Landmarks on the Iron Road: Two Centuries of North American Railroad Engineering (Railroads Past and Present)

Although railroad engineering began in England, railroad builders on this side of the Atlantic developed uniquely American ways suitable to the tasks of building a railroad system across the North American Continent. American civil engineers were unsurpassed in their ability to build railroads over great distances and across high mountain passes, to erect great bridges, or to bore tunnels of prodigious length. There is a remarkable story of the application of engineering to the building of a transportation system that civilised and settled America, and then supported an industrial revolution and created a world power. This is also the story of the development of the new profession of civil engineering in the 19th century. Our engineers were schooled at West Point, the technical schools in Europe, or technical institutes in America, while some were self taught: these early civil engineers soon acquired the skills needed for the construction of railroads that could be rapidly and economically built. Their innovation and daring developed the methods and machines to transform tunnelling from hand drilling to black powder blasting art to a modern technology of shields and tunnel-boring machines. The needs of the railroads changed bridge design from trial and error art to science, fathered modern structural engineering practices, and advanced the development of structural materials. This book, for the first time, calls adequate attention to the physical plant over which railroads operate - the roadbed, track, bridges, and tunnels, subjects that are often taken for granted. It is a book no rail fan or student of engineering can be without.

England and France may have been the birthplaces of the railroad, but America was its nursery and playground. The need to link the already far-flung territory of the United States in the early 19th century spurred significant advances in civil engineering, transportation historian William Middleton writes, especially in the design and construction of railroad bridges.

These spans needed to cross great rivers and deep canyons as well as bear weights unknown to earlier bridges. Bridges until that time were built much as they had been in Roman antiquity; to develop safe load-bearing bridges required much trial and error. It also required vision and experience, and Middleton's text is populated by a cast of brilliant, practical-minded men who figure little in standard histories of westward expansion but who were as important as any explorer or military leader in uniting the country. One such man was Wendel Bollman, a carpenter who developed a patented "suspension and trussed bridge" that was widely used along the Potomac, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers; another was J. E. Schwitzer, who adapted Swiss designs to the daunting conditions of the Rocky Mountains; still another was Theodore Dehone Judah, who built the first railroad along the tortuous California coast.

Middleton celebrates these and other bridge builders and their remarkable creations, many of which are still in use today. His text, illustrated with historic photographs and drawings, will be of much interest to railroad buffs. --Gregory McNamee