In Maury Klein’s book Unfinished Business, he says this about the UP transcontinental line: “History has demolished the charge that they made the line longer than neccesary to garner more subsidary bonds from the government. When E.H .Harriman spent millions to improve the line, his engineers lopped only 30 miles off the original 1,032 miles to Ogden… The 2 major reductions came at points where the original survey had been altered over the engineer’s protests”.
Can anybody offer info about what those 2 major reductions were, and why the original surveys were altered?
Well, earlier today I happened to be reviewing a copy of Maj.Gen. Grenville M. Dodge’s book, How We Built the Union Pacific Railway, and Other Railway Paper and Addresses, Monarch Printing Co., 1870, for another post, so here’s a summary of what he had to say about this on pp. 43 - 44 [refer to the digitized scan of it as a ‘PDF’ file on Google Books at -
http://books.google.com/books?id=ij8uAAAAYAAJ&dq=dodge+"how+we+built+the+union+pacific"&source=gbs_navlinks_s
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From the Muddy Creek line out of Omaha as built by Consulting Engineer Silas Seymour, to the original Dey line, known as the Lane Cut-Off, which saved 11 miles in 14 miles - pp. 43 - 44 [elsewhere he says that Seymour’s alignment lengthened it by 9 miles or more in 13 miles - see pp. 13 - 14]. Seymour altered the line to purportedly reduce the grades, according to Dodge, but Dodge refutes that at pg. 13- 14, essentially saying that the grades were just as steep on the Seymour alignment, as I understand it. Accordingly, the ‘real’ reason for this change is not clear;
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Sherman Hill to the Laramie Plains, primarily to reduce the grade - no mileage reduction stated. See also pp. 31 - 32;
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Cooper Lake Line, changed from the original Laramie River to Rattlesnake Hill / Carbon Summit route, to Rock Creek and Medicine Bow River instead, back to near the original UP location, to save 20 miles. This change was apparently instigated by the contractors to save money by reducing the grading by about half, but against the protest of the division engineer and apparently witho
It would seem like the surveyer’s trade would be be more black & white than most others. If the old alignment was better than the new alignment, wouldn’t that have been easy to prove on the site?
The location engineer/ surveyor often got over-ruled by things outside his control. That easier grade often came with mitigating circumstances.
Some things never change: Grading/dirtwork contractors are still a squirrely bunch looking to squeeze every dime out of a client that they can.[;)]
Yes, the surveying (grades) and construction engineering (earthwork and construction costs, etc.) components are way more quantitative and objectively determinable, forseeable, and predictable, than almost any other aspect of the business. But what’s better, in what sense, and in what context ?
But this is just another go-round in the ages-old contest between the first or initial (construction) cost or capital investment vs. future operating costs. The surveying and engineering parts supply the first half of that equation only; the second half is largely subject to a whole range of uncontrollable variables, such as economies, markets, weather, other costs, competition, etc. So - as in the “location” thread - while the surveyor and engineer may justifiably take pride in their well-engineered line, business conditions and market forces may decide the costs of building that route was too expensive and forces the rates up too high to be competitive. Hence, these things are usually - and esp. for a “developmental railroad” such as this one - educated guesses and judgments that are made about what the future traffic levels, rates, and costs, etc. will be, and the best combination of them for the enterprise. In a nutshell, is it better to have lower interest charges from cheaper construction costs but higher operating costs, or maybe higher debt service costs but lower operating costs from the much better fixed plant ? To complicate it further, note that the construction / debt costs are pretty much “fixed” for each year, regardless of the amount of traffic, so the more traffic there is, the better, because there are more units to share those costs, hence each unit has less of a burden. However, more traffic drives up operating costs pretty much proportionately, although there may be economies of scale on a per-unit basis, but then they go through the roof when congestion and other diseconomies of scale k
Murphy,
Read the book Empire Express, I think the author is Bain but am not sure as my copy is packed in boxes at the moment.
My take is that Seymour was either incompetent or a tool of Dr. Durrant and the big loop near Omaha, later corrected by the Lane Cutoff, was probably a bit of chicanery. I also recall seeing photos of construction of a massive fill on the Lane cutoff, which implies that the initial route may have been a reasonable choice when it was made. The question really is; what was the lowest cost route at the time given the lower standards of the 1860’s. If the data exists, it is somewhere in Omaha.
Mac
Mr. North’s analysis should give us all pause. There are no simple answers. My Muddy friend and I worked for Santa Fe and we can recite all kinds of line change stories. Williams-Crookton for example, whose story needs not be repeated here.
A more classic 19th century Santa Fe story applies to its original main line across Kansas which was of course motivated by a land grant which terminated at the Colorado border. As its name implies, Santa Fe had as its objective (1860’s) the potential which had made the Santa Fe Trail to that namesake city a commercial success. There was a shortcut of the Santa Fe Trail which went southwest from near Dodge City, KS through what was to become the Oklahoma panhandle and on across NE New Mexico. This segment of the Trail avoided Raton Pass and was considerably shorter than the eventual line through La Junta toward the Raton Mountians. So why not build what was to become Santa Fe’s original Transcon on the shorter and easier location?
The principal economic reasons were: 1. there was little potential revenue on this route in 1872 and a new upstart railroad had to establish itself as a business; 2. Santa Fe’s competitors were building toward the Colorado mountains where precoius metals had been discovered and a much greater revenue potential was evident. The engineering reasons were there was little water, coal or timber to be found along this shorter and lower line, both of which were needed to sustain 1870’s operations, all of which were available on the line selected. Ironically, neither of these lines would compete in the 21st century as is evidenced by the current Transcon through Amarillo and the sale of the Raton Pass line south of Trinidad to the State of New Mexico. There is even more to this story but I think this much makes the point.