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.