“Small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless engines”
Then the real survey-work begins. The engineers divide the line, if it is of any great length, and the several divisions prosecute their work simultaneously. Each surveying party consists of a front flag-man, who is a captain and commands a brigade of axe-men in their work of cutting away trees and bushes; the transit-man, who makes his record of distances and angles and commands his brigade of chain-men and flag-men; and the leveller, who studies contour all the while, and supervisors, rod-men and more axe-men. Topographers are carried, their big drawing boards being strapped with the camp equipment; and a good cook is a big detail not likely to be overlooked.
In soft and rolling country this is a form of camp life that turns back the scoffer: busy summer days and indolent summer nights around the camp-fire, pipes drawing well and plans being set for the morrow’s work. Another summer all this will be changed. The resistless path of the railroad will be stepped through here, the group of nodding pines will be gone, for a culvert will span the creek at this very point.
Sometimes the work of these parties becomes intense and dramatic. The chief, lowered into a deep and rocky river cañon, is making rough notes and sketches, following the character of the rock formation, and dreaming the great dreams that all great engineers, great architects, great creators must dream perforce. He is dreaming of the day when, a year or two hence, the railroad’s path shall have crowded itself into this impasse, and when the folk who dine luxuriously in the showy cars will fret because of the curve that spills their soup, and who never know of the man who was slipped down over a six-hundred-foot cliff in order that the railroad might find its way.
It is then that the surveying party begins to have its thrills. Perhaps to put that line through the cañon the party will have to descend the river in canoes. If the river be too rough, then there is the alternative of being lowered over the cliffsides. Talk of your dangers of Alpine climbing! The engineers who plan and build railroads through any mountainous country miss not a single one of them. Everywhere the lines must find a foothold. This is the proposition that admits of but one answer—solution. Sometimes the men who follow the chief in the deep river cañons, the men with heavy instruments to carry and to operate—transits, levels, and the like—must have lines of logs strung together for their precarious foothold as they work. Sometimes the foothold is lost; the rope that lowers the engineer down over the cliffside snaps, and the folk in the cheerful dining-room do not know of the graves that are dug beside the railroad’s resistless path.
It is all new and wonderful, blazing this path for civilization; sometimes it is even accidental. An engineer, baffled to find a crossing over the Rockies for a transcontinental route saw an eagle disappear through a cleft in the hills that his eye had not before detected. He followed the course of the eagle; to-day the rails of the transcontinental reach through that cleft, and the time-table shows it as Eagle Pass.
Possibly there are still alternative routes when the surveyers return in the fall and begin to make their finished drawings. Final choices must now be made, and land-maps that show the property that the railroad will have to acquire, prepared. The details, of infinite number, are being worked out with infinite care.
The great problem of all is the problem of grades; in a mountainous stretch of line this is almost the entire problem. Obviously a perfect stretch of railroad would be straight and without grades. The railroad that comes nearest that practically impossible standard comes nearest to perfection. But as it comes near this perfection, the cost of construction multiplies many times. Most new lines must feel their way carefully at the outset. Moreover it is not an impossible thing to reconstruct it after years of affluence—of which more in another chapter.