. The American railway; its construction, development, management, and appliances . given to the line. The Denver andRio Grande has been compared to an octopus. This is really acompliment to its engineers. It sucks nutriment from every placewhere nutriment is to be found. To do this it has been forced toclimb mountains, where it was thought locomotives could neverclimb. In one place, called the Royal Gorge, the difficulties ofblasting a road-bed into the side of the mountain were so great thatit was thought expedient to carry the track upon a bridge, andthis bridge was hung from two rafters, b
. The American railway; its construction, development, management, and appliances . given to the line. The Denver andRio Grande has been compared to an octopus. This is really acompliment to its engineers. It sucks nutriment from every placewhere nutriment is to be found. To do this it has been forced toclimb mountains, where it was thought locomotives could neverclimb. In one place, called the Royal Gorge, the difficulties ofblasting a road-bed into the side of the mountain were so great thatit was thought expedient to carry the track upon a bridge, andthis bridge was hung from two rafters, braced against the sides ofthe gorge. In surveying some parts of the lines the engineerswere suspended by ropes from the top of the mountains and madetheir measurements swinging in mid-air. The problem of location is different in an old-settled country,where the position of the towns as trade-centres has been fixed bynatural laws that cannot be overruled. In this case the best thingthe engineer can do is to get the easiest gradient possible consist- i8 THE BUILDING OF A Sections of Snow-sheds. ent with the topography of the country, and let the curves takecare of themselves ; always to strike the important towns, even ifthe line is made more crooked and longer thereby ; to so placethe line in these towns as to accommodate the public, andstill be able to buy plenty of land ; also to locatefor under or over, rather than grade crossings. In all countries, old and new, moun-tainous and level, the rule should be tokeep the level of track wellabove the surface of theground, in order to insuregood drainage and freedomfrom question of avoidance of obstruction by snow is a very seri-ous one upon the Rocky Mountain lines, and they could not beworked without the device of snow-sheds—another purely Ameri-can invention. Thereare said to be six milesof stanchly built snow-sheds on the Cana-dian Pacific and sixtymiles on the CentralPacific Railway. Thequantity of sn
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