To The Yard, Except Through The Mountains, Where They
Are 70 Lbs.
Begun as pioneer works, they undergo, as traffic progresses, many
improvements.
Ballast is laid down. Iron or steel bridges are
substituted for timber. The gorges spanned by trestles are, one by one,
filled up, by the use of the steam digger to fill, and the ballast
plough to push out, the stuff from the flat bottomed wagons on each
side and through the interstices of, the trestles. Sometimes the timber
is left in; sometimes it is drawn out and used elsewhere. This trestle
bridge plan of expediting the completion, and cheapening the
construction, of new railways, wants more study, at home. Whenever
there are gorges and valleys to pass in a timbered country, the
facility they give of getting "through" is enormous. The Canadian
Pacific would not be open now, but for this facility.
All these lines across the Continent have very similar features. They
each have prairies to pass, with long straight lines and horizons which
seem ever vanishing and never reached; mountain ranges of vast
altitudes to cross, alkaline lands, hitherto uncultivable, hot sulphur
springs, prairie-dogs, gophyrs, and other animals not usually seen. The
buffalo has retired from the neighbourhood of these iron-roads and of
the "fire-wagons," as the Indians call the locomotives. Here and there
on all the prairies on all the lines, heaps of whitened bones, of
buffalo, elk, and stag, are piled up at stations, to be taken away for
agricultural purposes.
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