THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. II.—NOVEMBER, 1858.—NO. XIII.
—-
Though our country can boast of no Watt, Brindley, Smeaton, Rennie, Telford, Brunel, Stephenson, or Fairbairn, and lacks such experimenters as Tredgold, Barlow, Hodgkinson, and Clark, yet we have our Evans and Fulton, our Whistler, Latrobe, Roebling, Haupt, Ellet, Adams, and Morris,—engineers who yield to none in professional skill, and whose work will bear comparison with the best of that of Great Britain or the Continent; and if America does not show a Thames Tunnel, a Conway or Menai Tubular Bridge, or a monster steamer, yet she has a railroad-bridge of eight hundred feet clear span, hung two hundred and fifty feet above one of the wildest rivers in the world,—locomotive engines climbing the Alleghanies at an ascent of five hundred feet per mile,—and twenty-five thousand miles of railroad, employing upwards of five thousand locomotives and eighty thousand cars, costing over a thousand millions of dollars, and transporting annually one hundred and thirty millions of passengers and thirty million tons of freight,—and all this in a manner peculiarly adapted to our country, both financially and mechanically.
In England the amount of money bears a high proportion to the amount of territory; in America the reverse is the case; and the engineers of the two countries quickly recognized the fact: for we find our railroads costing from thirty thousand to forty thousand dollars per mile,—while in England, to surmount much easier natural obstacles, the cost varies from seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars per mile.
The cost of railroad transport will probably never be so low as carriage by water,—that is, natural water-communication; because the river or or ocean is given
- ↑ Handbook of Railroad Construction, for the Use of American Engineers. By George L. Vose, Civil Engineer. Boston and Cambridge: James Munroe & Company. 1857.
- ↑ Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Reports, from 1830 to 1850. Benjamin H. Latrobe. Chief Engineer.
- ↑ Railways and their Management, being a Pamphlet written by James M. Whiton, Esq., late of the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad. 1856
- ↑ Report of the President, Treasurer, and General Superintendent of the New York and Erie Railroad Company to the Stockholders. March, 1856.
- ↑ Final Report of John A. Roebling, Civil Engineer on the Niagara Railway Suspension-Bridge. May, 1855.
