For these big jobs laborers’ camps will be established close to them; and small temporary railroads peopled with hordes of restless dummy-engines and forcing their narrow-gauged rails here and there and everywhere, will be busy for long weeks and months. There will not be much hand-cutting in the ledges. Steam shovels, mounted like locomotives upon the rails, and pushing forward all the while, will fairly eat out the hillside. One of these will catch up in a single dip of his giant arm more than a wagon load of soft earth or of rock that has been blasted apart for his coming.
To make the fills the engineers must often build rough wooden trestles out of the permanent level of the line. The dummy-engines, with their trails of dump-cars, coming from the back of the steam shovels in the cutting, or from the nearest borrow-pit, will hardly seem in a single day to make an appreciable effect upon the fill. But the days and weeks together count, and the dumping multiplies until the rough trestle has completely disappeared, and the railroad has a firm and permanent path across the edge of the dizzy embankment. And these embankments can be made truly dizzy. The passenger going west from Omaha on the new Lane cut-off of the Union Pacific finds his path for almost twenty miles through deep cuttings of the crests of the rolling Nebraska hills, across the edge of the long fills over wide valleys. The Lackawanna railroad building a great cut-off on its main line where it passes through New Jersey has just finished the largest railroad embankment ever built—an earthen structure for two tracks, three miles long and seventy-five to one hundred and ten feet in height.
Cutting a path for the railroad through the crest of the high hills
A giant fill—in the making
The finishing touches to the track
This machine can lay a mile of track a day