As the line goes forward, the track follows. The new railroad has probably popularized itself from the outset by hiring the near-by farmers and their teams to grade the line through their localities, particularly where an almost level country makes the grading a slight matter. Sometimes in level country, grading machines, drawn by horses, or by traction engines, have been used to advantage. These machines are equipped with ploughs which loosen the soil and place it on conveyor belts. Material can be deposited twenty-two feet away from the line, and a four-foot excavation can be made by these machines with ease.
But the laying of the track—the line having been finished at sub-grade with a top width of from 14 to 20 feet for each standard gauge track to be laid—the line begins to assume the appearance of a real railroad. Upon the first stretches of completed track, locomotives and cars employed in construction service begin to operate. As the track grows, their field of operation increases. Then comes the day when the track sections begin to be joined; the railroad is beginning to be a real pathway of steel.
To build this pathway is comparatively a simple matter, once the sub-grade is finished. A mile a day is not too much for any confident contractor to expect of his construction gangs. There was that time, back in ’69, when a world’s record of ten miles of track laid in a single day was established on the Central Pacific. For that mile of standard track the contractor will need 3,168 ties—eight carloads; 352 rails—five carloads; and a carload of angle irons, bolts, and spikes, as fasteners.
The track-layers are as proud of their profession as any man might be of his. Their skill is a wondrous thing. Two men who follow the wake of a wagon roughly place the ties as fast as they are dropped upon the right-of-way. Another man aligns them with a line that has been strung by one of the young engineers, a fourth with a notched board, marks the location of one rail. That rail—the line side—follows close to the location marks. It is roughly banded and lightly fastened in place. The other rail—the gauge side—quickly follows. The wonderfully accurate gauge representing the 4 feet, 8½ inches that is almost the standard of the work, and which is tested every morning by the engineers, is in constant use. The railroad track must be true; there is not room for even the variation of a fraction of an inch in the gauge of the two rails.
In fastening the two long lines of rails, the profession of track-laying rises to almost supreme heights. The men who fasten the rail with angle iron and a single roughly-adjusted bolt in each rail-end are head-strappers and past masters in their art. After them in due season come the back-strappers, finishing that fine work of solidly bolting the rail against the vast strain of a thousand-ton train being shot over it at lightning speed. And after the back-strappers and the men who have spiked the rail to the ties, comes the locomotive itself, bringing more ties, more rails, more angle-bars and bolts, and more spikes to the front. Then sometime later the road-bed is ballasted and the line made ready for heavy operation.
But track-laying is frequently machine systematized these days; and in this, as in so many smaller things, the mechanical device has supplanted the man. A real giant is the track-laying machine. It is mounted upon railroad tracks and is a form of overhead carrier with a tremendous overhang. The carrier is fed with the cross-ties from supply cars just back of the machine and the ties are dropped, each close to its appointed place, as a locomotive slowly pushes the entire apparatus forward. In a smaller way the heavy steel rails are delivered from under the overhang of the carrier. A gang of men make short work of the fastening of the rail to the cross-ties and the machine moves steadily forward. It has been known to make two miles a day at this work.
Culverts have been laid for each small run or kill or creek; the bridge-builders along the new line finish their work and cart off their kits; the day comes when there is an unbroken railroad from one end of the new line to the other. It links new rails and new towns; its localities produce for new markets, commerce from strange quarters pours down upon the land that has known it not. Passenger trains begin regular operation, the fresh-painted depots are brilliant in their newness, the shriek of the locomotive sounds where it has never before sounded.
Life is awakened. The railroad, which is life, has reached forth a new arm, and creation is begun.