Nor should the shape and weight of the rail be
overlooked. Experience, that stern schoolmaster, has taught us, that, while
heavy rails of seventy pounds to the yard, and over, of ordinary iron, go
to pieces in three or four years, sixty-pound rails of well-worked and good
iron will last more than double that time. The extraordinary durability of
the forty-five pound rails made for the Reading Railway Company by the Ebbw
Vale Company in 1837 is well known to railway men.
A short calculation will show the superiority, in point of economy, of
light and good rails to heavy rails of an inferior quality. A seventy-pound
rail requires 110 tons to the mile, costing, at 860 per ton, $6,600. At the
end of four years this has to be re-rolled at a cost of $30 per ton, or
$3,300 more. This is equal in eight years to an annual depreciation of
$1,237 per mile. A sixty-pound rail requires 94 tons to a mile, costing for
the best iron that can be rolled $80 per ton, or $7,520 per mile. This
would last eight years, and the annual depreciation would be $940 per mile,
or $297 less than the other. The 30,000 miles of American railways are thus
taxed annually nearly nine millions of dollars for preferring quantity to
quality.
In England, it is the custom to retain the best engineering talent upon
railways, after as well as during construction. In this country, as soon as
the engineer has made out his "final estimate," he is dismissed with as
little ceremony as a daylaborer.
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