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Soon the tracks were laid, and the new bridge took up the work of the old, and then, piece by piece, the old suspension bridge, the first of its kind, was demolished and taken away. Over the Niagara gorge also was built one of the first cantilever bridges ever constructed.
There's Mellen, for instance; he's in Chihuahua building a cantilever bridge. He's the best steel man in the country. McKay, my superintendent, is running a railroad job in California. 'Happy Tom' Slater " "The funny man with the blues?" "Exactly! He was at work on a hydraulic project near Dawson the last I heard of him. Dr.
He hurried on to where, under the smaller traveller, the uncompleted south part of the central, or suspension, span poised dizzily in space, over-arching the abyss. Many yards of gap still yawned between its tip and the tip of the sections that strained out to meet it from the end of the north cantilever.
Wargrave marvelled at the engineering skill of the inhabitants who with rude and imperfect appliances had thrown cantilever bridges over the deep gorges of this mountainous southern zone.
Before they had gone a hundred feet every man in the crowd knew that at any moment the huge cantilever might crash down with them to certain destruction in the chasm, yet not one turned back. A short distance beyond the cantilever towers they came to the foremost of the on-shift steel workers, who had halted in their shoreward run when they saw that the outcoming party showed no sign of halting.
His gaze followed the bridge-service track past the cookhouse and bunkhouse and the storehouses, out across the completed shore span to the gigantic structure of the south cantilever. Far beyond, between its lofty skeleton towers and upsweeping side webs, appeared, in seemingly reduced proportions, the towers and webs of the north cantilever, across on the north edge of the channel of the strait.
Presently the three were passing the centre of the cantilever, between the gigantic towers, whose iron heels were socketed far below in the top-plates of the massive concrete piers, built on the very edge of deep water.
Here every chink and crevice was packed with snow and ice. But all the titanic steel structure above and the unfloored bottom-chords and girders of the outer, or extension, arm of the cantilever had been swept bare of snow by the winter gales and left glistening with the glaze of the last shower of sleet. Blake swung steadily along after the others, his face impassive.
The original plan had been to build this section on the cantilever principle, so as to gain independence of the river ice, but to do so would have meant slow work and much delay an expenditure of time which the terms of the option made impossible. Arrangements had been made, therefore, to lay it on false-work as the other spans had been laid, risking everything upon the weather.
"You remember, I was in your father's office for a year. That was before I succeeded with my plans for the Michamac cantilever bridge and went to take charge of the construction as resident engineer." "Your plans?" muttered Blake incredulously. "To be sure. I remember now," said Genevieve absently, and she turned to look about, with a perplexed uptilting of her arched brows.