The most effective method for rendering a locomotive unfit for service was found to be the firing of a cannon ball through the boiler. Carriages and wagons which might otherwise be used by the enemy, and could not be conveniently carried off, were easily destroyed by fire. In one period of six months the Federals disposed of 400 in this way. Stations, water-tanks, sleepers, fuel and telegraph poles were also destroyed or rendered useless by fire or otherwise.
In the first year of the war—1861—the Confederates gave the Federals a foretaste of much that was to come by destroying forty-eight locomotives on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and making a complete wreck of 100 miles of the North Missouri Railroad track and everything thereon.
Much more serious than this, however, from a strategical point of view, was the wholesale destruction carried out by the Confederates, in April, 1862, on the Fredericksburg Railway, connecting Richmond and Washington, the immediate result of the mischief done being to prevent an impending combination between the Federal armies of the Potomac and the Rappahannock, neither of which could act without the other, while neither could join the other unless it could make use of rail communication. There was much that required to be done, for the Confederates had carried out their work in a most thorough-going fashion. Several indispensable railway bridges had been destroyed; three miles of track had been torn up, the rails being carried south and the sleepers burned; and wharves and buildings had been burned or wrecked. The whole transportation service, in fact, had been reduced to a state of chaos.
At the urgent request of the Secretary of War, the work of restoration was undertaken by Mr. Herman Haupt, a railway engineer who had already distinguished himself more especially as a builder of bridges, and was now to establish a further record as the pioneer of those Construction Corps of which so much was to be heard later on in connection with railways and war.
In carrying out the necessary repairs the only help which Haupt could obtain, at first, was that of soldiers detailed from the Federal ranks. Many of these men were entirely unaccustomed to physical labour; others were sickly, inefficient, or unwilling to undertake what they did not regard as a soldier's duties, while the Army officers sent in a fresh lot daily until Haupt's remonstrances led to their allotting certain men to form a "Construction Corps." Other difficulties which presented themselves included an insufficient supply of tools, occasional scarcity of food, and several days of wet weather; yet the work advanced so rapidly that the Akakeek bridge, a single span of 120 ft., at an elevation of 30 ft., was rebuilt in about fifteen working hours; the Potomac Creek bridge, 414 ft. long with an elevation of 82 ft. above the water, and requiring the use of as much roughly-hewn timber as would have extended a total length of six and a half miles, if put end to end, was completed in nine days;[5] and the three miles of track were relaid in three days, included in the work done in that time being the preparation of more than 3,000 sleepers from lumber cut down for the purpose in woods a mile and a half distant from the track. General McDowell subsequently said, concerning the Potomac bridge:—
When it is considered that in the campaigns of Napoleon trestle bridges of more than one story, even of moderate height, were regarded as impracticable, and that, too, for common military roads, it is not difficult to understand why distinguished Europeans should express surprise at so bold a specimen of American military engineering. It is a structure which ignores all rules and precedents of military science as laid down in the books. It is constructed chiefly of round sticks cut from the woods, and not even divested of bark; the legs of the trestles are braced with round poles. It is in four stories—three of trestle and one of crib work.
While constructed in so apparently primitive a fashion, the bridge was, General McDowell further said, carrying every day from ten to twenty heavy railway trains in both directions, and had withstood several severe freshets and storms without injury.
Thus early, therefore, in the more active phases of the Civil War, evidence was being afforded that, although the railways on which so much depended might be readily destroyed, they could, also, be rapidly restored; and subsequent experience was to offer proofs still more remarkable in support of this fact.