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Stitching the Country Together: Railroad System Technology in 1632

Written by Iver P. Cooper

The American railroad system was, in the words of Jessamyn West, "a big iron needle stitching the country together." The "needle," I suppose, is the locomotive, but it doesn't accomplish much without the "thread"—the track.

In this article, I will be covering railroads in pre-RoF Grantville, the immediate post-RoF rail supply, route planning, track design and construction, rolling stock, and some safety issues.

 

Railroads in Pre-Ring of Fire Grantville

Canon does not specifically describe the rail network in the vicinity of Grantville. However, since Grantville is based on real-life Mannington, West Virginia, it is worth taking a look at Mannington's situation. In 2005, CSX owned a line which extends approximately 17.51 miles from Milepost BS 306.32 near Barrackville to Milepost 319.48 near Mannington. This line closely parallels Buffalo Creek. The right-of-way (ROW), which varies from 30 to 90 feet wide, was originally acquired in the 1850s by the Baltimore & Ohio (B&O) Railroad (which became part of first the Chessie System, and later, CSX). (It presumably is part of the original B&O main line out to Wheeling.) CSX also owns, in the same area, the 4.35-mile Dents Run Spur between Milepost BSB 0.00 and Milepost 4.35. I am not sure exactly how much of this track would be within the Ring of Fire, but certainly some of it is.

As of 2005, there were still rails, cross-ties, and ballast on the line, at least in some sections. We know this because CSX sought government approval to abandon the line and salvage that material. We don't know the weight of the rail, but for reasons explained later, I would guess it to be at least 100 pounds a yard on the part alongside Buffalo Creek, and at least seventy pounds a yard on the Dents Run spur.

The line also includes some old bridges, "built from 1904 to 1912. They are all steel/concrete or steel 'I' beam structures."

Barflies visiting Mannington have documented the existence of track serving various abandoned coal mines or lumber camps in the area. In the 1632 Dead Horses FAQ, their findings are summarized as follows:

* 45 narrow gauge rail cars were found in the ROF mostly in abandoned mines. There was a mix of 2 ft and 2.5 ft gauge as well as cars that could operate on either....

* 60 miles of 20lb track were found on lumber trails and in doghole mines—of this about 45 miles is serviceable.

A rail line went into Grantville for servicing the power station. So that track, as well as some rolling stock and even a kind of a small car workshop, came with us through the Ring of Fire. Regrettably, there was not even a single engine at this time in Grantville.

Besides the track, there is also a brick, ex-B&O railroad station in Mannington, built in 1896, and now used to house a business ( Arrowhead Resources LLC, 104 West Railroad St).

Rail Supply

The USE starts with both the old B&O standard track, and the narrow (2 or 2.5 foot) gauge lines servicing the lumberjacks and miners. Some of the latter is being used by Pitre's railway battalion. The story doesn't say anything about the rest of that track, but it seems reasonable to expect authors to follow the guidance of the FAQ, which says that "the unserviceable track . . . was turned over to USE Steel for recycling into bar rail."

The initial supply of steel rail is whatever salvaged up-time rail is not used to make armor for the four ironclads (Weber and Flint, 1634: The Baltic War, Chapter 52; only three were referred to in Weber, "In the Navy," Ring of Fire). We know that the navy is going to need "miles of track." How many? Until we have the specs of the ironclads—the thickness of the armor, whether it is just flank armor or also deck armor, and the length, height above water, and width of the ships—we cannot determine the quantities involved. However, that didn't stop me from making a crude estimate.

Eddie Cantrell at one point makes reference to the Benton and the Tennessee, as being bigger than what the USE Navy will be building.

The first CSS Tennessee would probably have displaced 800 tons like her sister ship CSS Arkansas. She was burnt before completion. The second was 1273 tons, 209 feet long with a 48 foot beam. She was captured in 1864 and became the USS Tennessee. Both were larger than the Benton.

The USS Benton was a 1033-ton Civil War ironclad, the largest in the western flotilla. It was 72 feet wide and 202 feet long. The sides were slanted, probably at a 45 degree angle, and bore armor 3.5 inches thick. The wheelhouse and stern had 2.5 inch thick iron. I am not sure of the height above water, but for the "city class" ironclads like USS St. Louis, it was twelve feet. If the stated beam is at the waterline, then each flank had 990 cu. ft. of armor, and the bow and stern each had 252 cu. ft. So we need around 2,500 cu. ft. to armor all four sides. (I am ignoring deck plating, if any.) One cubic foot of wrought iron weighs 480 pounds, so that is about 600 tons.

Is that a good estimate? By way of comparison, an 1862 Navy Department specification for an iron-clad steam battery, with a 465 foot water line, side plating mostly 4.25 inches thick, 1.5 inch deck plates, and two armored conning towers, said that the estimated weight of the armor was 691.6 tons. (Baxter, The Introduction of the Iron Clad Warship, Appendix B) Clearly, I am in the ballpark.

Steel weighs about 500 pounds per cubic foot. So, to get 2,500 cubic feet out of rails weighing 40 pounds a yard, we would need 31,250 yards (17.8 miles). For three such ironclads, we would need over 53 miles of 40 pound rail, which means over 26 miles of track.

However, the USE ironclads are designed to resist seventeenth century, not nineteenth century, cannon, and therefore probably carry thinner armor. Moreover, since they are designed to traverse rivers considerably shallower than the Mississippi, they are likely to be smaller, too. So their salvaged rails are likely to be quite a bit less than 26 miles of track.

Also, while we know that some of the rail is going to be used for the ironclad armor, canon does not insist that all of the armor be salvaged track. Some of it could be down-time iron, rather than up-time steel. The Civil War ironclads in fact used wrought iron armor.

John Zeek, one of the authors of the TacRAIL stories, stated on 1632 Slush Comments that TacRAIL used only 20 miles of the serviceable track, the other 25 miles worth having been turned over to the government. I would think it likely to have been used to make "strap rail" for the civilian railroad, rather than melted down.

Route Planning

It should be appreciated that it usually will not be possible to run the line on a straight, level path, except for short distances. If you encounter a hill, your choices will be to go over it (so the train must climb and then descend a grade), to curve around it, or to cut or tunnel through it. If you meet a river, you can cross it with a bridge (or a tunnel), or transfer the train cars (or their cargo) by ferry. An approach curve may allow a river to be crossed perpendicularly rather than obliquely.

In nineteenth-century America, where the railroad was penetrating thinly settled areas, it was not unusual to construct, at relatively little expense, a line with sharp curves and steep grades, and later, after the railroad had recouped its initial investment, reroute. New towns and businesses sprang up along the line. In Victorian Britain, on the other hand, the railroad tended to go to places where people, factories, and mines were already located, and it was easier to raise the money to finance expensive bridges, tunnels and the like. The USE of the 1630s is likely to take a middle course.

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Grade (Slope). Grade is expressed either as the change in height relative to horizontal distance (e.g., 1 in 10, or 10%), or as the degree of the slope (5.7 degrees being the slope of a 1 in 10 grade).

If you are going uphill, the locomotive has to overcome gravitational force as well as rolling friction. This grade resistance is roughly 20 pounds per ton of load, for every 1% of slope. (Armstrong, 20) If the locomotive isn't powerful enough to pull the entire train up a bill; it can double up, that is, take half the train up to the top, then head back down to retrieve the second half.

As it progresses, the locomotive is doing work, converting chemical energy into potential energy. To lift one ton a distance of 100 feet will cost 0.1 hp-hour (about 75 watt-hours). It doesn't matter if you lift it slowly or quickly, or up a gentle slope or a steep one. The energy bill is the same.

Lifting is costly, too. The energy needed to lift one ton by that distance might be enough to propel the train 10.5 miles, at 15 mph, on level track.

You will recover that energy when you go downhill if the slope is gentle enough so you can safely coast down. If you have to brake, to avoid losing control, then some of the energy is irrevocably lost.

You see the Catch-22 here. If you economize on road cutting by letting the track go up and down hills, you will need to pay the piper by building more powerful locomotives, or running shorter (lighter) trains.

In early nineteenth-century England, great care was taken to limit grades to a maximum of 1 in 330. This of course entailed a great capital investment in road bed construction. In America, economy of materials and cash was triumphant, and much steeper grades were deemed acceptable. (NOCK/L, 34). In 1911, at least in British practice, a grade of 1 in 400 was considered easy; 1 in 200, moderate; and 1 in 100, heavy.

On a normal railway, the maximum possible grade depends on the adhesion of smooth wheels to smooth rails, which in turn depends on climate, the adhesion being strongest when the rails are dry. According to EB11, the theoretical limit is around 1 in 16 to 1 in 20,and the practical one at that time was more like 1 in 22.5.

Steeper grades can be climbed by means of a rack railway, in which a cog wheel on the train engages a tooth rack on the rail. According to EB11, rack railways can have a gradient of 1 in 4 or even 1 in 2. If that isn't good enough, one must resort to a cable railway, in which the train is pulled up.

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In the U.S., about one-seventh of all track is on a curve. (Henry, 79) Curves force the train to reduce speed (so it doesn't derail), and also result in an effective increase in resistance. The sharper the curve, the greater the problems presented. (Armstrong, 26).

There are two ways of expressing the sharpness of a curve. First, you can calculate the angle through which the track turns in 100 feet, say, one degree. Or you can imagine the curve to be an arc of a hypothetical circle, and state the radius of that circle (for a 1 degree curve, it is 5,729 feet).

When you go around a curve, you experience a centrifugal force. The train wants to keep going straight, the tracks want it to turn. If the centrifugal force is too great, the train wins, and it leaves the tracks. Not good.

One engineering trick for dealing with this problem is called super-elevation; the outer rail is raised a few inches, tipping the train, and causing the combined effect of gravitational force and centrifugal force to keep the train on the track. Six inches of super-elevation is perfect if you are going 45 mph around a five degree curve.

Unfortunately, if you run slower trains on the same track, the wheel flanges bear down heavily on the inner rail, resulting in excessive wear. So the degree of super-elevation is usually a compromise on lines carrying both fast passenger trains and slow bulk freight.

Another remedy is to provide a check rail on the inner side of the inner rail. As the wheels try to slide horizontally outward, they meet the check rail.

A third solution is to "tweak" the shape of a railcar wheel. If you stand in front of a train (hopefully one which is stationary!), you will see that wheels are not perfect cylinders, they are slightly conical (standard "taper" is 1 in 20), with the narrowest diameter on the outside. As the train moves onto a curve, the wheels shift outward, so the outer wheel's diameter at the point of contact increases, and that of the inner wheel decreases. That corrects for the curve.

If these expedients are insufficient to compensate for the centrifugal force, the train must slow down. The speed on a fifteen degree curve might be half that on a five degree one, and one-quarter that on a mild one degree veer.

There is also extra friction involved when you take a train around a curve. For each one degree of curve, figure increased resistance of about 0.8 pounds for each ton of load. That means that a 25 degree curve has the same effect on resistance as a 1 in 10 grade. Consequently, route designers usually find it better to curve around hills, than to traverse them. On the Horseshoe Curve of the Pennsylvania R.R., which is a nine degree curve, the grade is 1.8%. If the track were laid straight, the grade would have been 8.5% (Henry, 56). The most extreme examples of trading curves for grades is on certain mountain railways, which climb a hill by a series of switchbacks.

What kind of curves might be expected on the USE's railroads? EB11 says that in Great Britain, a 15 degree curve (383 foot radius) is considered "very sharp, at least for main lines on the standard gauge." It is very sharp, indeed; you probably would encounter such a curve only in a mountain region, or to get onto an industrial siding. (Henry, 57). Clarke (8), discussing late nineteenth-century practice, says that on main lines, most curves are of at least 1,000 foot radius in Europe, and 300 foot radius in America.

Traversing curves has an energy cost. First of all, there is the increased friction. When the curves add up to a full circle, you have used up about 0.014 hp-hour per ton, the equivalent of lifting a ton a distance of fourteen feet. Moreover, curves increase the effective distance traveled, and work equals force times distance.

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Acceleration. To stop at a station, you must decelerate. Then, when you are ready to move again, you must accelerate until you reach "cruising speed." Likewise, if you slow down to negotiate a curve, you will pay a price when you speed up again. You need extra tractive force (above and beyond that needed to overcome the base train resistance) whenever you want to accelerate; as Newton said, Force equals mass times acceleration. According to EB11, the acceleration resistance equals the weight of the train, multiplied by the ratio of the desired acceleration to gravitational acceleration.

Acceleration also has an energy (fuel) cost. According to Armstrong (24), the energy needed to accelerate a stopped train up to 30 mph is what would be needed to get it to roll three miles at a constant 30 mph. Decelerating doesn't cost energy, but does result in brake wear.

Track Gauge

The track gauge is the distance between the inside edges of the two rails forming a single track. Wider gauges allow the railway to carry heavier loads (because it can use wider cars), but construction costs are higher, because everything must be scaled up: the weight of the rails, the length of the crossties, the width of the supporting bed. Narrow gauges not only reduce those costs, but also allow the track equipment to negotiate tighter curves.

In the twentieth century, gauges ran from one feet for certain industrial railways, up to nine feet for one of the Japanese funiculars. The so-called "standard" or Stephenson gauge is 4 ft. 8.5 in. Seven different gauges were in use in the United States in 1860.

It is very undesirable for there to be a mix of gauges within one country's rail lines. If gauges are mismatched, then, at the point where the gauge is "broken," passengers and freight must be unloaded from one train and reloaded on another. Or some other adjustment must be made, e.g., "cars with a sliding wheel base, hoists to lift cars from one wheel base to another, and, most commonly, a third rail." (Railroad.net)

On the other hand, a change of gauge at a national border makes it difficult for an invader to use the victim's tracks, at least until it captures the latter's rolling stock. The Finns deliberately used a different gauge than the Russians.

Since no other power has a railroad, the USE isn't going to be much concerned about the defensive value of a change of gauge. It seems pretty likely that the old timeline "standard gauge" will be standard for civilian railroads in the new timeline, too. See Weber, "In the Navy" (Ring of Fire).

Loading Gauge

The loading gauge is the maximum height and width of the rolling stock which can use the track, and is defined by bridge, roadcut and tunnel clearances and, in some cases, limited by the stations through which the tracks pass. Modern British railways under a restrictive limitation of 9'0" width and 12'11" height. In contrast, in America the rolling stock can be as wide as 10'10" and as high as 16'2". (NOCK/RE, 208-9).

The tradeoff, here, is that a permissive loading gauge results in greater construction costs for bridge and tunnel work, while a restrictive one forces the use of more cars to carry the same load. I suspect the American standard will prevail in the post-RoF USE.

Bear in mind that having a large loading gauge is ineffectual if the track gauge is narrow. If you run big cars on a narrow gauge, they may tip over when the train tries to negotiate a curve.

Monorail Systems

Thus far, we have assumed that each track uses two rails. However, some short rail lines are monorail. A monorail system has some real advantages. You only need have half as much rail, obviously. And you don't have to keep two rails level with each other, and at the correct separation.

So what's the catch? A train with only one line of wheels, riding on top of a single rail, would tip over, just as a riderless bicycle would if you let go of it. The stability problem has been "solved" in several ways, three of which are mentioned in EB11: you can suspend the train from an overhead rail, you can straddle the cars over a somewhat lower rail, or you can equip the cars with gyroscopic stabilizers.

Suspended monorails have found some acceptance in mountainous areas; a good example is the "floating railway" (1901–present) of the Wupper Valley. The longest suspended monorail in the world is presently the Chiba Urban Monorail (15.2 km)(Wikipedia).

The problem with a suspended monorail line is that you have provide a tall structure from which the train can hang. If that structure is made of iron, you will probably need more metal for it than you would for a second rail. If it's made of reinforced concrete, the ferrous demand will be less, but it's unclear that the savings in iron will justify the investment which must be made in concrete formulation and construction.

A supported quasi-monorail line, designed by Lartigue, operated from 1888 to 1924 (Listowel to Ballybunion, in Ireland, 9.5 miles), and, at its peak, carried 1,400 passengers a day and 10,000 tons of freight a year. ( MBI 114) Its supports were waist-high, A-shaped wooden trestles, with the main rail on top. I call it a quasi-monorail becuse there were two additional lower rails; the cars had unpowered guide wheels which rode upon them. Its construction cost was 30,000 pounds; the line ran 9.5 miles. It had to use a custom "Siamese Twin" locomotive and custom cars; these were divided, so they "hung" over the monorail, like panniers on a camel. This of course lowered their center of gravity.

Most modern monorail systems use cars which straddle a 2-3 foot wide reinforced concrete beam. (Wikipedia).

A full size (40 foot) prototype of a gyroscopically balanced monorail railcar was demonstrated in 1909–10. It never attracted sufficient investment interest to progress further.

Track Design

The Grantvillers have plenty of up-time track—complete with steel rails, cross-ties, and cross-bed—to study. So they know what they want to build. Let's take a closer look at the track components. . . .

Track Foundation

In early nineteenth-century Britain, and occasionally in America, the rails were fastened to square stone blocks, perhaps two feet to a side. These were cheap in England, and had the advantage that horses could walk freely between the rails, drawing the train forward. They were also durable. Unfortunately, they didn't have any resiliency, so the ride was harsh, the rail and the wheels were subject to heavy wear, and the jar tended to shift the stone blocks out of position, leading to a variation in the gauge. (NOCK/D, 7-9, 112; Mills 210).

Hence, the stone blocks were replaced with wooden sleepers. This was usually a transverse sleeper (crosstie), a support which laid perpendicular to the rails, with both rails fastened to each sleeper. (Mills).

In 1889, there were still 1,000 miles of longitudinal sleepers (each under and parallel to a rail) in use. Light crossties were used together with the longitudinal sleepers to maintain the gauge. (SciAm Fig. 8).

Wood was preferred because it was resilient, and therefore easier on the rolling stock. In America, where timber was cheap and widespread, this also led to lower construction costs.(Stover 32).

Sleepers normally have a rectangular cross-section. However, to save money, a railroad can use a "half-round" sleeper; essentially, a log split in half (Mills 211). In fact, for a pioneer railroad, one can cut down a tree, plane down the sections where the rail would lie, and otherwise leave the log intact.

According to EB11, the British sleepers typically have a length of nine feet, a width of ten inches, and a thickness of five inches. The most common American crossties are eight feet long, eight inches wide, and six or seven inches thick. However, the width and thickness can be adjusted to the intensity of the traffic.

The sleepers are usually placed two to three feet apart (measured center to center)(EB11). Henry, addressing 1940's practice, says that there are 3,000 ties/mile on the main lines, and 2,800 ties/mile on side tracks. (Henry 68).

Beam theory says that the maximum deflection between supports is proportional to the cube of the distance between them (Gordon, Structures, 382-3), so maintaining a spacing suitable for the expected loadings is important.

Sleepers deteriorate as a result of decay and abrasion. Baltic wood, impregnated with creosote preservative, will last twelve to eighteen years in America and only six or seven years untreated. I would expect similar performance in Europe. In the tropics, and in dry climates at high altitudes, creosote isn't particularly effective; the sleepers rot within three or four years. (Mills 213-4).

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The sleepers are most commonly made of wood, and in 1911, European railways had the wood pretreated to preserve it. EB11 suggests the use of three gallons of heated "dead oil of tar" (cresote) per sleeper. This is forced into the sleeper, which is also warmed. At that time, American railroads relied mostly on open air seasoning, but by the time of the RoF, they had changed their practice. Preservation treatment is most urgent if the rail is running through timberless country, as it is then less convenient to replace a defective sleeper.

The Boston and Lowell used solid granite longitudinal sleepers, and found that while they had a long life, they destroyed the rolling stock (Meyer 311; Bradlee 4).

Concrete and ferro-concrete sleepers have also been used, especially in twentieth-century Europe. Concrete doesn't burn or get devoured by termites like wood, or rust like iron or steel.

Because concrete is not resilient, like wood, you have to provide cushioning pads. Because of its deficiencies in tensile and bending strength, concrete ties need pre-tensioning and steel reinforcement. Since you can't spike concrete, you need to provide inserts to receive fasteners. (Armstrong 34). Concrete ties cannot easily be mixed with wooden ties because of the differences in mounting equipment.

In 1909, concrete sleepers cost 50% more than wooden ones, but offered twice the life expectancy. (CCE).

I doubt that concrete sleepers will be used on the initial USE tracks. However, once we are laying track in northern Germany and the Netherlands, where wood is scarce and expensive, concrete sleepers may be cost-effective.

Steel sleepers, introduced by 1875, are relatively lightweight, dimensionally accurate, and immune to biological attack, although of course they can corrode. You don't want to use steel sleepers if the tracks are running over salty soils! In 1884, they had an expected life of perhaps 35 years (Mais 50). But steel is going to be so valuable in the first post-RoF decade that I doubt that the railroads will use it for sleepers (as opposed to high traffic rails). Wrought iron or cast iron have also been used in place of steel. (Vernon-Harcourt 252ff).

Recycled plastic and rubber, or composite, sleepers have resiliency similar to that of wood but of course don't decay. These sleepers started to enter the market around 2004 and hence the up-timers will not be aware of them.

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The sleepers themselves rest on a layer of ballast, which is sloped to provide drainage. For a double tracked line, the width at the top is 25 feet in British practice (EB11), and greater in America. The materials used are earth, gravel, broken stone and the like, sorted so that the coarser materials are on the bottom. Ballast also fills the gaps between the sleepers. EB11 recommends a depth of six inches to one foot, or more.

Rails

Overview. The rails (stringers) have two purposes. The first is to provide a low-friction surface over which a load can be dragged with relatively small force. The second is to provide a guideway so that one vehicle can lead a train of followers.

The first rails were made of a single type of wood. These were replaced by a composite of a relatively inexpensive softwood, overlaid with a hardwood as the wearing surface. The hardwood, in turn, was replaced with iron, resulting in so called "capped" or "strapped" rail. (There were also experiments with putting iron on top of stone, but it was more expensive as well as more time-consuming to lay. See Dilts, 128, 136.) The wood-and-iron composite in turn gave way to all metal rails: the cast iron rail, the wrought iron rail, and finally the steel rail.

Steel rail is made in a rolling mill. Rough stock, usually in the form of a rod, is heated and then shaped by one or more rollers. EB11 has an article on "Rolling Mills."

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Quentin Underwood criticizes the present (early 1634) rail line to Halle, because it is merely capped (strap) rail. But it is important to understand just what the use of capped rail implies.

So far as being able to pull a rolling load is concerned, capped rail is just as good as modern rail. The rolling resistance (more on that later) is dependent just on the surfaces which are in contact, so just a little pull is necessary to move a big load.

The hidden price of strap rails is that they are not as strong as all-metal rails, and so there is a limit on the axle weight of the cars. That is important if you are transporting heavy bulk freight. Maintenance costs will be higher, because it will be necessary from time to time to refasten the metal strips to the wood. The metal wearing surfaces are thin, and hence are also likely to fail more quickly than a modern steel rail would under the same circumstances.

Canon doesn't say whether the rail surface on the Halle line is iron or steel. The strap rail used on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad in 1829 was wrought iron, 0.625 inches thick, 2.5 inches wide, and fifteen feet long, with a weight of fifteen pounds a yard. It was imported from England ($55-60/ton), since domestic production would have been almost twice as expensive. The total cost of laying the track was $4,000 a mile. (Stover, 32).

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The reason strap rails replaced wooden rails was not because they further reduced friction between rail and wheel, but because the older rails broke, wore away, or decayed too quickly. This changeover occurred even before the invention of the locomotive. Now, a curious fact—not likely to be known to the up-timers, but perhaps capable of rediscovery by someone like Dr. Gribbleflotz, who wouldn't know not to try to do it—is that it may ...