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Updated: June 11, 2025
It was a strange, almost fantastic life these two men, with hundreds of others, were leading away out here on the vast prairie, whose long solitude was now being broken by the babel that attends track-laying, and whose vast bosom, for the first time, was being girded with a band of steel which was to connect the Atlantic with the Pacific, and bring home most forcibly to the Mother Country the value of her great Canadian colony.
The track-laying crew was equal to 4 miles per day, and in the month of August 92 miles of track were laid.
This work was all done in 182 working days, including stormy ones, when little, if anything, could be done, making a daily average of 33,548 yards excavation, 13,150 feet B.M. timber, 471 feet piling, 2-38/100 miles track-laying. We never had an accurate force report made of the whole line, but roughly there were employed 5,000 men and 1,700 teams.
Records in track-laying were made then that have never been broken. Near Promontory a sign is still standing to announce "Ten miles of track laid in one day." Actual figures are not obtainable, but reliable contemporaries at that time stated there were twenty-five thousand men employed on the construction work of the two lines, as well as six thousand teams and two hundred construction trains.
"Yes. When the train is out of sight and hearing, you get back over there and drive that track-laying for every foot there is in it." Adams nodded. "I'll do it, and get myself locked up, I suppose." "No, you won't; that's the beauty of it. The majesty of the law all there is of it in Argentine goes with me to Carbonate in the person of the town-marshal." "Oh, good succulently good! Well, so long.
"Fall in," said the straw boss, and Bradford got busy. He could handle one end of a thirty-foot rail with ease, and before night, without exciting the other workmen or making any show of superiority, he had quietly, almost unconsciously, become the leader of the track-laying gang. The foreman called Casement's attention to the new man, and Casement watched him for five minutes.
From the growing workshops at Wady Halfa the continual clatter and clang of hammers and the black smoke of manufacture rose to the African sky. The malodorous incense of civilisation was offered to the startled gods of Egypt. All this was preparation; nor was it until the 8th of May that track-laying into the desert was begun in earnest.
Track-laying began upon this road from both ends of the line in September, 1880, that is, from the city of Mexico and from the Rio Grande at Juarez, and upon the completion of the bridge at La Encarnation, the north and south tracks met, March 8, 1884. The line was formally opened on April 10 following.
The workmen laid tracks across the Wasatch on a bed of snow and ice, and one of the track-laying trains slid bodily, track and all, off the ice into a stream. The two companies had over twenty thousand men at work that winter. Suddenly the Central Pacific surprised the Eastern builders by filing a map and plans for building as far as Echo, some distance east of Ogden.
But the pleasurers were as yet only upon the borders of the pandemonium, and Ford was torturing his ingenuity to devise some argument strong enough to turn back the threatened invasion. There were reasons enough why a party with women among its members should not be projected into the grading and track-laying field.
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