REBUILDING A RAILROAD
RECONSTRUCTION NECESSARY IN MANY CASES--OLD GRADES TOO HEAVY--CURVES
STRAIGHTENED--TUNNELS AVOIDED--THESE IMPROVEMENTS REQUIRED ESPECIALLY
BY FREIGHT LINES.
To the operating heads of the great railroad systems, rebuilding a line is
to-day a far more important problem than the building of new routes. The
country has grown--grown in wealth, among other things. The causes that
demanded the very greatest economy in the building of early railroad lines
no longer exist. The hill that the early engineer carefully rounded with
his line is now pierced without a second thought. Grades that were once
deemed slight are now classed as impossible. The almost infinite
development in the operation of the railroad has seen the grade or the
curve, not as a slight matter, but as a matter which, however slight in a
single instance, becomes in the course of constant operation a heavy
operating expense. To-day the operating folk of the big railroads are
counting the pennies where they countlessly multiply in these fashions; it
is one of the greatest factors in the grinding operation competition
between the great railroad systems of the country.
It is all quite as it should be. The early builders did the best that they
might do with the opportunities that were theirs. They got the railroad
through. It developed wealth for itself, as well as for the territory it
served; and with that wealth it is enabled in these piping days of peace
and plenty to correct the alignment errors of the early builders.
Moreover, there are frequent cases where the steady increase of traffic
has rendered it necessary for a railroad to parallel its trunks with new
lines, quite aside from the consideration of grade and curve.
As far back as the early fifties this great work of rebuilding the
trunk-line railroads was begun. Certain serious errors in the original
alignment of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad between Baltimore and the
Potomac River were corrected, even though at a considerable expense. As
time went on, other railroads continued this correction work. It is still
being prosecuted east and west of the Mississippi. Ten million dollars,
fifty million dollars, looks like a lot of money to the stockholders of
any company, when their president tells them that this is to be the cost
of this new relief line, this reconstruction, that cut-off; but what is
$1,000,000 when it is going to save more than $100,000 a year in the
operation of your railroad? It is the big sight of the big situation that
the railroads make nowadays at this reconstruction work.
Mr. Harriman, with his transcontinentals from the Mississippi watersheds
west, was almost the pioneer in this work of wholesale reconstruction. The
wholesale operating benefits that have resulted from it in the case of his
group of Pacifics have been largely responsible for his preëminence in the
railroad world. And yet, once his method was tried, it all seemed simpler
than A, B, C.
Take the case of the Lucin cut-off on his Southern Pacific. When the Union
Pacific was being pushed across the plains and threaded over the Rockies
and the Sierras, the Great Salt Lake of Utah lay directly in its path. The
railroad did the obvious thing and carefully made a detour around the
lake. When Mr. Harriman took over the Union Pacific, then in a state of
physical decadence, and linked it with his Southern Pacific, and surveyed
the situation carefully, he decreed that the Great Salt Lake should no
longer cause a trunk-line railroad to double in its path. He caused a line
to be surveyed direct across the marshy lake from Ogden to Lucin and when
that was done he had a line--on paper--103 miles long as against 147
miles by the old line. The engineer hesitated, but Harriman urged and they
courageously began the construction of miles and miles of embankment and
of trestle. Then new difficulties arose. Sink-holes developed. In a few
minutes structures that had been the work of long months silently
disappeared. The engineers in charge came to Harriman.
"It is not possible," they told him.
"You must carry it through whether it is possible or not," Harriman
replied.
Eventually they carried it through.
* * * * *
When it was done, the Union Pacific had not only shortened its
transcontinental line 44 miles, but it had eliminated more than 1,500 feet
of heavy grade and 3,919 degrees of curvature. An operating economy of
between $900,000 and $1,000,000 a year had been effected and the
stockholders of the company had a good investment for the $10,000,000 that
the Lucin cut-off had cost them.
Nor was that all on the Union Pacific. On other sections of its main line
similar reconstruction work has added to the economy of operation by
millions of dollars each year. For twenty miles west from Omaha, where the
old historic transcontinental formerly dipped south to avoid a series of
undulating hills, the new Lane cut-off cuts squarely across them--20 miles
of deep cuts and heavy fills--"heavy railroad," as the engineers like to
put it. And again, where the old line twisted and wound itself over the
Black Hills, and wobbled unsteadily through Wyoming, the reconstruction
engineers pressed their work.
[Illustration: WHERE HARRIMAN STRETCHED THE SOUTHERN PACIFIC IN A STRAIGHT
LINE ACROSS THE GREAT SALT LAKE]
[Illustration: LINE REVISION ON THE NEW YORK CENTRAL--TUNNELLING THROUGH
THE BASES OF THESE JUTTING PEAKS ALONG THE HUDSON RIVER DOES AWAY WITH
SHARP AND DANGEROUS CURVES]
[Illustration: IMPRESSIVE GRADE REVISION ON THE UNION PACIFIC IN THE BLACK
HILLS OF WYOMING. THE DISCARDED LINE MAY BE SEEN AT THE RIGHT]
It is not generally understood that the summit of the Union Pacific is in
the Black Hills, which are the first foothill range of the Rockies, rather
than in the mountain crest beyond. The Black Hills have always been a
baffling proposition, with their short, steep slopes. The engineers
wrinkled their brows at the thought of correcting the old line through
there, but Harriman simply said that they must, that the board--which
meant E. H. Harriman himself--had directed that 247 feet be cut from the
road's crest there; and 247 feet, almost to the inch, was cut. It took
giant fills and embankments and an army of men but the grades were brought
to a minimum for a Rocky Mountain stretch. Wooden trestles, old and
affording a constant fire-risk, were swallowed up in embankments; a single
slice through a hill-top, a quarter of a mile long and eighty feet deep,
did its part in reducing the grades; antiquated cars disappeared before
equipment of the modern class; dilapidated shanties were supplanted by
fine, permanent railroad stations. The new Union Pacific is a monument to
the reconstruction engineer--and to E. H. Harriman.
The Canadian Pacific Railway, while traversing but one small northeastern
corner of the United States, is essentially an American railroad, both in
equipment and in operation. It forms an important half of that all-British
Red Line encircling the globe, of which any Englishman is so very proud.
When the Canadian Pacific Railway was completing its last link in this
unbroken line of rails from St. John, N. B., and Montreal, to Vancouver,
the question of grades was indeed a secondary one. The vital thing was to
cut the line through, and to that end great sacrifices of grade efficiency
were made. So that when the line was through, and the first Imperial
Limited was making its way from the Atlantic to the Pacific over a single
railroad system, it was indeed a line with structural defects. At one
point--the famous Big Hill, near Field, Alta.--in order to overcome the
steep Rocky Mountain climbs, it was necessary to use from four to six
engines for comparatively light freight and passenger trains. And at that,
it was difficult to attain a speed of more than four or five miles an
hour.
Within the last three years, this fearful grade has been corrected by the
very first spiral tunnels ever built upon the American continent. Spiral
tunnel construction of this kind is not new. It has been used with
remarkable success by the railroads of Continental Europe, in piercing the
High-Alpine boundaries between France, Germany, Austria, and Italy.
Coming from the east on the Canadian Pacific Railway, the train first
enters the spiral tunnel--they call it the "corkscrew" out in
Alberta--under Cathedral Mountain. This first bore is some 3,200 feet in
length. Emerging from it, the train runs back east across the Kicking
Horse River, then enters the eastern spiral tunnel, and after describing
an elliptic curve, emerges, and again crosses the Kicking Horse westward.
This whole thing is a perfect maze--the railroad doubling back upon itself
twice, tunnelling under two mountains, and crossing the river twice in
order to cut down the grade. The work cost $1,500,000. The mere cost of
the explosives came to over $250,000. It was one of the really great
tunnel jobs of the world. Yet despite the complicated work caused by the
spiral shape of the tunnels, they met exactly. The worth of the thing to
the Canadian Pacific is shown in the fact that those same trains that
formerly required four to six engines, are now handled easily over this
Big-Hill grade with but two engines, and at a speed of about twenty-five
miles an hour.
Other railroads by the dozen, whose lines traverse mountainous or even
hilly country, are engaged in this proposition of lowering their grades.
F. D. Underwood, president of the Erie, and known as one of the ablest
operating heads in this country, has been engaged in cutting off some of
the heavy hill-climbs on that old-time route from the seaboard to the
lakes. Underwood has already seen Erie's hopes of success in developing
the property as essentially a freighter and for the immediate improvement
of that portion of its facilities he has built three new relief lines, a
small stretch near Chautauqua Lake in western New York, and then through
the upper Genesee Valley, the third and most important eastward from a
point near Port Jervis and piercing the summit of the Shawangunk
Mountains.
The line through the Genesee Valley extends from Hunts, on the Buffalo
division, about 20 miles west of Hornell, to Hinsdale on the main line,
and is 33 miles long. It cuts off a heavy grade between Hornell and
Hinsdale on the main line--a little over one per cent--for both east-bound
and west-bound freight. At that particular point, Erie's west-bound
freight approximates 75 per cent of the east-bound, and so the new line
recognizes that fact by establishing the west-bound maximum grade at 3-10
of one per cent, as against a maximum of 2-10 of one per cent in the other
direction. Brought to a plain understanding, a single locomotive has no
difficulty in handling 80 cars, each bearing 40 tons of coal, over this
new low-grade line. To take one-half that load over the old main line
required a pusher.
On the east end of the line, where Erie's engineers built their greatest
low-grade cut-off, the coal rolls down to the seaboard in such quantities
as to make the west-bound tonnage only a quarter of the east-bound; so the
reconstruction engineers were satisfied with a maximum west-bound grade at
6-10 of one per cent as against the maximum of 2-10 east-bound, in the
direction of the heavy traffic. The cut-off, which is double-tracked and
is 42-1/2 miles long, increases the distance from New York to Chicago 8
miles; but this is not an essential fact, for, like the Genesee Valley
Road it is built exclusively for freight service, and not only almost
triples the hauling capacity of a locomotive but actually permits of
faster running time for the freight trains between Jersey City and Port
Jervis. To build the cut-off required a really great expenditure, for like
all these new lines it was "heavy work," embracing a tunnel nearly a mile
long under the crest of the Shawangunk Ridge, and a steel trestle over the
Moodna Valley, 3,200 feet in length and 190 feet high. Still President
Underwood can contemplate his locomotives hauling three times their old
loads over it. The economy of such a proposition becomes apparent upon the
face of it.
The Baltimore & Ohio, the Southern, and the Norfolk & Western have
recently lowered their grades and straightened their curves in similar
fashion; the Lehigh Valley, by the erection of a great new bridge at
Towanda, Pa., has taken a bad link out of its main line; the Chicago &
Alton, when the engineers told it that it must abandon miles upon miles of
its main line (for long years its pride) and build anew, told those
engineers to go ahead. Stretch by stretch the old road was revamped to
meet in every way modern conditions. A steel bridge across the Missouri,
which was the first steel bridge built in America, and which cost
$500,000, was sent to the scrap-heap while the old-timers groaned. "That
which yesterday was a railroad marvel becomes a curiosity to-morrow,"
observes Frank H. Spearman, in speaking of this very thing.
The rebuilding of the Chicago & Alton was a clean-cut affair. The 70-pound
rails were torn from the main line and sent to sidings and branch lines in
favor of the 80-pound rails; for while men were tearing at the tracks, the
shops were working overtime; 55-ton freight engines that could haul 30
cars were to give way to 165-ton motive power, capable of picking up and
carrying a hundred cars with ease. That was why the old bridge had to go
in favor of one which cost an even million dollars. And when the Alton
built heavy new bridges at dozens of other points besides the Missouri, it
built them after the new fashion, with solid rock ballast floor, affording
additional comfort and safety to its patrons.
In a flat State like Illinois there were no very serious grade defects to
be corrected, but through the gentle undulations of rolling country the
line twisted and turned like a lazy brook. The rebuilders stopped that.
When they were done there was a single section of 40 miles, straight as
the arrow flies, and many tangents of from 15 to 29 miles. In some cases
when the trains were transferred to the completed line, the old, spindly,
wobbly affair could be seen for miles in roadbed, to the one side or the
other of the new. In some cases, this abandoned right-of-way was sold to
interurban electric railroads; in one particular case one of the abandoned
bridges was included in the sale.
* * * * *
The Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western is one of the old time Eastern Roads
that have waxed immensely prosperous with the years. Originally built as
an anthracite coal carrier from the Eastern Pennsylvania Mountains to the
seaboard, it has developed into a through freight and passenger carrier of
importance. The old-time engineer knew how to plan good railroads; the
Pennsylvania to-day is building its new low-grade freight line on the very
surveys made by its pioneer surveyors three-quarters of a century ago;
but, as we have already intimated, those railroads were financially weak.
Early annual reports of the Pennsylvania tell how its stock was peddled in
Philadelphia from house to house--up one street and down another--and how
sometimes two houses joined together to buy a single share. Money was not
plentiful in the middle of the last century.
So the Lackawanna engineers were compelled to build their road in
semi-mountainous districts, along the lines of least resistance, rather
than by the most direct routes. As it came east from Scranton over the
Pocono Mountains it found its way in a roundabout course to the middle of
Northern New Jersey. The road wound south and then wound north again, its
grades were steep, some of its curves were short, and it dipped through
two tunnels--one at Oxford Furnace, the other at Manunka Chunk.
To iron out those time-taking dips, the sharp curves, the grades, and the
tunnel, the Lackawanna cut-off--the "heaviest" bit of railroad in the
world--was begun three years ago. A new route 28-1/2 miles long was
surveyed diagonally across from Port Morris on the main line in New Jersey
to the main line again at the Delaware Water Gap. Despite the fact that it
must cross the watersheds diagonally--the watersheds formed by deep
valleys and high rocky ridges--the line as surveyed and built is only
three miles longer than an absolute air-line. It shortens the Lackawanna's
main stem from New York to Buffalo--already the shortest route between
these two cities--by 15 miles, and brings that busy lake port a trifle
within 400 miles from the seaboard.
To cross those watersheds at a sharp diagonal meant "heavy work"; and the
engineers, to run their straight-cut, low-grade line, found that they
would have to make tremendous cuts and fills--these last alone totalling
14,600,00 cubic yards. The Lackawanna's engineers will give you a faint
idea of the stupendous size of these embankments. To build them up of
stone and earth at the rate of a cartload a minute for each working-day of
the year would require 81 years for the job. To do it in less than three
years has meant the employment of whole trains of dump-cars, the purchase
of 600-acre farms for single borrow-pits, the energy and administration of
real engineers.
There have been cuts through solid rock, 65 bridges and culverts to be
wrought of concrete, a single embankment (at the Pequest River) three
miles in length, 110 feet high, and 300 feet wide at its base. The
traveller who rides over the completed double-track road will have but a
faint idea of the human labor and the human energy that have gone to
construct it.
* * * * *
The great railroad that traverses the State of Pennsylvania is another
monument to the engineer. The Pennsylvania Railroad was no wobbly affair
at any time. Its grades and curves, considering the character of the
country through which its trunk rests, are not excessive. It has been a
good standard railroad for a good many years past. But in 1902, the
Pennsylvania found that its troubles rested in the volume of traffic that
was being offered it. Over its middle division from Harrisburg to
Pittsburgh it was handling as much tonnage as J. J. Hill's entire Great
Northern system. The heavy tonnage business began to clog the road's fast
passenger traffic (its especial pride) and the fast freight traffic (the
mainstay of its shippers), and appeal was made to the reconstruction
engineers.
It was no slight appeal at that. Pittsburgh, handling 400,000 freight cars
a month, was clogged, congested with such streams as had never before
tried to crowd through that narrow neck of the Pennsylvania's bottle and
the orders that went forth for relief were emphatic. Vice-presidents,
general managers, superintendents and general superintendents, and
engineers of every sort crowded into the president's office in Broad
Street Station, and out of that conference the plans for an exclusively
low-grade freight line from New York to Pittsburgh and for the traffic
relief of Pittsburgh itself were born.
Every large city has become, in a sense, a bottle-neck for the important
railroads that pierce it. In some cases like Chicago or St. Louis or
Kansas City or Indianapolis, the situation has been solved by the creation
of belt-line freight railroads partly or entirely encircling the town. At
Buffalo, the New York Central lines have built a connecting line to enable
through traffic to escape the congestion of city yards and terminals,
while at New Haven, the road of the same name has recently spent several
million dollars in enlarging its narrow throat in the middle of the town.
But nowhere else did the situation approach that at Pittsburgh. Through
the Pennsylvania's passenger station there poured not only an abnormally
heavy passenger traffic, owing to a heavy suburban service, but every
pound of freight bound between the parent company and its two great
subsidiaries, the Panhandle and the Fort Wayne. There were further
complications right at the station, owing to the proximity of two of the
very worst grade-crossings in America, where Penn and Liberty Avenues
swept their busy tides of city traffic all day long over the Fort Wayne's
main line tracks. It was a problem that called for the best in engineering
skill--and received it.
The Pennsylvania dug deep into its pocket-book and solved the problem
magnificently. It began by going back to the vicinity of its great
Pitcairn freight-yards at the east of the city, and from them building two
connecting laterals (the one to the south and across the Monongahela River
to connect with the Panhandle tracks, the other to the north--known as the
Brilliant cut-off) across the Alleghany and connecting with the tracks of
the West Penn Railroad, which in turn connected with those of the Fort
Wayne in the one-time city of Allegheny. That sounds simple, but it was in
reality a fearfully expensive undertaking. The mile of Brilliant cut-off,
"heavy work" every inch of it, cost $5,500,000, and is to-day the most
expensive mile of railroad track in the world.
But the gripping hand was off the traffic throat of Pittsburgh and
commercial Pittsburgh breathed more easily once again. The Union Station
and its approach tracks were restored to passenger uses; and in the course
of things the Pennsylvania tore down the old station, built a new one, and
wiped out the two wicked city crossings, as with the stroke of an
Aladdin's hand.
So much for Pittsburgh. Now consider the great new freight line leading to
the east from there. Not all of that railroad has yet been built, but the
greater part of it is already completed, and every part of the old road
that was under tension because of freight congestion has already been
relieved.
To build this new double-track railroad across 350 miles of a mountainous
State, the engineers studied two points--grade and curvature. Distance
was no object, for speed is the very last attainment of heavy tonnage
movement. The new route consisted in part of the enlargement of the old
routes, and in part of the construction of brand new line. It started east
from Pittsburgh, where the great Brilliant cut-off had been built to
relieve the tremendous terminal freight congestion, and followed up the
valley of the Alleghany River on the route of the West Penn Road, a
Pennsylvania property. The main line of the Pennsylvania comes east from
Pittsburgh up the valley of the Monongahela for a distance, and then
across country to Blairsville Intersection, 50 miles east of Pittsburgh,
where it is intercepted by the low-grade freight route.
From Blairsville to Gallitzin, the road winds through the narrow and
forbidding Conemaugh Valley most of the way. It twists itself through the
slender defile of Packsaddle. A dozen years ago or more, when the
Pennsylvania's engineers were ordered to four-track the original
double-track through that narrow defile in God's great world, they shook
their heads dubiously; then--after the fashion of engineers--they went
ahead and did it. When the order came for two more tracks in the same
narrow pass, they placed them there, although they had literally to blast
out a shelf on the side of the fearfully steep mountainsides for the
low-grade line.
Just beyond Gallitzin, where the Pennsylvania pierces with two great
tunnels the very summit of the Alleghanies, the low-grade line takes its
own course once more, breaking farther and farther away from the main
line, and for long sections following the trail of the long-since
abandoned Portage Railroad. The day is coming when Gallitzin Tunnels are
to be left high in the air. The Pennsylvania's officers tell you that
frankly.
"We have plans for a six-mile tunnel, to be handled by electric
motive-power already made," said one of them, just the other day, "and
every year we wait, that tunnel grows longer, the approaching grades less
and less. It will cost money--money into millions of dollars--and it will
earn 10 per cent on the investment."
From Gallitzin, the low-grade line delves far south to Hollidaysburgh and
then follows the tracks of a former branch line up to Petersburg on the
main line, which it parallels to the Susquehanna. Where the main line
crosses the Susquehanna at Rockville, the low-grade freight route diverges
once again and follows the west bank of the river for a number of miles,
completely avoiding in that way Harrisburg and the steel-making towns to
the south of it with all of their conditions of congestion. The freight
route crosses the broad Susquehanna at Shock's Mills, eight miles north of
Columbia, and follows the east bank of the river for twenty miles to
Shenks Ferry, where it turns abruptly eastward through the rugged hills of
Lancaster County to a connection with the main line at Parkesburg. From
thence it follows the main line nearly all the way to Glen Loch, crossing
and re-crossing it but at all times retaining its nominal grades. At Glen
Loch it makes a wide detour around Philadelphia and its suburbs and
reaches with a long straight "short cut" over to the main line at
Morrisville near Trenton.
So much for the location of this great line of reconstruction. In grades
and in curvatures it has achieved real triumphs. The great tonnage here is
also always east-bound--coal and iron coming to the seaboard. Its grades
also are chiefly consequential then to the east-bound movement. To that
movement the heavy grades are again at the almost incredible figure of
3-10 of one per cent--some seventeen feet to the mile. That will mean more
when it is understood that that figure is equal to the pull that is
required of an engine to start a heavy freight train upon an absolutely
level track. With such a pull, grades become as nothing, and the
Pennsylvania's operating department is enabled to run 75 trains an hour
over this low-grade line; hour after hour upon a 15 minutes' interval.
Ask a Pennsylvania officer what he would do with such traffic on his old
main line to-day, and he will tell you that he would rather resign than
tackle the proposition. The same thing is true on the New York Central
lines. Like the Pennsylvania, that railroad thought a little time ago that
with its four tracks it might move all civilization. Its acquisition of
the bankrupt West Shore Railroad in the eighties gave it two extra tracks
across New York State that for a long time were carried on the company's
books as deadwood. Now they are filled with freight operation and bringing
in a healthy return to their owners. The growing land is always catching
up to its new railroad facilities, no matter how rapidly they may be
constructed.
To-morrow?
The railroad operator does not like to think of that. He meets to-day and
he plans as best he may against that to-morrow. To meet the great unknown
he bids the engineers--those who construct and those who reconstruct--to
him, and begs that they exercise their best wits to help him to see a
little way into the dim and shadowy future.