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Updated: May 11, 2025
The rails which they had taken up last they took off with them besides throwing out cross-ties upon the track occasionally hoping thereby the more surely to impede the pursuit; but all this was like tow to the touch of fire to the now thoroughly-aroused, excited, and eager pursuers.
Only about two weeks did we abide in the Old Capitol, the officers being transported to Johnson's Island, and the privates to other prisons. Our route was by Harrisburg, and as the train was leaving the city it jumped the track, jolting horribly on the cross-ties, but inflicting no serious injury.
Get right down to the facts; we're not cutting cross-ties in this court." The old man caught his breath, placed his fingers suddenly to his lips as if to choke back the forbidden words, and, in an apologetic voice, murmured: "I'm gettin' there's fast's I kin, sir, 'deed I am; I ain't hidin' nothin'." He wasn't. Anyone could see it in his face.
Instructed to keep an accurate record of all material used, the trackmen jocosely scattered more spikes than they drove, made fire-wood of the stock cross-ties, and were not above underpinning the section-houses with new dimension timbers. In countless other ways the waste was prodigious and often mysteriously unexplainable. The company supplies had a curious fashion of disappearing in transit.
I then learned that there was no bridge of any importance except the one at Baldwin, nine miles farther down, but as I was aware, from information recently received, that it was defended by three regiments and a battery, I concluded that I could best accomplish the purpose for which I had been detached crippling the road by tearing up the track, bending the rails, and burning the cross-ties.
From this point the chase was the most thrilling and reckless of which there is any record. Andrews resorted to his old trick of dropping cross-ties, but he soon saw that this would not do. Then he uncoupled one of his box cars. Captain Fuller picked it up, and pushed it ahead. Andrews uncoupled another. This was served the same way, and at Resaca the cars were run on a siding.
Colonel Poe had provided tools for ripping up the rails and twisting them when hot; but the best and easiest way is the one I have described, of heating the middle of the iron-rails on bonfires made of the cross-ties, and then winding them around a telegraph-pole or the trunk of some convenient sapling.
He listened to the grinding of the press, to the midnight noises about the public square, the town muttering in its sleep. "I am advancing" he mused, looking about him. "I was not content to skimp along in New England, nor to buy cross-ties, nor to singe the pin feathers off a chicken at night, nor to worry with the feeble machinery of a dull schoolboy's head.
That is because you haven't mulled over it as long as I have. In the first place, you have no curves to straighten and no cross-ties to relay our predecessors having set the good example of using standard length ties for their three-foot road. String your men out in gangs as far as they'll go, and swing the three-foot track, as a whole, ten inches out of center to the left.
How is this matter handled by rebates, I suppose?" "N-not exactly," was the hesitating denial. "That would be too risky for both of us. But the Transcontinental Company is a heavy buyer lumber and cross-ties and bridge timber, you know and the biggest part of the difference between our special and the regular rate is taken up in our bills for material furnished to the railroad."
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