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Binding the Land With Steel

Written by Kevin H. Evans

And behold, the messengers did create Granges and Factories, and plenty from there came forth. And the people again did cry out, "The bounty does not come forth from the messengers to feed our children."

Wherefore, the messengers were sent to create roads of iron. And thereafter, rails did span the land, and there was abundance for all.

Maybe this is how European historians will record it hundreds of years after our time frame. It will appear that the up-timers waved their magical wands, and the railroads were created. These abilities would be terrific, but the reality of creating a working railroad from scratch is much different.

Construction of a railroad, especially a railroad where almost all the work is done by hand, is an enormous undertaking. Such construction may be one of the largest projects that the down-time population has ever seen. The construction of the mighty Roman roads and cities, or the great cathedrals of Europe come close in the amount of manpower and effort required. Of all works that people create, railroads are among the largest.

Even a short line railroad typically includes a right-of-way, or path, that is some fifty feet wide and many hundreds of miles in length. The facilities required include stations, track maintenance facilities, the actual track, and large numbers of vehicles that are used to transport people and commodities over the route. The crews that build these railroads are really large. In the late 1800s the crew that built the transcontinental railroad from Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco was composed of over twenty thousand men. Construction required a little over five years, even with such large crews. The record for the amount of track laid in one day was only ten miles. Food, shelter, sanitation, and supply were major concerns.

While we will use the railroads constructed in North America as our source, we will primarily talk about the new timeline. Constructing a railroad falls into roughly ten major areas of concern, or tasks. These responsibilities will be divided over three crews.

In order of process, these tasks are: setting the standards, obtaining the right-of-way, financing, surveying the route, creating the road bed, laying down the ties, setting the rails, attaching the rails to the ties, ballasting the track, and all of the support services needed to keep everybody working.

The three crews actually involved in the construction are the survey crew, the grading crew, and the track-laying crew.

The first couple of the tasks mentioned have either been covered elsewhere, or are too complicated to go into for this article. The tasks of setting the standards and route selection have been covered by Iver P Cooper and Carsten Edelberger in Grantville Gazette, Volume Seven. In these articles, careful attention has been paid to just exactly what we need as standards, and where we need to build the railroads.

Obtaining the right-of-way has also been covered. We should note that in the 1632 universe, railroads are very new ideas. Nobles and landowners, farmers and local residents, city dwellers and itinerant workers will all be alternately frightened, concerned, fascinated, or misinformed on the real value of railroad. So before anything is done on building, securing the land to build on will be paramount.

Land ownership in Germany is a confusing issue, and obtaining the permanent right to base a facility on each little piece of land will be an enormous undertaking. So if you have a whole battery of lawyers that are currently in mothballs, negotiating right-of-way will soak up their services just fine, for quite a long period of time. Indeed, serious intervention by high levels of the government will probably be needed in order to obtain these rights-of-way.

Financing is another area that is mostly outside of the purview of this article, and will only be mentioned in passing. As with any large projects, financing the railroad will consume numbers of lawyers, governmental officials, private officials, and time. In the early days of railroads, most railroads were privately owned and built, but almost all of them had some form of government assistance. This assistance could be anything from the government granting tracts of land on which to build to direct financial assistance or even a substantial amount of money earmarked by the government so that the railroads would be built in their area. Something that you can absolutely depend on is that the financing of railroads will provide unusual opportunities for fraud, corruption and just downright weirdness. All these are inherent with such a large project with so many people involved.

The Survey Crew

Let's start with the survey. Surveying a right-of-way is the first step that people in general will see. A team, sometimes before the right-of-way is selected, sometimes after it is selected, goes out along the proposed route of the railway and defines precisely where the track will go. The surveyors are responsible for making sure that the track is level and that curves and inclines are as gradual as possible.

The surveyors are also responsible for making the railroad as inexpensive as possible. That means, if at all possible, you go around hills rather than through them. They also have to ensure that the railway will not be flooded out in the spring or completely blocked by winter snows or avalanches. Tunnels and cuts cost a lot of money. Bridges also add significantly to the final cost, but one should remember that in many cases, a bridge over a low spot or valley is still cheaper than a cut or a tunnel.

The surveyors need to take into consideration the general slope and lie of the land, predict where water flows in the spring rains, determine water flow and strength of rivers and streams, make a determination whether a short tunnel is more financially advantageous than a long loop of track around the hillside or mountain, and plan a route so future improvements can increase the profitability of the line. The surveyors and the job they do can make or break the future of a railroad. A mistake by your surveyor can take, literally, hundreds of years to correct.

This crew is not normally very large. Any number from one to twenty people is normal. Initial surveys are usually made by one or two people on horseback checking the proposed route. Detailed surveys, or the survey that will define precisely where the track is laid, are usually performed by a crew of eight to twenty, and involves the use of surveying instruments and extensive recordkeeping. The instrumentation, at a bare minimum will include compasses, maps, surveyors transits, surveying polls, measuring chains, very detailed ledgers and record books.

For our purposes we will set a surveying crew of eight, along with their equipment. A light wagon will be required for transport. Also, they will need either camping gear or sufficient funding to room and board with the locals in the area as they survey the right-of-way. The right-of-way survey must be exactly marked and recorded in the ledgers so that the construction road crew will know exactly where the road bed must be placed.

The Road Grading Crew

The next task, grading the road bed, is the first area we encounter very large numbers, often larger than any other task. In the early days of railroad construction in the new timeline, the crews will be small- to medium-sized. Instead of the thousands that were involved in the project in our timeline, we will probably have a crew that numbers in mere hundreds. The minimum crew and equipment should include scraper operators and their mule-driven scrapers, pick and shovel men, carpenters, blacksmiths, wagon masters, bridge builders, rock drillers, explosive experts, a portable saw mill, administrators and crew bosses, cooks and helpers, and a group to oversee and supervise field sanitation and behavior within the camp. And, of course, all the people will have their own equipment that will need to be transported from place to place as the railroad progresses.

By far the largest in number will be the manual laborers. A great deal of the earth will have to be moved. Scrapers and well-trained operators can do the finishing touches, but sometimes it just comes down to the man with the shovel.

The actual construction of the road involves removing the topsoil and putting in a solid base of ballast. Ballast is material that is firm and solid and does not have a tendency to move around. It also provides the road with excellent drainage. The roadbed should have the ability to let water pass through it, yet still firmly hold any materials in place so as to keep the track from moving around. Good ballast is usually made of broken stone, or gravel. Ballast can also be divided into a lower layer of large ballast, and an upper layer of finer, crushed ballast. The ballasted roadbed must be leveled and smooth, especially anywhere there is a stream or water is likely to run off during a rainstorm. The planning of the railway must include some form of drainage culverts or areas where the water can pass through.

Culverts can be made out of boxes that resemble large wooden tunnels. The larger culverts and bridges will be much more efficiently constructed out of wood, especially in the early years of the railway. Bridges will require a large amount of lumber. Supply officials can either provide their carpenters and bridge builders with lumber from local villages, or buy the rights to the timber and cut their own supply.

Sometimes there will be large obstacles that are too expensive to go around. Then the railroad must plan on cutting a tunnel. For this, you'll need stone drillers or miners, the explosives and experts that can handle the task with care, and the proper excavation site. Much of the excavated stone from tunnels and cuts can be transported and used as ballast and fill, or for constructing permanent buildings along the right of way.

There is a large amount of civil engineering involved in setting the roadway. Fortunately, we have examples of modern styles of road bed within the Grantville area. Many railroad hobbyists keep libraries about railroad subjects so that their models are as much like reality as possible. It is entirely possible that one or two books on the civil engineering aspects of creating a railroad came through the ring of fire.

To support this large crew, we have cooks, sanitation workers, administration people, and general roustabout workers. Some of the unskilled jobs, of course, can be done by the general laborers. But much of the work will involve specialization. All supplies for the grading crew will likely have to come in by wagon. Because of the large size of the crew, local housing in the form of tents will be preferred. Even in the seventeenth century, man-hours can be expensive. The company will want as much work for their money as they can get, so travel times to and from distant living areas would be discouraged.

So how big is this crew? My guess is that there will be six to eight scrapers and their operators, a sawmill crew, around thirty carpenters, three or four smiths, two to three hundred general laborers, ten to twelve wagons and their crews, two or three cooks and a staff of seven or eight scullery helpers, a camp captain and his assistant, and probably twenty people involved in field sanitation and other cleanup. Some of the tasks, such as sanitation or simplified cooking chores, can be performed by the general laborers on rotation from their normal duties. However, this still gives us a work crew that is between two hundred fifty and four hundred people. The size of the work crew will probably fluctuate wildly until the companies building railroads get a good feel for the job. Sometimes it is difficult to predict how many people they need in order to keep the roadbed ahead of the track laying group.

The Track Laying Crews

These individuals are divided up into several different teams. First, the tie-setters. This crew is responsible for bringing the treated wooden ties to front of the project, and aligning them down a previously prepared ballasted road bed. Getting the ties to the worksite will involve several wagons, cart drivers and supervisors, along with the unskilled labor for heavy lifting. Loading crews at the supply storage area in the camp will load large numbers of railroad ties on the wagons. These wagons will then hurry forward to the tie-laying crews, where the ties are thrown off the wagons as they roll along the side of the ballasted road. The actual tie-laying crew will grab ties, usually with two men to each tie. These men take the tie, set it on the roadbed, and align it to a survey chain held by two more members of the crew. By aligning one end of the ties to the survey chain, the course of the railroad can be kept in accord with the surveyed route. The tie crew will also include at least one surveyor whose job it is to keep the actual road aligned with the previous survey.

Once the ties are on the ground and aligned, the rails will need to be put in place. This is accomplished by the rail crew. Rails are loaded on the carts at the supply-side of the camp. These carts ride on railroad wheels and run on the track that has been previously laid. The carts are pulled forward to the end of the rails, usually by horses, where each rail crew awaits the cart. When the cart arrives the first man of each rail crew grabs the end of the rail and starts to pull. Whenever three or four more feet are free, another crew member grabs the rail.

The rails are carried forward and set on the ties at the end of the previously positioned rails on each side of the cart. After the rail is positioned on the ground, the rail crew returns for a new rail. When the rail cart is empty, it is flipped off the track to allow the next rail cart to proceed forward. Depending on the size of the crew, as many as four rail carts will be in use at any given time.

The rail next to the aligned end of the ties will be positioned an exact distance from the end of the ties. The previously aligned ties ensure that the rail is straight, nonetheless ...