Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume III

FIRST AMERICAN TRANS-CONTINENTAL RAILROAD. 141 able to the contractor and engineer. The prin- ciples of railroading had still to be learned in large part. Now it is cost of Engineering; operation that is looked to. Handicaps. * , , , , , Grades must be kept down to the minimum and curvature eliminated if pos- sible, so that the heavy tonnage of the later- day train may be hauled at least expense. The steam shovel, the air drill, and dynamite make excavations and tunnelling far easier than they were forty years ago. If a hill or a mountain intervenes on the route selected, it is levelled or tunnelled, and the easy-grade line adhered to. In 1862 the means of effecting such work easily did not exist, and engineers were accustomed to avoid obstructions rather than fight them. They skirted hills and climbed over mountains to avoid high cost of construction. Though we may now regard the stretch between the Missouri and the Rockies as “ easy ” country, it was not so very easy when every yard of earth removed represented the work of a man with shovel and pick. A good deal of improvement was purposely left to the future, when traffic developments should justify the expense. By the year 1900 the traffic demanded that the present management should take the task of reconstruction in hand—of tearing up the old track and replacing it, of abandoning sections alto- gether, of tunnelling mountains to avoid curves and severe gradients, of replacing wooden bridges with steel. From a point on the main track in the west part of Omaha, known as the Summit, to Lane, a small station due west from the city, the direct distance is about twelve miles. The line taken originally by the railroad be- SUNSET AND OVERLAND LIMITED CROSSING SALT LAKE. [Photo, Southern Pacific Railway Company.)