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 42½ 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 28½ 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.