I was reading something in a general history book that explained that the Great Northern was more succesful than it's rivals due to building their R.O.W. differently. The contention was, that GN was smart enough to recognize that blowing snow would be a problem in the winter. Therefore, they built their tracks on a higher roadbed, so as not to collect so much drifted snow . In contrast, the competitors, NP, CP,CN, & CMSTP (?) the book suggested, weren't as forseeing, and, I don't know- built their lines right down in the weeds, and spent all their money on snowlpows? Sometimes, I shake my head and wonder how much time, if any, a lot of writers put into bascic research on things. Wouldn't the railroad engineering practices of the late 1880's have been pretty much the same from company to company in a specific region?
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It gets pretty deep sometimes. Oh, you meant snow, didn't you?
Anyone that has access to the book, "The American Heritage History of Railroads in America" by Oliver Jensen can turn to pages 302-303. On those pages there is a picture captioned to be the Great Northern's main line in Minnesota. The tracks and roadbed don't seem to be any higher than any other railroad's right of way in similar circumstances.
While objects close to the right of way might cause drifts to form over the tracks, isn't the biggest problem spots places where cuts have been made through hill sides? Once some of them fill up, you're going to need more than a locomotive's plow to get through them.
Jeff
Not nearly enough time for me to go into all the detail this response deserves. Others will. But here's some simple feedback. Once you exclude the original GN and NP switchback routes up and over the top of the Cascades and compare the routes of all Northwest main lines as they existed from about 1900 on, it would seem GN didn't exactly cling to higher ground to keep itself out of snow. GN's second route over the Cascades, via the first Cascade Tunnel, still needed snowsheds to protect many miles of its track. Only after the avalanche at Wellington did GN lower its summit elevation using a much longer tunnel. And that route is still fraught with deep snow in winter. Over in Montana, the crossing of the Rockies at Marias Pass involved several large snowsheds on the east slope to guard against drifting snow, and numerous snowsheds (many of which still exist today) on the west slope to guard against avalanches. Short of an actual mile-to-mile comparison, I'd say the Milwaukee Road built on high ground, up on the slopes and ridgelines, nearly as much as GN did.
Murphy Siding In contrast, the competitors, NP, CP,CN, & CMSTP (?)
In contrast, the competitors, NP, CP,CN, & CMSTP (?)
Much like Medical professionals talk about the differences between symptoms and diseases, and how they can be confused, Engineering professionals would differentiate between practices and results. If you only look at results, you could assume that they were planned for, not simply the (un)intended result of practices.
It is important for a discussion like this about early RR building practices that CN in western Canada be separated into its' predecessors; Canadian Northern (CNoR) and Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP). In the period immediately before WWI a CPR executive did an assessment of his two main competitors and came up with what is generally considered the most succinct description of the differences. GTP is a company with a railroad, but no customers; and CNoR has customers, but no railroad. GTP has been described elsewhere on this forum as one of the better engineered railroads in NA, meanwhile CNoR was laying ties down on prairie grass to get to potential customers before anyone else could.
One famous dash by CNoR to get from just south of Stettler, AB over to a new mine with locomotive coal at Brazeau (now Nordegg, AB) is now one of CN's more productive lines with coal, sulphur and petrochemicals. When it came to customer service CNoR was clearly superior to GTP, but it was their respective failings that lead to their financial failures, and the formation of CN.
Before they were abandoned at the end of the last century, some of the former CNoR grain branches only ever received about one layer of ballast from CN, beyond what they were originally built with. And CN's Winnipeg-Edmonton mainline is almost entirely on the GTP route.
Dealing with snow was never a factor in the design, merely a fact of life.
Bruce
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. . . __ . ______
1) They were all governed by the basic civil/ construction engineering principle of closely 'balancing' the volumes/ quantities of earth removed from cuts (excavations) with that needed for fills (embankments), with due consideration for unsuitable materials, etc.
2) An local imbalance could be tolerated over a 'short' distance - such as near a tunnel or major cut or valley crossing, etc, but not for long distances (just like your wallet or checking account). No one was going to move a million cubic yards of earth for 100 miles - nor even 1,000 CY for a mile - if they didn't have to for some good reason.
3) The development and introduction of powered earth-moving equipment and the date of each line's construction and later improvement had a lot to do with the resulting cross-section. Early railroads had small, tight, steep slopes because manual labor and horse-drawn carts were too expensive to do more extensive work. Today, side slopes of as much as 4 units horizontal to 1 unit vertical (a 25% slope) are preferred to allow the snow to blow out of a cut, such as on the Powder River Basin line.
4) Likewise, the engineering practices evolved as experience was gained in those conditions. For example, one famous locating engineer of the time, Edward Gillette, came to advocate locating a line on the northern side of a valley (= exposed to the sun) as much as possible to facilitate melting of snow that way.
5) Finally, available finances also governed the construction quality - later railroads and later lines are usually built better than the earlier ones.
I'd be skeptical of that claim without a detailed study of cross-sectional area by mileage for each railroad in parallel or similar conditions, and then seeing how the factors I've listed above might have affected their construction standards. I suspect 3), 4), and 5) above had more to do with that result than any 'revealed wisdom' on this that was uniquely held by the GN.
I'm very much interested in seeing the mudchicken's comments on this assertion as well.
- Paul North.
Paul as usual has provided analysis that is capsulized in a manner that makes it easy to understand and further elaborate upon.
It is my judgment that his items 1. 2. and 5 were predominate in railroad construction prior to the 20th century with perhaps item 5. being the most dominate. Later short line changes were made to aleviate the worst 'early mistakes'.
As the need for greater speed and stronger track structure became evident even more line changes were made. Spiralized curves and stronger bridges were needed. Larger bridge openings became necessary as experience with watershed runoff was accumulated. The art or science for determinating the size of the opening continues to evolve.
It was not until after WW II that the concept of minimalizing slack action was considered when new lines were constructed. The 44 mile Santa Fe Transcon line change between Williams and Crookton Arizona was built with 31 miles of continuous 1% grade that the transitioned into an opposing 0.88% grade with a 10,000 foot vertical curve. Curviture no greater than one degree was mandated in this mountainous terrain. The same concept was used on the Santa Fe Phoenix Sub line change with 36 miles having only one vertical curve at its summit.
Engineering, as it is defined to do, continues evolving and wisdom acquired for more than a century and a half has now diminished the application of Paul's item 5.
Vertical curve? Can you expain that?
I'm no engineer but it probably means the transition from level to a grade or from upgrade to downgrade at the crest of a hill.
Perhaps some will choose another explanation but when I explain to my grandchildren what they see when a public road transitions from one grade to another is:
A parabolic curve that may be designed in to fit the conditions desired. Sight distance being one for example where the engineer lengthens the parabolic curve to allow drivers to 'see further over the hill'. That is accomplished by a 'rate of change per 100 feet' from one grade to the other being made with a longer transition..
Example for the 10,000 foot railroad curve mentioned: 1% plus 0.88% = 1.88 divided by 100 lengths of 100 feet gives a change of grade per 100 feet of .0188.
Maybe I'm mis-reading the orig poster's intention, but I "think" he's refering to a deeper ballast section on thier track than other lines. Most of the comments so far, seem to be directed at the sub-ballast section.
Not having walked or surveyed any ex GN or NP lines, I will blindly offer one other explaination for consideration. If the track followed a creek or river for any distance, they may have raised the track via deeper ballast or more robust sub-ballast to keep the rails above flood stage for the nearby waterway.
Murphy,
Paul's post nicely summarizes basic railroad construction.
Your question has to do with blowing snow and creation of drifts. In my experience in Eastern Washington, which once in a while gets the kind of winds that hit the northern prairies, drifts form behind anything that slows the wind. In a railroad context that means drifts form prefferentially in cuts. The only way to discourage drifting, given a depth of cut, is to flatten the slopes so the snow stays in the air rather than dropping out to form a drift.
I suspect all lines were originally built with narrow cuts and at the angle of repose of the material. Even dirt will stand at 1:1 if you are willing to clean the ditches reasonably regularly. It may be that the GN, to minimize dirt washing into the ditches, and thus ditch cleaning AND to encourage snow to blow on by, flattened the slopes in their cuts either more systematically, or to a higher standard, that is to flatter slopes than did other carriers. This is a classic trade off of capital investment versus operating cost. In fact the slope flattening was probably charged to operating expense and would have been a wise program.
I doubt the accuracy of the author's claim as you recounted it.
Mac McCulloch
Building the railroad (or highway) on a raised embankment indeed helps snow blow across rather than accumulate on the tracks. To build that embankment means moving fill from somewhere else, hopefully nearby, and that requires time, money, and man or machine (or horse) power. For many roads the urgent need was to get rails laid down and producing some income to stave off bankruptcy. Scrape a bit of earth from beside the centerline to form a rudimentary ditch and a slightly raised roadbed and that was enough to get going. Upgrading the roadbed could follow later as business and traffic justified the expense.
If your financial backers had deep pockets, of course, you could afford the higher construction costs and the extra year of little or no business until the line was complete. Few had that luxury.
John
GN was generally built to a pretty high standard. Their pass over the Rockies and Cascades was lower than competitors. Their grades on the iron ore lines in Minnesota were generally level or downhill, allowing them to run trains 100 cars longer and 10000 tons heavier than neighboring Missabe. I'm sure other examples exist.
They also happened to sit on some traffic bonanzas like the Mesaba Iron Range in Minnesota and a few other industries out west that their competitors didn't have access to, so they were always pretty prosperous compared to NP and Milwaukee. This translated into money for improvements that the others sometimes lacked.
Snowfall was a nuisance, but not a game changer. They could however afford to do things like widen out troublesome cuts in North Dakota and Montana. NP and Milwaukee were less able to afford this.
All my humble opinions, let the GN vs. NP flame wars begin!
Murphy Siding I was reading something in a general history book that explained that the Great Northern was more succesful than it's rivals due to building their R.O.W. differently. The contention was, that GN was smart enough to recognize that blowing snow would be a problem in the winter. Therefore, they built their tracks on a higher roadbed, so as not to collect so much drifted snow . In contrast, the competitors, NP, CP,CN, & CMSTP (?) the book suggested, weren't as forseeing, and, I don't know- built their lines right down in the weeds, and spent all their money on snowlpows? Sometimes, I shake my head and wonder how much time, if any, a lot of writers put into bascic research on things. Wouldn't the railroad engineering practices of the late 1880's have been pretty much the same from company to company in a specific region?
Murphy, have you ever seen the old Milwaukee Road between Summit and Webster that is BNSF now? WAY up in the air in a lot of places. The GN line from Watertown to Huron is on the ground. I remember a winter in the 1970s where it blew in so hard around Bancroft that when the tried to plow it the plow derailed and they decided to wait until spring.
I imagine every stretch of rail was different..
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Redore,
While Jim Hill was rightly famous for building new lines with the lowest reasonably possible grades, and for regrading parts of the Manitoba to lower grades in Minnesota, I would not cite the Cascade Mountains as a case of extra ordinary high standards.
The first line over the top of Stevens Pass went over the top at an elevation of about 4,000 feet. It featured switchbacks on both sides and had a capacity of about 60 cars per day in good weather. This line was in service from January 1893 through December of 1900, say eight full years. The NP also had a switchback line. Some of it was a bit steeper but it was shorter in miles and much shorter lived time wise, only a couple of years.
The GN tunnel had a stiff ascending grade eastward. The natural air flow was west to east. These two facts often combined to create a situation in which the locomotive crews of eastward trains made the entire trip in the cloud of their own exhaust gasses. Cases of loosing conciousness were common and fatalities happened every year. The 1910 electrification made the tunnel safe from exhaust gasses, at a cost of over $100 million in todays money.
The NP tunnel included the self inflicted wound of having the summit inside the tunnel. This tended to trap the exhaust gasses near the summit. About 1912 the NP put in a steam driven fan system to flush out the tunnel.
The GN was on a steep side hill for the entire distance from Scenic to Wellington, about 10 miles. Slides were a constant problem and more and better snowsheds were built every year. The Wellington slide of 1910 killed about 96 employees and passengers. The NP had nothing comparable to this. The only snowsheds on the NP were at tunnel portals.
Not until the new Cascade Tunnel of 1929 did the GN get a comparable summit elevation to the NP, virtually idendical, in fact. With the new tunnel the GN finally got aproach grades of 2.2% of comparable length to the NP, but I think the NP held the advantage here as well.
The Stampede Tunnel clearances began to be a problem by the 1930's as the NP could not run its big articulated locomotives through the tunnel. By the 1960's tall cars like auto racks could not fit throuh Stampede, and of course double stack containers will not fit either. The GN tunnels, all built or expanded ca 1928 for the electrification could handle auto racks no problem after the wires camedown in 1956. When double stacks came along the tunnels were crown cut to accommodate them.
I grew up in Wenatchee WA, and GN vet, and have rode both lines in passenger trains and loco cabs.
rrnut282 Maybe I'm mis-reading the orig poster's intention, but I "think" he's refering to a deeper ballast section on thier track than other lines. Most of the comments so far, seem to be directed at the sub-ballast section. Not having walked or surveyed any ex GN or NP lines, I will blindly offer one other explaination for consideration. If the track followed a creek or river for any distance, they may have raised the track via deeper ballast or more robust sub-ballast to keep the rails above flood stage for the nearby waterway.
ButchKnouse Murphy, have you ever seen the old Milwaukee Road between Summit and Webster that is BNSF now? WAY up in the air in a lot of places. The GN line from Watertown to Huron is on the ground. I remember a winter in the 1970s where it blew in so hard around Bancroft that when the tried to plow it the plow derailed and they decided to wait until spring. I imagine every stretch of rail was different..
It was of course their Minneapolis to Seattle main line. Back in the heyday of RRs their was lots of traffic on it.
How fast do the trains go up there? The DM&E goes through here at 40, and I see them west of Wolsey running 50.
But when I go up north, the trains look like they're flying low.
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