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[quote user="Modelcar"] <p><font size="4"></font></p><p><font size="4">....Believe some alignments were chosen on how much grade the operation could handle determined on what was being hauled on it.</font></p><p><font size="4">Coal haulers, {heavy loads}, especially needed grades acceptable to negotiate such grades and had to be built to allow these loads being hauled. Hence were built to accommodate the tonnage.</font></p><p> </p><p>[/quote]</p><p>First cost is <em>always</em> the first consideration for the engineer. Function is secondary. If the function desired by the client can't be obtained within the budget the client has available for design and construction, the project comes to nothing. One might think that operating cost is more important than first cost -- given the examples you cite of low ruling grade being the first consideration -- but since the only operating cost a client ever likes is ZERO, first cost inevitably is trimmed (and the grade stiffened) until the pain of the operating cost becomes too dear. The engineer's job is to find that balance.</p><p>Low grade is hardly the holy grail of railroad location. Many heavy-haul railroads accepted for the long-term some unpleasantly steep grades because the first cost to do otherwise out-weighed the long-term reduction in operating costs obtained by the low-grade alternative. Some classic examples are the DM&IR from Duluth to Proctor; the NYC exiting the Hudson River Valley westward at Albany, New York; SP Palmdale Cutoff and Los Angeles & Salt Lake on the western side of Cajon Pass (both engineered low-grade alternatives and rejected them for excessive first cost, and chose to emulate the Santa Fe or trackage rights on the Santa Fe, respectively). There are recent studies you might not be aware of where detailed engineering studies were made of mountain passes with high operating costs, that came to nothing because the reduction in operating costs wouldn't pay for the first costs.</p><p>Perhaps you're looking at railroad locations as conceived of purity and thus mistaking the chosen location as the <em>ideal </em>location. What you actually are seeing is the result of an economic comparison between first cost and operating costs, and what are generally long-forgotten are all of the engineering studies that came up with lower grade alignments too expensive to build, relative to the operating costs they would save. I doubt any locating engineer has ever had the luxury of realizing construction on the <em>best</em> location at any time in his career; there are always some better ones that cost too much to build.</p><p>A. M. Wellington, who codified railway location engineering, defined engineering as follows. "It would be well if engineering were less generally thought of, and even defined, as the art of constructing. In a certain important sense it is rather the art of <em>not constructing; </em>or to define it rudely but not inaptly, it is the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion." (my italics)</p><p>Wellington championed top-down engineering, and termed grades and curves "minor details of alignment," which they are -- the economic questions of location are vastly more important.</p><p>S. Hadid</p>
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