Like most everybody else, I live in an area that had a lot of rail lines built 100+ years ago. I marvel at the thought that over a century before calculators and computers, railroad builers could build such long lasting track structures. This is especially true, when you consider that the train weights have increased over the last century. How did the engineers of old manage to be so …good(?), without modern day equipment?
Locally, I know of quite a few stone arch bridges made out of pink Sioux Quartzite, for example. How did the designer know how to build such a structure, that would still be used, under much heavier loading conditions, 125 or so years later?
Starrucca Viaduct, well over 1000’ long, is made of PA bluestone, IIRC, and was built about 1853. Of course, the Romans built some structures that still stand, but it still amazes me that they were able to construct such a structure with such tight tolerances, and as quickly as they did. And, with hand tools. It, too, is still in use, albeit with one track instead of two.
One explanation for the longevity of the early engineer’s work is that the technology has progressed, and the roadbeds they laid have benefitted from that advancement.
Some structures were horribly overbuilt, but others you seem to have forgotten about didn’t survive the first train. The narrow gage experience showed this plenty of times. The understanding of structures/statics and materials science + metalurgy had not yet been fully developed.
The track structure they laid is of course long, long gone, though I did some work in 2007 on a line still laid with its original 1903 60 lb. Minnequa rail. And some of the co-located splinter collections once called “ties” appeared to be original too.
Culverts and drainage structures such as you describe were not engineered with any knowledge or prediction of what loadings might be 100 years hence, nor were people at that time often even thinking there would be need for these structures that distant into the future. Their choices were limited to light-duty timber bridges using untreated low-quality timber that would be extremely expensive to maintain (with total replacement of every member on roughly a 3-5 year schedule), or stone-faced, rubble-filled structures that would be virtually maintenance-free – and the cost differential between the two was not enormous. Once a decision was made for stone, the cost differential between engineering and constructing for the minimum-possible stone structure and something that was bulletproof was virtually nil.
Constructability, particularly with stone structures and hand labor, favors “heavy” anyway. There is no good way to build it light.
You don’t need computers or even a pocket calculator to do 99% of the engineering we do today. You need common sense, experience, a pencil and paper, and good standards. The software is nice to have to do things like calculate earthwork quantities and size drainage openings. There is also software that purports to minimize earthwork and cut-and-fill quantities, and locate alignments, and you should see the wretched results they deliver! I once went to a demonstration by some very smart guys of how their software program could locate a rail line on virgin topography to minimize earthwork. The result didn’t have hardly a stick of tangent rail in five miles, and bobbed up and down like a rowboat in a hurricane. In other words, it was utterly i
That holds true in my industry as well. “They don’t build house like they used to.” The over-built ones are still standing strong. The under-built ones…fell down. Was the engineering of the late 19th century based on experience, or seat of the pants?
Starrucca Viaduct was opened in1848 for the Erie’s double track 6ft guage…
But the point made here are well taken…I have been driving between North Jersey to the Southern Tier of New York since April of 1961…there isn’t a highway, main road, or back road yielding a 2 and a half hour trip to 12 or more hours of driving that I havent’ done. And I am constantly amazed at the work of the engineers who built the railroads and canals up and over and through the Pocono Mountains back in the 1830’s and 40’s! Roebling’s feat of taking the D&H Canal across the Lackawaxen and Delaware Rivers and the bridges, viaducts, and tunnels of the Erie, Lehigh Valley, Lackawanna, CNJ and thier predecessors from 1830 well into the 20th Century are stunning even today.
There were some wonderful locating engineers in the 19th century, Tehachipi for example. But we must understand the conditions placed upon them by their bosses (money persons). Funds were short and the need to have 800 miles of RR built in XXX months was the major criteria. So the most economical construction was usually what was engineered and it could be fixed later if the RR was successful.
But the locations they chose were for the most part the best to get from A to B. The curviture and grades were where the money must be conserved. We who have later worked at bettering those situations can attest that they did a great job given the financial constraints and the limits of construction capabilities they faced. Also, the revenue which early RR’s needed to succeed was found from different sources than today, so you built where the revenue source was.
Remember that a location may be chosen because that was where water and timber could be ecomomically acquired. Or it was chosen because established local businesses gave money or property to have the RR come their way and the engineer did what his boss said to do, just as they do today.
I have great admiration for those early RR engineers. Other than relatively short " line changes" we are still using the locations they chose.
To pose another position; the early railroad construction IMHO was built in a race for expediency. To construct a railline; to go from point A to B, first, to prove it could be done, and secondly garner the rewards of more and better funding., To capturing the travelers, and freight between those two points. With labor back then as cheap, and somewhat available as it apparently was; with the loadings fairly light.
The requirements of the types of cars and locomotives, being fairly forgiving of the ‘fast and dirty’ laid track. The first idea was to make the mosr money and then improve the structure as traffic demanded, serviceability and not longevity was the apparent goal. Only after a line could prove its ability to earn for its company did the strengthening and overbuilding take place.
It seems to me that railroad size and speed development temporarily outpaced the adequacy of the track, bridges, and safety measures in the pioneering era, which resulted in a bewildering variety and quantity of accidents and failures. However, I would not attribute that to a deficiency in engineering ability. In reading the Railroad Gazette from that period, I am struck by just how engineering-intense the railroad industry was in that otherwise seemingly primitive era.
Lest we forget…Railroad Engineering, on both the Civil & Mechanical aspects was the Rocket Science and Brain Surgery of the day and attracted the best and brightest of the available people. That is not in any way to demean what those men accomplished with the materials they had to work with.
When you needed earth moved…hire 1000 Irishmen with picks and shovels, get 100 carts and 100 mules to move the carts any you had your state of the art Earthmover.
Drilling for your black powder explosive shots…hire 1000 Germans with sledge hammers and hand held star drill bits and you had your Jackleg drilling machines (if one of them was named Jack.)
The 19th Century engineering accomplishments are amazing when viewed from a 21st Century perspective.
There are a couple of stone culverts left from the original RR (Saint Paul & Eastern Grand Trunk, later part of the Milwaukee, Lake Shore & Western and finally the C&NW) grade through my hometown. Both were abandoned 60-70 years ago. One is at the bottom of a 20 foot embankment and the other is still in place for access between a couple of farm fields. At the time the line was constructed (1880-84, I believe) this was still pretty big lumber territory so they passed up a lot of readily available timber to quarry out the stonework. Oddly enough, a couple of larger bridges constructed later (1900-1906) were either timber (or timber approaches) until replaced with steel plate girders on concrete abutments.
I think expediency was a later developement than need. Need was the 1830 to 1850 era work, then came the expediency of “railroad fever” which finally petered out in the early 1900’s replaced by rededication to need because of higher traffic demands and heavier equipment. It was probably also geographical…need in the east at the beginning, expediencey through the midwest to the coast during expansion; but the second “need” era was universal. And like our CCC and Eisenhower Highway system, first roads were built based on limited knowledge of future size of equipment which lead to constant repair and rebuilding exercises.
Kevin: The large bridges you describe are a different case than the bridges about which Murphy posed his original question, which is what I was answering. Stone-faced arch bridges in the 1860-1910 period reached an upper practical economic limit as their size grew, usually once the bridge was more than two spans of 20’ feet each, or a total embankment height of 25-30 feet above stream bed. Beyond that size, either the cost of the embankment, or the cost of the stonework, both became prohibitive. The earthwork cost became prohibitive because as you know the width of the embankment increases at something like 4x the rate of the height. The travel distance to obtain all that earth with animal- or man-drawn scrapers becomes too far. Similarly with stone, once beyond about a 20’ height the cost to lift stone becomes very high because it reaches beyond a simple stiff-leg derrick powered by animal or man, and the quantity of stone exceeds what can be o
Your last sentence caught my attention. It’s conventional wisdom, it seems sensible, but unfortunately it’s not what happened. I would be fine if all we had done in this country is fail to anticipate the future. What we actually did is willfully screw up the future in the name of political ideology, and to grasp for short-term individual economic gain. I’m beginning to think that while in theory we all think democracy is a wonderful idea, in practice we are almost never able to make the wise, shared-sacrifice decisions that a democracy requires.
I know hardly anyone wants to take the time to click through and read links, or go into the details but, truly, the devil really does live in the details, and please read the link below. Why? Because there was no accidental or excusable failure to antipate the future in the Interstate Highway Act. Everyone involved knew precisely what would happen. The only people who imagined it would all work out in the future nicely were members of the public who think that as long as you have an ideology you believe in, the details will all fall in place. Instead, there was a cynical decision made by everyone in the know to build an Interstate Highway System that everyone knew would crumble, and an
I do not have the time to read the entire link right now, but I will do so. It’s interesting that the Bush and Gore families were political oponents in the 1950’s. I’m sure it will be very enlightening. I’m of the conviction that the Interstates should have been toll roads from the get go.
As to RWM’s doubts about democracy, Churchill provides a good quote. I’ll remember it as best I can.
“Democracy is a very bad form of government, but all the others are so much worse.”
Being from Illinois I know representative government isn’t pretty or efficient or even very honest. But there’s nothing better to replace it with.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike, now almost 70 years old was {and is}, financed by tolls. It seems to have been a very useful success as a system and thru updating the tolls to the need, they have updated the structure throughout it’s many years. Tolls now are roughly {for automobiles, don’t know about trucks}, 7 times what they were at it’s opening in Oct. 1940.
{Trivia RR data}…Route roughly follows the 1885 South Penn RR R of W that was never quite finished.