitations of man first began to multiply upon the banks of the water courses, the profession of the bridge-builder was born. The first bridge was probably a felled tree spanning some modest brook. But from that first bridge came a magnificent development. Bridge-building became an art and a science. Men wrought gigantic structures in stone, long-arched viaducts, with which they defied time. Then for two thousand years the profession of the bridge-builder stood absolutely still.

With the coming of the iron and steel age it moved forward again. The development of a fibre of great strength and without the dead weight of granite gave engineers new possibilities. They began in simple fashion, and then they developed once again, with marvellous strides. Steel, the dead thing with a living muscle, could span waterways from which stone shrank. Steel redrew the maps of nations. Proud rivers at which the paths of man had halted, were conquered for the first time. Routes of traffic of every sort were simplified; the railroad made new progress; and economic saving of millions of dollars was made to this gray old world.

The earliest of the very distinguished list of American bridge-builders erected great timber structures for the highroads and the post-roads. Some of them went back many centuries and came to the stone bridge, in many ways the most wonderful of all the artifices by which man conquers the obstructive power of a running stream. But the building of stone bridges took time and money, and time and money were little known factors in a new land that had begun to expand rapidly.

So at first the railroad followed the course of the highroad and the post-road, and took the timber bridge unto itself. In some cases it actually fastened itself upon the highroad bridge, as at Trenton, N. J., where a faithful wooden structure built by Theodore Burr in 1803 was strengthened and widened in 1848 to take the first through railroad route from New York. It continued its heavy dual work until 1875 when it was superseded by a steel bridge. A dozen years ago the railroad tracks were moved from that structure to a magnificent and permanent stone-arch built near-by. Thus the railroad crossing the Delaware at Trenton has, in this way, typified step by step every stage of the development of American bridge-building.

The timber bridges developed the steel truss bridge, the typically American construction, of to-day. In an earlier day the timber bridges were the glory of the engineer. Sometimes you see one of these old fellows remaining, like the long structure that Mr. Walcott built across the Connecticut River at Springfield, Mass., in 1805, and which still does good service; but the most of them have passed away. Fire has been their most persistent enemy. Within the past two years fire destroyed the staunch toll-bridge at Waterford on the Hudson, just above Troy. The bridge was a faithful carrier for one hundred and four years. In many ways it was typical of those first constructions. It consisted of four clear arch spans—one 154 feet, another 161 feet, the third 176 feet, and the fourth 180 feet in length. It was built of yellow pine, wonderfully hewn and fitted, hung upon solid pegs; and save for the renewal of some of the arch footings, the roof, and the side coverings, it was unchanged through all the years—even though the heavy trolley-cars of a through interurban line were finally turned upon it.

About the same time, the once-famed Permanent Bridge across the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia was built. It had two arches of 150 feet each and one of 195 feet. In its day it was regarded as nothing less than a triumph. A very old publication says:

“The plan was furnished by Mr. Timothy Palmer, of Newburyport, Mass., a self-taught architect. He brought with him five workmen from New England. They at once evinced superior intelligence and adroitness in a business which was found to be a peculiar art, acquired by habits not promptly gained by even good workmen in other branches of framing in wood.... The frame is a masterly piece of workmanship, combining in its principles that of king-post and braces or trusses with those of a stone arch.”

In after years, the Permanent Bridge was also entrusted with the carrying of a railroad. It has, however, disappeared these many years.

The early railroad builders did not neglect the possibilities of the stone bridge. Two notable early examples of this form of construction still remain—the Starrucca Viaduct upon the Erie Railroad, near Susquehanna, Pa., and an even earlier structure, the stone-arch bridge across the Patapsco River at Relay, Md., which B. H. Latrobe, the most distinguished of all American railroad engineers, built for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, in 1833-35. The Thomas Viaduct, as it has been known for three-quarters of a century, was the first stone-arch bridge ever built to carry railroad traffic. It was erected in a day when the railroad was just graduating from the use of teams of horses as motive-power. In this day, when locomotives have begun to reach practical limits of size and weight, that viaduct is still in use as an integral part of the main line of the Baltimore & Ohio. It is built on a curve, and consists of 8 spans of stone arches, 67 feet 6 inches, centre to centre of piers, which, together with the abutments at each end, make the total length of the structure 612 feet. It is in as good condition to-day as upon the day it was built.

When the Erie Railroad was being constructed across the Southern Tier counties of New York in 1848, its course was halted near the point where the rails first reached the beautiful valley of the Susquehanna. A side-valley, a quarter of a mile in width, stretched itself squarely across the railroad’s path. There was no way it could be avoided, and it could be crossed only at a high level. For a time the projectors of the Erie considered making a solid fill, but the tremendous cost of such an embankment was prohibitive. While they were at their wits’ ends, James P. Kirkwood, a shrewd Scotchman, who had been working as a civil engineer upon the Boston & Albany, appeared. Kirkwood spanned the valley with the Starucca Viaduct, one of the most beautiful bridges ever built in America. He opened quarries close at hand and by indefatigable energy built his stone bridge in a single summer. It has been in use ever since. The increasing weight of its burdens has never been of consequence to it, and to-day it remains an important link in a busy trunk-line railroad. It is 1,200 feet in length and consists of 18 arches of 50 feet clear span apiece.

But stone bridges even then cost money, and so the timber structure still remained the most available. Many men can still remember the tunnels, into whose darkness the railroad cars plunged every time they crossed a stream of any importance whatsoever. They have nearly all gone. The wooden bridge was ill suited to the ravages of weather and of fire—ravages that were quickened by the railroad, rather than hindered. A substitute material was demanded. It was found—in iron.

The first iron bridge in the United States is believed to be the one erected by Trumbull in 1840 over the Erie Canal at Frankfort, N. Y. Record is also held of one of these bridges being built for the North Adams branch of the Boston & Albany Railroad, in 1846. About a year later, Nathaniel Rider began to build iron bridges for the New York & Harlem, the Erie, and some others of the early railroads. His bridges—of the truss type, of course, that type having been worked out in the timber bridges of the land—were each composed of cast-iron top-chords and post, the remaining part of the structure being fabricated of wrought-iron. The members were bolted together. Still, the failure of a Rider bridge upon the Erie in 1850, followed closely by the failure of a similar structure over the River Dee, in England, influenced officials of that railroad to a conclusion that iron bridges were unpractical, and to order them to be removed and replaced by wooden structures. For a time it looked as if the iron bridge were doomed. That was a dark day for the bridge engineers. A contemporary account says:

“The first impulse to the general adoption of iron for railroad bridges was given by Benjamin H. Latrobe, chief engineer of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. When the extension of this road from Cumberland to Wheeling was begun, he decided to use this material in all the new bridges. Mr. Latrobe had previously much experience in the construction of wooden bridges in which iron was extensively used; he had also designed and used the fish-bellied girder constructed of cast and wrought-iron.”

Under the influence of the really great Latrobe, an iron span of 124 feet was built in 1852 at Harpers Ferry. In that same year, the B. & O. built its Monongahela River Bridge, a really pretentious structure of 3 spans of 205 feet each, and the first really great iron railroad bridge in all the land. The path was set. The conquest of iron over wood as a bridge material was merely a problem of good engineering. The iron bridge quickly came into its own. The Pennsylvania Railroad began building cast-iron bridges of from 65 to 110 feet span at its Altoona shops for the many creeks and runs along the western end of its line. The other railroads were following in rapid order. Squire Whipple, Bollman, Pratt—all the others who could design and build iron bridges—were kept more than busy by the work that poured in upon them.

And in the day when the iron bridge was coming into its own, Sir Henry Bessemer, over in England, was bringing the steel age into existence, first making toy cannon models for the lasting joy of Napoleon III, and then making a whole world see that steel—that dead thing with the living muscle—was no longer to be limited for use in tools and cutting surface. Steel was to become the very right-hand of man. And so steel came to the bridge-builders, at first only in the most important wearing points such as pins and rivets, finally to be the whole fabric of the modern bridge. The transition was gradual. The early engineers began using less and less of cast-iron and more and more of wrought, until they had practically eliminated cast-iron as a bridge material. Then there came a quick change; there was another dark day for the railroad bridge engineers of America. In 1876—that very year when the land was so joyously celebrating its Centennial—a passenger train went crashing through a defective bridge at Ashtabula, Ohio. There was a great property loss—thousands and thousands of dollars, and a loss of lives that could never be expressed in dollars. An outraged land asked the bridge-builders if they really knew their business.

Out of that Ashtabula wreck came the scientific testing of bridges and bridge materials, and the abolition of the rule-of-thumb in the cheaper sorts of construction. Out of that miserable wreckage came also the use of steel in the railroad bridge. Steel had found itself; and how the steel bridges began to spring up across the land! They spanned the Ohio, and they spanned the Mississippi, and they spanned the Missouri; a great structure threw itself over the deep gorge of the Kentucky River. When the day came that fire destroyed the famous wooden viaduct of the Erie over the Genesee River at Portage, N. Y. (you must remember the pictures of that tremendous structure in the early geographies), steel took its place.

All this while the bridge engineer attempted more and more. He built over the deep gorge of the Niagara. He conquered the St. Lawrence in and about Montreal. He laughed at the mighty Hudson and flung a dizzy steel trestle over its bosom at Poughkeepsie. He built at Cairo, at Thebes, and at Memphis, on the Mississippi, and again and again and still again at St. Louis. The East River no longer halted him or compelled him to resort to the alternative of the very expensive types of suspension bridge. He has finally thrown a great cantilever over it, from Manhattan to Long Island. The steel bridge has come into its own.

Let us study for a moment the construction of the different types of railroad bridge. For the tiny creeks—the little things that are mad torrents in spring, and run stark-dry in midsummer—where they cannot be poured through a pipe or a concrete moulded culvert, the simplest of bridge forms will suffice. And the simplest of bridge forms consists of two wooden beams laid from abutment to abutment and holding the ties and rails of the track-structure. As the first development of that simplest idea comes the substitution of steel for wood, giving, as we have already seen, protection against fire and a far greater strength. The steel beam has greater strength than a wooden beam of the same outside dimension and yet in its design it effects for itself a great saving of material, by cutting out superfluous parts and becoming the structural standard of to-day, the I beam. When the I beam becomes too large to be made in a single pouring or a single rolling, it may be constructed of steel plates and angles firmly riveted together, and thus still remains the possibility of the simplest form of bridge. That single span may be further increased, or the bridge developed into a succession of increased spans by the substitution of the lattice-work girder, effecting further saving in weight without material loss of strength for the solid-plate girder. The track may be laid atop of such girders or—to save clearance in overhead crossing—swung between them at their bases.

The limit in this form of bridge is generally in a 65-foot or a 100-foot span. It is not practical to build the girders up outside of a shop; and the 65-foot length represents the two flat-cars that must be used to transport any one of them to the bridge location. Some railroads have used three cars for the hauling of a single girder, and so increased these spans to 100 feet; but as a rule, over 65 feet, and the truss, the most common form of railroad bridge in this country, comes into use.

The truss is a distinct evolution from those old timber bridges of which we have already spoken. Burr and Latrobe and Bollman and Howe and Squire Whipple—those distinguished engineers of other days—have evolved it, step by step. It is, in one sense, no more than an enlarged form of lattice girder, the work of the different designers having been to accomplish at all times, a maximum of strength with a minimum of weight. It is built of members that stand pulling-strain, and those that stand pressure-strain; and these are respectively known as tension and as compression members. In them rests the real strength of the truss. But in addition to the structure are the bracing-rods, generally placed as diagonals and built to sustain the structure against both lateral and wind-strains. The members that form the trusses are stoutly riveted together; the rapid rat-a-tap-tap of the riveter is no longer a novelty in any corner of the land. Sometimes certain of the important bearing-points are connected by steel pins instead of rivets—another survival of the old days of the timber bridge.

As a rule, the railroad is carried through the truss—and this is known as the through span. Sometimes it is carried upon the top of the structure, and then the truss becomes known as a deck span. A long bridge may effectively combine both of these types of span. The splendid new double-track truss bridge recently built by the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad over the Susquehanna River between Havre-de-Grace and Aiken, Md., to replace a single-track bridge in the same location, is a splendid example of the best type of such structures. At the point of crossing, the river is divided into channels by Watson Island; the width of the west channel being approximately 2,600 feet and that of the east channel being approximately 1,400 feet. The distance across the low-lying island is 2,000 feet—making the length of the entire bridge about 6,000 feet. The bridge, as originally constructed when the line from Baltimore to Philadelphia was built, in 1886, had a steel trestle over Watson Island. In building the new structure, this viaduct was eliminated in favor of a bridge structure of 90-foot girder spans, placed upon concrete piers. Additional piers were placed in the west channel, shortening the deck spans from 480 to 240 feet; the through span over the main channel was kept at the original length—520 feet. In the east channel, the span lengths remained unchanged, with a single slight exception. The changes in the span lengths involved new masonry, and all piers were sunk to solid rock, those in the west channel being carried by caissons to a depth of more than seventy feet beneath low-water. The total amount of new masonry and concrete approximated 62,000 cubic yards. The long span-lengths of the deck span over the east channel and the through span over the navigable portion of the west channel—each 520 feet in length—occasioned heavy construction. The deck span, for instance, weighed 12,000 pounds to each foot of bridge. The total weight of this very long bridge reaches the enormous figure of 32,000,000 pounds. And yet, even the untechnical observe the extreme simplicity of its lines of construction, and feel that the engineer, A. W. Thompson, has done his work well. The construction of the giant took two years and a half. During that time, the trains of the B. & O. were diverted to the closely adjacent Pennsylvania, so that the bridge-builders might continue with a minimum of delay.

The truss span reaches its limitations at a little over 500 feet in length—we have just seen how the Susquehanna structure had its spans cut in halves in the non-navigable portions of the river. The spans of two great railroad bridges over the Ohio at Cincinnati reached 519 and 550 feet, but they were built in a day when the weights of locomotives and of train-loads had not yet begun to rise. Nowadays the shorter span is the safer and by far the best. The engineer builds plenty of midstream piers, looking out only for a decent width for any navigable channels.

And when because of peculiarities of location he cannot place his pier midstream, then it is time for him to get out his pencils and begin his drawings all over again. He can perhaps build a suspension bridge—a clear span of 1,500 feet will be as nothing to it,—but suspension bridges take a long time to build and are fearfully expensive in the building. It is more than likely, then, that he will turn to the cantilever. In the cantilever, two giant trusses are cunningly balanced upon string supporting towers. They are constructed by being built out from the towers, evenly, so that the balance of weight may never be lost for a single hour. The two projecting arms are finally caught together in mid-air and over the very centre of the span—caught and made fast by the riveters. The result is a bridge of surpassing strength and fairly low cost, a real triumph for the bridge engineer.

The first of these cantilever bridges built in the United States was of iron. It was designed and constructed by C. Shaler Smith across the deep gorge of the Kentucky River in 1876-77. Mr. Smith also built the second cantilever, the Minnehaha, across the Mississippi, at St. Paul, Minn., in 1879-80. The third and fourth were the Niagara and the Frazer River bridges built in the early eighties. In their trail came many others—one of the most notable among them being the great Poughkeepsie Bridge.

We are going to see something of the construction of one of these great railroad bridges. Let us begin at the beginning, and see the men, as they work upon the foundations of abutments and of piers—many times hundreds of feet under the waters of the very stream that they will eventually conquer. For months this important work of getting a good foothold for the monster will go forth almost unseen by the workaday world—by the aid of the great timber footings, which the engineer calls his caissons. These caissons (they are really nothing more or less than great wooden boxes), are slowly sunk into the sand or soft rock under the tremendous weight of the many courses of masonry. They sink to solid rock—or something that closely approximates solid rock.

We are going down into one of the caissons that form the foothold of a single great pier of a modern railroad bridge; we are going to stand for a very few minutes under air-pressure with the “sand-hogs”—men whom we first came to know when we studied the boring of a tunnel. Air pressure spells danger. It takes a good nerve to work high up on the exposed steel frame of some growing bridge, but the bridge-builders have air and sunlight in which to pursue their hazardous work. The sand-hog has neither. He toils in a box down in the depths of the unknown, working with pick and shovel under artificial light and under a pressure that becomes all but intolerable. The knowledge that the most precious and vital of all man’s needs—fresh air—is controlled by another, and through delicate and intricate mechanism, cannot add to his peace of mind.

No wonder, then, that it is the highest paid of all merely manual work. The sand-hog working 50 feet below datum is paid $3.50 for an eight-hour day. But 50 feet is but the beginning to these human worms, who burrow deep into the earth. Below it they first begin to divide their day into two working periods. The air begins to count, and men with steel muscled arms must rest. As they approach 80 feet below datum—the engineers’ phrase for sea level,—they are working two periods each day of one hour and a half apiece, while their daily pay has risen to $4. There is your rough arithmetical law of sand-hogs. As your caisson goes down so does the length of your working-day decrease; inversely, their air pressures and the pay of the men increase. The cost? The cost leaps forward in geometrical progression. It is the owner’s turn to groan this time.

One hundred feet is the limit. At 100 feet the air pressure is more than 50 pounds to the square inch—three additional atmospheres—and the limit of human endurance is reached. The men work two shifts of forty minutes each as a daily portion and the law steps in to say that they must rest four hours between the shifts. They are paid $4.50 for that day’s work—which means something more than $4 an hour for the time that they are actually at work in the caisson.

You have expressed your interest in the sand-hog, given vent to a desire to go down into their underworld. You wonder what three pressures is going to feel like. Permission is given and a physician begins examining you. You cannot go into the caisson unless you are sound of heart and stout of body. This is no joking matter. The sand-hogs’ rules read like the training instructions for a college football team. No drink, regular hours, simple diet, the donning of heavy clothes after they leave the pressure, constant reëxamination—these rules are inflexible when the caissons go to far depths. By their observance the difficult foundation construction of this new bridge has been kept free from accident—there have been few cases of the “bends” brought to the specially constructed hospital in the bottom of the cavity.

The “bends” sounds complicated, and is, in reality, almost the simplest of human ailments in its diagnosis. A “bubble” of high pressure air works its way into the human structure while a man is in the caisson. When he comes out into the normal atmosphere the bubble is caught and remains. If it is caught near any vital organ that bubble is apt to spell death. Generally the bubbles are caught in the joints—frequently the elbow or the knee—where they cause excruciating pain. Then the specially constructed hospital crowded on the narrow platform formed by the top of the pier, comes into full play. Its sick room is incased in an air-tight cylinder. The man suffering from the “bends,” together with physicians and nurses, is put under a pressure that gradually increases until it reaches that of the caisson. After that it is a comparatively simple matter to relieve the bubble and bring the air in the hospital back to a normal pressure.

The path is clear for us to go down into the caisson. A party of sand-hogs, hot and exhausted after forty minutes of work within, come out of the little manhole at the top of the air-lock. We step through the little manhole and into a tiny steel bucket that rests within the air-lock there at the top of the shaft. A word of command—farewell to the bright blue sky overhead—the black manhole cover is replaced. It is suddenly very dark. A single faint incandescent gives a dim glow in the tiny place.

Concrete affords wonderful opportunities for the bridge-builders

The Lackawanna is building the largest concrete bridge in the world
across the Delaware River at Slateford, Pa.

The bridge-builder lays out an assemblying-yard for gathering together
the different parts of his new construction

The new Brandywine Viaduct of the Baltimore & Ohio, at Wilmington, Del.

You are not thinking of that. They are putting the pressure on. You can feel it. Your eardrums feel as if they would break; they vibrate. You must show your distress.

“Pinch your nose and swallow hard,” says the man who stands beside you in the bucket.

He stands so close to you that you can fairly feel the pulsation of his heart, but his voice sounds miles away. You swallow hard, the hardest you have ever swallowed, and you pinch your nose. You feel better. The far-away voice speaks again in your ear. “Three atmospheres,” is all it says. The caisson shaft is no place for extended conversation. You descend in an express elevator car; in that bucket you just drop. You have all the eerie sensations that a Coney Island “novelty ride” might give you. There is a row of dim incandescents all the way down the smooth side of the shaft, and when you look you forget that this is vertical traction and think of an uptown subway tube as you see it recede from the rear of an express. A final manhole, the gate at the foot of the shaft and you stop abruptly. It seems as if you had almost bumped against the under side of China.

“This is it,” says the far-away voice.

A timbered room, not larger than a parlor in a city flat and not near so high. A close and murky place, filled with a little company of men—shadowy humans of a real underworld there under the dull electric glow.

“They’re finding the footing for the shaft,” says the voice. “We’re on rock at last at 94 feet.”

When the footings are finished and the caisson’s edges have ceased to cut its path straight downward, that timbered construction will rest here far below the city for long ages. The sand-hogs will come out of their working chamber for the last time—it will be poured full of concrete, more solid than rock itself. The air pressure will be withdrawn—there is no longer mud or shifting sand for it to withhold. Then, section by section, the steel lining of the caisson shaft will be withdrawn, while concrete, tramped into place, makes the shaft a hidden monolith 100 feet or so in length. Upon the tops of all these monoliths a close grillage of steel beams will be laid; upon that grillage will be riveted the steel plates and columns of the bridge tower. The great structure is to have sure footing; these giant feet bind and clasp themselves throughout the years against the mighty river that has been conquered and humbled by the work of man.

“You should have been down in one of the boxes when they had to burn torches, before they got the electric light,” says one of the bridge engineers. “I worked in one of those that we left under a stone tower of the Brooklyn Bridge. Now we’re almost in clover. They even cool and dry the compressed air before we breathe it.”

An order goes aloft over an electric wire, the engineer who sits smoking his pipe on the sun-baked platform of the traveller derrick pulls a lever, and we go slipping up the shaft toward fresh air and freedom only a little less rapidly than we descended it. We do not reach it too quickly. There is a long wait in the air-lock after the lower manhole has closed, while the pressure is being reduced. You begin to worry and you ask your guide as to the delay. Nothing wrong?

He smiles at your timorous question and explains. It would be dangerous to come out from the caisson pressure quickly. He does not want to have to send you to that air-tight hospital with a bad case of the “bends.”

“How long in the air-lock?” you ask.

“Fifty minutes,” he answers.

Then he explains in more detail. You have been under a pressure of 50 pounds to the square inch—that’s your three atmospheres, and under the rules you must spend fifty minutes in the tiny air-lock. Up to a pressure of 36 pounds you must spend two minutes there for every three pounds of pressure. When you get above that “law of 36” it is a minute to the pound.

When that manhole cover overhead finally slides open you feel blinded by the light, even though the sun is hidden behind a passing cloud. The air-lock tender reaches down with his arms and gives you a lift up onto his narrow perch.

“Want to be a sand-hog?” he smiles.

“Not yet a while,” you answer, in all truth. “Not until every other job is gone.”