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Updated: May 13, 2025
Beside it lies a long lagoon, an abandoned portion of the Pennsylvania Canal. Beside this again, as though some monster had passed leaving a track clear of trees, stretches the right of way of the first "Pennsylvania," and a little nearer swings the magnificent double-tracked bed of the railroad of today.
At this point the trunk line resolved itself from four tracks into two, and here the gravel track, which looked as if it had been laid by a palsied contractor, left the main line and respectability behind, and hobbled out of sight behind the signal station with an intoxicated air. Beneath the tower, to the right hand, a double-tracked branch tapped a fertile country beyond the sand hills.
The Vanderbilt lines, which today with their controlled and affiliated systems comprise more than 13,000 miles of railroad a large portion of which is double-tracked, no mean amount being laid with third and fourth tracks is the outgrowth of a little seventeen-mile line, first chartered in 1826, and finished for traffic in 1831.
The P.R.R., you will recall, has been operating across the Isthmus since 1855. When the United States took over the Zone in 1904 it built a new double-tracked line of five-foot gauge for nearly the whole forty-seven miles. Much of this, however, runs through territory soon to be covered by Gatun Lake, nearly all the rest of it is on the wrong side of the canal.
But the drivers were an unruly set, paid no attention to turnouts, and would meet face to face on the track, just as if no turnouts existed. A fight or a block was sure to follow, and somebody was forced to go back. To avoid this, the road was double-tracked in 1834, when, for the first time, two locomotives dragging long trains of cars ran over the line from Lancaster to Philadelphia.
She was a Holstein, I think, though we could not see if she was black or red it was so dark, we could only see the white markings. We were sorry to leave her. She was another of the bright spots in my memory of Germany. We crossed a railroad, a double-tracked one with rock ballast, which my map showed to be a line which runs to Bremen, and a little later we came to the Weser.
The Union Pacific Railroad, now a double-tracked, transcontinental highway, laid with ninety and one hundred pound steel rails, and ballasted with disintegrated granite, a model of railroad construction, equipment, and maintenance, was, after the close of the Civil War, being pushed with light iron rails and heavy gradients across what was then known to geographers as the Great American Desert, and the project of a transcontinental railroad was meant at that time to unite the chief port of the Pacific coast, San Francisco, with the leading cities of the Atlantic seaboard.
Branch lines innumerable were flung out, crowded sections were double-tracked, grades were lowered, curves straightened, vast terminals built, steamship connections formed, and equipment doubled and trebled. In this expansion the state, as ever in Canada, took a leading share.
One thing was evident over and above the beauty of the moonlit country through which we were rushing at a good pace, and that was the remarkable improvement in Italian railroading since my last visit to Italy a dozen years before. This was a modern rock-ballasted, double-tracked roadbed, which accounted in part for the rapidity and ease of the troop movements these last months.
Now they flashed by his window as the mile-posts flashed in the early days, for the line had been double-tracked so that the electric-lighted hotels on wheels passed up and down regardless of opposing trains. All these changes had been wrought in a single generation; and Henry felt that he had contributed, according to his light, to the great work.
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