



Produced by Cornell University




THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.


A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.



VOL. II.--NOVEMBER, 1858.--NO. XIII.




RAILWAY-ENGINEERING IN THE UNITED STATES.[1]

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