Though steam-powered trains were a significant invention, they couldn't move without railroads.
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00:00The invention of the steam engine in the early 1800s gave rise to the greatest enterprise on the planet.
00:08From clouds of steam and billowing smoke emerged the golden age of railroads and railway marvels.
00:30Music
00:46There it sat, a strange looking device that could travel from place to place by its own power.
00:52But how? Its weight was not calculated in pounds, but tons.
00:57It was enormous. Its wheels would sink into the dirt and mud-filled roads of the day.
01:02Horse-drawn wagons were already using rails to haul freight. Rails would be the way to use the heavy steam engine.
01:12A road of rails. A system of iron rails secured to a path of wooden ties that the train could move along with its flanged wheels.
01:22Now, to get to point A from point B, all one had to do was lay down track between the two designated spots.
01:33Travel was going to be made easy. It was a grand idea, and it sounded simple.
01:39Well, the world doesn't work that way, and generally the shortest distance between two points is not the straightest or the levelest.
01:49So the railroad civil engineers have had to invest a tremendous amount of creativity and talent in figuring ways of crossing rivers and chasms,
01:59getting through or around mountains, and doing this in an economical way.
02:04So railroad marvels are really the product of creative efforts necessary to get a railroad from point A to point B.
02:13For a time, formidable mountain ranges confined the early progress of railroads in the U.S.
02:19The mountains were great geographical barriers that had to be overcome.
02:24At first, the railroads in America were short-line.
02:28They served the ports of the eastern seacoast by delivering commerce to seaboard states.
02:34Many feats of engineering wonderment occurred all along the short lines.
02:40But the great triumph of the age was celebrated when a golden spike was driven into a polished tie at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869.
02:54The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad was probably this nation's first significant railroad marvel that is easily recognizable by the public today.
03:06Before we joined east and west coast by rail, we spoke of travel across country in months.
03:15And suddenly, we had reduced the transit time to just days.
03:19And the impacts that that would have on society and how the nation was further settled and further solidified is a wonderful and very powerful story.
03:35The Civil War had almost destroyed the concept of one united nation.
03:39But the Union survived.
03:41The North and South were once again joined.
03:44The Transcontinental Railroad bound up the wounded nation from east to west and tied it together with a ribbon of iron from sea to shining sea.
03:55The accomplishment was breathtaking.
03:57The Central Pacific Railroad had moved out of Sacramento toward the east and the Union Pacific from Missouri.
04:04They raced toward each other in a cacophony of anvil courses as the spikes were driven into the rails, all driven with sledgehammers and muscles of steel.
04:22More individual and extraordinary feats of engineering and construction took place in the building of the Transcontinental Railroad than at any other time in railroad history.
04:31It was a marvel and gave birth to all the marvels that would follow as railroading became the biggest business in the world.
04:41To think that from the 1830s when it was a novelty, when railroading was a novelty, to just leap forward 30 years in time when it was running 2,000, 3,000 miles across a continent is quite a leap in technology.
04:58After the completion of the Transcontinental, technology kept right on leaping.
05:04The miles of railroad track kept on spreading across the country.
05:08The peak year was 1916 when there were approximately 254,000 miles of track in the United States.
05:17And one civil engineer figured for every mile of track, there was a bridge of some sort that had been built to allow the train to find the easiest way.
05:26This included bridges of every type, wooden and steel trestle, beam, truss, suspension, soaring concrete arch viaducts, and stone arch viaducts, which resembled the ancient Roman aqueducts.
05:42The early steel arch viaducts were built in the late 19th century.
05:47The early stone bridges were built by people who were more artists than engineers.
05:52They were using classical forms that came down from Roman times.
05:57There was no method for calculating stresses in the material.
06:02They just built in proportion on the basis of hundreds of years of experience, which, as it turns out, was the only way to do it.
06:11They built in proportion on the basis of hundreds of years of experience, which, as it turns out, has stood the test of time very well.
06:21The stone arch bridges stand today as functioning symbols from the golden age of railroads.
06:28But they were expensive and took years to build, stone by cut stone.
06:35So engineers began to build with wood and iron.
06:39The original stone bridges of the very early railroads are mostly still around and still in service.
06:44The bridges that followed them of wood or iron are long since gone and replaced several times over.
06:52Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, both wood and iron bridges crossed the Susquehanna River at one time,
06:58before designers took a giant step backwards in time and created the graceful stone arch structure known as the Rockville Bridge.
07:11This is the Rockville Bridge. It was completed in 1902.
07:14It's the longest stone arch railroad bridge in the world.
07:17It's the third bridge on the site. The first one was wooden, built in 1849.
07:21The second one was iron, built in 1877.
07:24But then as trains got bigger, heavier, and faster, something more substantial was needed.
07:28And so this stone bridge was built in 1902.
07:36An arched bridge was a crowning achievement of the ancient world and is impressive even today.
07:41Like the ancient structures, the stone arch railroad bridge was, for the most part, built by hand.
07:49The bridge consists of 48 arches. It's about 3,800 feet long and assembled from thousands and thousands of blocks of stone
07:58that were cut intricately to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
08:02The people who did this were true artisans of their day.
08:05The fact that they were able to make it all fit together without ever seeing the bridge is a remarkable testament to their abilities.
08:14In 1902, noted railroad author Frank Spearman wrote of the Rockville,
08:21in 1902, noted railroad author Frank Spearman wrote of the Rockville,
08:37It has been built to last forever.
08:40It is still in use today, a symbol of railroad artistry and ingenuity.
08:46Other arch bridges which grace the railroads date back to near the beginning of the 19th century.
08:53Many that are in use today will continue to be used in the future.
08:57The one-arch Carrollton Viaduct, completed in 1829, is the oldest in the U.S.,
09:03and the eight-arch Thomas Viaduct, completed in 1835, is next.
09:08Despite their age, they remain a part of contemporary railroading.
09:12The Thomas Viaduct, which is just west of Baltimore,
09:15which is a series of stone arches on a curve that was completed in 1835
09:20for the branch of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to Washington,
09:25and that bridge carries two tracks, and it's still in service today.
09:34The most impressive of all arch-style bridges rises up from the floor of the valley
09:38near the little town of Nicholson, Pennsylvania.
09:43It rises up to a startling height of 240 feet and dwarfs the town at its base.
09:51It was dedicated on Saturday, November the 6th, 1915.
09:56Novelist Theodore Dreiser called the viaduct one of the true wonders of the world.
10:03Tunkhannock Viaduct up in Nicholson, Pennsylvania, built in the early part of this century
10:09in an effort by the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railway to speed up its operation.
10:14Just a magnificent reinforced concrete structure that's truly marvelous and awesome
10:20just to see it rise above the valley below.
10:28The Tunkhannock began construction in May of 1912.
10:31It is a reinforced concrete arch bridge, 2,300 feet in length.
10:37It carries two tracks supported by ten 180-foot double arches.
10:42Each of the arch ribs is 14 feet wide and 8 feet thick at the crown.
10:50Thousands and thousands of cubic yards of concrete were used to build it.
10:55It took three years to put it up. There was so much concrete in it.
10:59And they built a big aerial tramway with big wooden towers
11:03that carried the concrete out to wherever it was needed to build the bridge.
11:11It looms up like some lost and gigantic piece of sculpture,
11:14strangely out of place in the tranquil landscape that surrounds it.
11:19It is rarely used today.
11:21It stands there as a sentinel, a railroad marvel from an era gone by.
11:34Since prehistoric times, man has had a fascination with digging in the ground.
11:40Early cave dwellers cut little tunnels to connect their various tribal caves into a community of sorts.
11:48With the expansion of the railroads, starting in the early 1800s, man began tunneling in earnest.
11:55If a mountain stood in the way of the railroad,
11:58then by God they would dig and chip and blast their way through it.
12:03No challenge seemed too big for the early railway pioneers.
12:08The development of all railroad tunnels is a significant story,
12:13from the Hoosick Tunnel that was developed in Massachusetts
12:18to the development of Moffat Tunnels, a four-mile tunnel outside of Denver,
12:24that was absolutely critical to crossing the Western Continental Divide in an efficient manner.
12:33The construction of the Hoosick Tunnel in Massachusetts was a marvel of monumental proportions.
12:39Work began in 1851 and went on until 1873.
12:46The tunnel was almost five miles long and ran under the Berkshire Mountain Range.
12:51When completed, it was the longest tunnel in the world.
12:55It cost $22 million when it was built and almost bankrupt the state.
13:03Its ventilation shaft rises up over 1,000 feet through the middle of the mountain.
13:08Passing mostly through solid rock, it took longer to dig than any other tunnel in history.
13:14241 months, 22 years.
13:22These fellows just went to work chipping away at the rock using hand tools,
13:28star drills that were manually punched into the rock, and a little bit of black powder.
13:35Then came the introduction of nitroglycerin around 1855.
13:41It was a much more efficient blasting compound than had been black powder,
13:46but it was also much more dangerous to handle and many more lives were lost.
13:52196 lives were lost during the construction of the Hoosick.
13:57Mostly the men were blown to bits by the highly volatile and unstable explosive, nitroglycerin.
14:04In spite of this, work continued and the east met the west in almost perfect alignment,
14:10just an offset of 7 sixteenths of an inch in the fall of 1873.
14:17The Hoosick, in use today, attests to the tenacity of the workers
14:22and the engineering genius of the railroad designers of the 19th century.
14:31In the early years of the 20th century, the Moffett Tunnel near Denver, Colorado was built.
14:37It was made possible by drilling techniques that became state of the art and are in use to this day.
14:46The tunnel was conceived by David Halliday Moffett Jr., a railroad pioneer and businessman.
14:52He was determined to connect the city of Denver with a transcontinental line.
15:00Early in 1902, at the age of 63,
15:03David Moffett announced his intention to build a railroad over the roof of the continent.
15:09He called it the Denver Northwestern and Pacific.
15:13It connected Denver with Salt Lake City.
15:17It became known as the Moffett Road, with its route through scenic Rollins Pass.
15:23But during the winter months, Rollins Pass was frequently closed for weeks at a time because of blizzards.
15:30The railroad was not showing a profit.
15:32A tunnel would be the answer,
15:34a tunnel that would allow the trains to escape the snow of Rollins Pass and become profitable.
15:41David Moffett died on March 18, 1911,
15:45but his dream of a tunnel through the continental divide would not die with him.
15:51Moffett had this dream of a tunnel, which was not built until long after his death.
15:58It was finally built by the Moffett Tunnel Commission, drilled through the Rockies west of Denver,
16:03completed about 1928, as I recall,
16:07and was, I think, briefly the longest tunnel in North America.
16:12It was an extremely interesting, difficult project.
16:19The green light for the construction of the tunnel was given in June of 1923.
16:24Camps were set up at the east and west portals, and digging began.
16:30Unlike the Hoosack Tunnel that caused the deaths of so many men,
16:34the Moffett Tunnel was, for the most part, considered a model of railroad building safety.
16:39There was a strong sense of community, and during the five years of construction,
16:44life in both portal camps was good.
16:46So was the pay.
16:48The average worker earned $5.15 for an eight-hour shift, a high salary for that time.
16:56The mess halls were open 24 hours a day, and food was abundant, which kept worker morale high.
17:03Entire families lived at the sites.
17:06Babies were born here, too.
17:09The first baby born at East Portal was named Thelma.
17:12Her father was one of the tunnel workmen.
17:17New life was welcome, but death made its presence felt also.
17:22On July 30, 1926, a serious accident occurred in the West Portal.
17:28One hundred and twenty-five tons of rock fell from the roof, killing six men.
17:33Twenty-eight men in all would die during its construction.
17:37But in railroading, this was considered a good record.
17:43A new drill was developed here that would become state-of-the-art.
17:46Called the Lewis Traveling Cantilever Girder,
17:49it allowed the project to continue after geological conditions halted work in the West Portal.
17:55The girder was a mechanism that excavated the top of the tunnel
17:58and then supported the roof as the bore was increased under it.
18:05On February 12, 1927, after almost four years,
18:10the West Portal workers broke through to the east.
18:13Celebrations followed.
18:15The tunnel was officially dedicated on February 26, 1928.
18:21David Moffat's dream of putting Denver on the main line was to be fulfilled.
18:27Finally, the Denver and Rio Grande was the line.
18:32The trains found momentary sanctuary during the winter months in the Rocky Mountains.
18:43The tunnel was, for a time, the longest in the United States at 6.21 miles.
18:50It had taken 48 months to bore and cost $15,600,000.
18:59It conquered the inconquerable, the Continental Divide.
19:04It was driven by the vision of one man, David H. Moffat.
19:11He was truly a visionary and he had the ability to convince people
19:15that his ideas were correct and would work.
19:21The Moffat Tunnel is the latter day marvel
19:24in one of the latest bits of railroad construction
19:28that was undertaken in the early part of the 20th century
19:32that was critically needed.
19:34The traffic volumes by 1920 were such east and west
19:37that there were bottlenecks being created
19:40trying to get across the Continental Divide.
19:43And the Moffat Tunnel just expedited that whole process.
19:49During World War II, as many as 30 passenger freight and troop trains
19:54passed through the Moffat in a single day.
19:58Since 1983, Amtrak's famous California Zephyr
20:02has used the Moffat Tunnel on its run from Chicago to San Francisco.
20:07A tunnel was one way to tame a mountain,
20:10but sometimes you just had to climb over it.
20:24For the railroad, the best path between point A and point B
20:28had always been a straight line with a gradient of no more than 2%.
20:33The railroad engineers went to extraordinary extremes
20:36attempting to accomplish this.
20:39Sometimes it was easy, often it was not.
20:42The Sierra Nevada was formidable, but conquerable.
20:47Donner Pass, 105 miles through the Sierra Nevada.
20:52The name Sierra Nevada means literally snow-covered mountains.
20:57The crossing of Donner Pass,
20:59located as close to the top of America as one can get,
21:02is a true railroad marvel of the early part of the last century.
21:08Central Pacific's brilliant young engineer, Theodore D. Judah,
21:12found the best way through the seemingly impenetrable granite peaks
21:16of the ominous mountain range.
21:22The chosen path over the mountains for the Central Pacific
21:25to join with the Union Pacific was staggering.
21:29From Sacramento, California, it climbed up through Donner Pass
21:32for 81 miles from the base and to an altitude of 7,000 feet.
21:39It was the best route.
21:41With only a few alterations, it is still in use today.
21:53The Central Pacific employed thousands of Chinese immigrant workers
21:57who were called upon to perform back-breaking and often dangerous tasks of labor.
22:03There were many fatalities in building the Transcontinental Railroad.
22:07Around a place called Cape Horn,
22:09the mountains were so severe that the only way they were able to build the line
22:14was to lower the Chinese laborers over the side of the cliff
22:19to cut holes into the mountain and place the powder to blast
22:23and make a shelf to put the tracks on.
22:27Some say that the Chinese were able to build the railroad
22:31Some say the expression,
22:33he doesn't stand a Chinaman's chance in hell,
22:36evolved from the horrendous experiences endured by the hard-working laborers
22:40as they cut and blasted their way through Donner Pass.
22:46The lore, the romance of the building of the Pacific Railroad
22:49says that thousands of workers were killed in premature explosions
22:53or swept away by the winter snows in the Sierra Nevada.
22:57There are actual authenticated records indicating that
23:01as many as 500 people were killed over the six-year construction period of the railroad.
23:06And in fact the number may be somewhat higher,
23:08but there were not the thousands and thousands of killed
23:11that popular romantic literature would have you believe.
23:15Forty miles of snowsheds were conceived and then constructed
23:19to keep the rail lines open.
23:21They were a remarkable solution
23:23which gave the railroad assurance of year-round operation.
23:30We could consider the snowsheds to be one of the railroad marvels of this country,
23:36certainly when they were constructed a hundred years ago.
23:39There was a great amount of vision that went into their engineering.
23:43And the way that they were constructed to deflect the snow from the mountains
23:48yet provided enough ventilation
23:50that locomotives could move through them
23:52without choking crew and passengers is indeed a marvel.
23:57The eastern seaboard had its share of difficulties as well.
24:01The desire to surmount the formidable Allegheny Mountain Range,
24:04which ran north and south across the state of Pennsylvania,
24:07gave birth to the first and most unusual railroad in America,
24:11the Allegheny Portage Railroad.
24:13It was the first of its kind.
24:15It was the first of its kind.
24:17It was the first of its kind.
24:19It was the first of its kind.
24:21It was the first of its kind.
24:24The Allegheny Portage Railroad,
24:26a marvel of engineering for its time.
24:30The system was built to connect the two canal waterways
24:33on either side of the Alleghenies,
24:36at Hollidaysburg in the east and Johnstown in the west.
24:41In the strictest sense, it was not a railroad.
24:44It was a series of ten inclined planes
24:47that gave portage to the canal boats, passengers and all,
24:50by pulling them with rope on flat cars with fixed steam engines
24:54over the mountain range to the waterway on the other side.
25:00The canal boats were designed to separate into two.
25:03Each half was pulled from the water
25:05and secured to a flatbed railroad car for the trip up the plane.
25:10On the other side, the canal boats were hooked together
25:13and continued on their way.
25:16It was breathtaking technology at its most advanced and terrifying.
25:20A marvel of engineering ingenuity.
25:24There's wonderful stories of the Allegheny Portage Railroad
25:27and how frightened people were to get on this contraption,
25:32this contrivance, and be pulled up a mountain.
25:35And that many people, in fact, elected to walk alongside
25:39and just didn't trust perhaps the technology or the construction of it.
25:45And sometimes they accurately didn't trust it
25:48because the ropes would break or something would fail
25:51and otherwise cause a disaster.
25:55When the hemp rope imported from Russia snapped on occasion,
25:59it caused terrifying and sometimes fatal plunges
26:02to the bottom of the inclined plane.
26:04Assurance was needed. Also, a better rope.
26:10John Augustus Roebling had the answer.
26:13He developed a steel wire cable that was gratefully used
26:16by the Allegheny Portage Railroad
26:18and later used in the construction of his Niagara Falls suspension bridge
26:22and the Brooklyn Bridge.
26:30With the new cable, the trips up and down the inclined planes became safer.
26:35But the Allegheny Portage Railroad and the canals,
26:37after only 23 years, were moving toward the final years of their existence.
26:42They were too slow.
26:47By the middle of the 19th century, speed was the name of the game.
26:52The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
26:54already reached from Baltimore to Cumberland, Maryland.
27:01The B&O was seeking approval for a route to Pittsburgh.
27:05Philadelphia feared that the Baltimore-Pittsburgh route
27:08would imperil its status as a first-class port city.
27:16The legislature rejected the B&O by one vote
27:19and granted a route to the newly formed Pennsylvania Railroad,
27:23a dynasty in the making.
27:27The Portage Railroad was considered outmoded by this time.
27:31The Pennsylvania Railroad badly needed a marvel
27:34that would allow its trains to climb the grades of the Allegheny Mountain Range
27:38to reach Pittsburgh, the gateway to the Golden West.
27:43A marvel was on the way.
27:45It would become known as the Eighth Wonder of the Railroad World,
27:49a feat of engineering that took a mountain range by surprise.
27:53It scaled its heights by first turning its back
27:56and going in the opposite direction.
27:59It was to become known throughout the world as the Great Horseshoe Curve,
28:03the best train-watching spot then, now, and forever.
28:21I'm taking this railroad over the Alleghenies.
28:24So said J. Edgar Thompson,
28:26chief civil engineer and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
28:30He proved to be a man of his word.
28:33And Thompson, in a very bold move,
28:36elected to take the railroad directly west out of Altoona
28:40into a valley and cut off the face of a mountain
28:45using the rock spoils to fill in two ravines,
28:49created a huge semicircular arc
28:52that enabled him to gain elevation very gradually.
28:55The challenge to railroads has always been
28:58to keep gradients as low as possible.
29:02Thompson was driven by the need to keep the grade below 2%,
29:07and that translates into 2 feet of rise in elevation per 100 feet of travel.
29:14Thompson's solution was simple and elegant.
29:17He curved his track in a graceful arc
29:19around the valley of lush forests and lakes
29:22until they just about returned to where they had begun.
29:25Just about, but not quite.
29:29The Horseshoe Curve was a great engineering marvel
29:32when it was completed in 1854.
29:34And part of that intrigue is the fact that it's so simple.
29:38The idea was to get elevation to climb up the mountain,
29:42and previously they had done it with hoisting trains up inclined plains.
29:47But the simplicity of this design was that they simply took the track
29:51and lengthened it by going out around,
29:54adding mileage to the route,
29:56and therefore making the grade a little easier to take.
30:02The Horseshoe Curve is about 3 quarters of a mile long
30:05and laid in a continuous 8-degree arc that forms a 220-degree path.
30:11From a higher vantage point,
30:13it looks like someone has thrown a gigantic horseshoe
30:16into the side of the mountain.
30:18Business at the curve has remained brisk for 150 years
30:22and includes a scenic park for train watchers.
30:27We often say that the Horseshoe Curve opened in February of 1854
30:31and it hasn't had a day off since.
30:33Again, another marvel.
30:35How many transportation features in America have lasted 150 years
30:40and are still in use today?
30:42Horseshoe Curve was a way to lengthen the line
30:46and keep the gradients down below 2%,
30:50which the railroad trains of the era could support
30:53and which they can support yet today.
30:57The curve started with a single track in 1854.
31:01By 1900, three more had been added.
31:05At its peak in World War II,
31:07as many as 100 trains, passenger, freight and troop carriers
31:11used the curve every single day, year in and year out.
31:16It played a vital part in our country's railroad history.
31:20Dan Cooper writes in his book, Horseshoe Heritage,
31:23The curve has been compared to a stage
31:25in which a drama of railroading is played out.
31:28Love and tragedy, fear and joy, life and death,
31:32all are a part of its history.
31:34Generations of train conductors have announced it
31:36to generations of passengers
31:38who still crowd the coach windows to get a good view of it
31:41as the train goes around.
31:44The train watchers in this country
31:46had an enormous amount of traffic to watch.
31:48At their peak, the United States railroads
31:51had almost 240,000 miles of track
31:55and 26,000 miles of that belonged to the Pennsylvania Railroad alone.
32:00As early as 1900, on any given day on that line,
32:04over 5,500 trains were dispatched.
32:07Now multiply that by all the other railroads
32:10and wonder, how did all those trains
32:13keep from bumping into each other?
32:18Sometimes they didn't.
32:20Early on, it became clear to the railroads
32:22that traffic control was a prerequisite,
32:25not only for the safety of the passengers,
32:28but because of the promise to deliver undamaged freight
32:31over great distances.
32:34How centralized traffic control evolved
32:36from crude hand-controlled switches
32:38to computer-driven centers of today
32:40is a continuing marvel in the history of the railroad.
32:45Centralized traffic control, CTC,
32:47basically started as a way to put several interlockings
32:51under the control of one or two block operators in one tower.
32:55In the very beginning, they literally had towers
32:59they could stand in,
33:01and that's why towers are still a little higher
33:04than a normal building,
33:06where they could see a certain distance to the next tower,
33:09and the operator in the next tower
33:11would give them the all-clear the train's by
33:14with a high ball or a flag,
33:16or perhaps a lantern at night.
33:20High ball it out of here!
33:22The saying comes from a train signal
33:24and not from a club car.
33:26A white ball about a foot and a half in diameter
33:29was hoisted by chain to its high position on the tower.
33:32It meant the train had a clear way.
33:35High ball it, full speed ahead.
33:38The high ball is no longer in service,
33:41but the expression remains part of our idiom.
33:46Train traffic control was originally handled
33:48on a manual basis,
33:50and it developed to a system
33:52where dispatchers would telegraph their orders
33:55to people who were stationed in towers along the line.
33:59Later, this manual system gave way
34:02to automatic traffic control
34:04and today it's all done by computers,
34:07by men in darkened rooms with TV screens.
34:13Switching and controlling traffic has come a long way
34:16from the days when the tower operators
34:18manually threw heavy switches and signals
34:20by levers called Armstrong machines.
34:25It was Armstrong because you had to be a big guy
34:28to move them and put your weight on it.
34:31With the development of electro-pneumatic switches,
34:34all you have is a small lever
34:36and basically you're pushing buttons,
34:38throwing toggle switches,
34:40or a small lever that does the same thing.
34:44When Ben Franklin flew his kite in the electrical storm
34:47and discovered that current would travel
34:49along a metal wire,
34:51unbeknownst to him,
34:53he played a role in the history of railroad marvels.
34:56Electricity became a magic key to traffic control.
35:01Probably the vast number of Americans in the public
35:04don't understand that each rail
35:07has a low-voltage current running through it
35:10and that the train,
35:12as it enters a certain section of track,
35:15shunts across the wheels and axles that current
35:18and that causes the change in the signals
35:20ahead and behind of a train.
35:23The development of automatic block signals,
35:25centralized traffic control
35:28has taken advantage
35:30of the latest computerized technologies today.
35:33On the screen behind me,
35:35you'll see all the sections that are in green.
35:37That is how far the signals are displayed
35:39by a train dispatcher for a particular train.
35:42The dispatcher's job is to route all the trains in his area
35:46the most efficient and safe way possible.
35:48An engineer's job is to follow the routing
35:51depending on the display of the signal.
35:55Today's train dispatcher sits behind a monitor
35:58and with a touch of a finger to the screen
36:01can alter the course of a train's destiny.
36:04They have touch screens where they can literally
36:07change trains from one track to another,
36:09display signals, stop trains if they need to.
36:12They're also in communication via radio with the engineer
36:16and other personnel on the ground,
36:19signal maintainers, maintenance-of-way people.
36:22They can talk directly to the train dispatcher.
36:26Working in conjunction with traffic control
36:29is the Center for Amtrak National Operations
36:32that handles everything else that makes a railroad function.
36:35It is tied together by satellite.
36:37It too is a marvel of modern-day technology
36:40assisting the railroad to run with efficiency and safety.
36:45The main function of the Ops Center
36:47is to tie in all of our internal and external customers together
36:50in the best way we can possibly do it.
36:53There are several hundred trains at one time running.
36:56We can have a passenger board a train in Los Angeles,
36:59have that passenger go through multiple scenic routes,
37:03end up in Chicago, transfer to a train through to Washington,
37:06and then re-board a train to New York,
37:09and we can track that passenger the entire time.
37:12The image of a passenger who, due to poor scheduling,
37:15has missed his train sitting in some forgotten and dark train depot
37:19is a nostalgic image that belongs to the railroad's past.
37:23Today, the Operations Center would surely come to the rescue.
37:27The highball of yesteryear now orbits the planet with its watchful eye.
37:31What you're looking at is the screen of the United States.
37:34One of the ways we use to communicate with our trains now is GPS.
37:38It's Global Positioning Signals.
37:40All these yellow dots represent engines throughout the country.
37:45So I was going to look for an engine.
37:47I click right on the engine, the dot,
37:52and it'll actually take the screen down
37:57to the point where you can actually read the street address
38:00where the train is, right here.
38:05It's in North Carolina.
38:07When you send them a message, you can ask them,
38:09do you have passenger Mrs. Jones on there with you?
38:12He's approximately...
38:20That's 70 miles from Washington.
38:25Today's traveler can feel secure
38:27because there is someone who is watching over him
38:29through every leg of his journey.
38:31The track is clear ahead, highball it all the way.
38:42The final railroad marvel of the 20th century
38:51began in the country that invented the steam locomotive two centuries ago,
38:56England.
38:58And the marvel is a railroad tunnel
39:00that runs under the English Channel to France for some 24 miles.
39:07It carries passengers, automobiles,
39:10trucks and freight between the east coast of England
39:12and the west coast of France.
39:17It has been called the Channel Tunnel, the Eurotunnel,
39:20and finally, the Chunnel.
39:23Everyone seems pleased with that name.
39:28The actual construction time of the Chunnel was relatively short.
39:32The combined project, a mutual effort of England and France,
39:35took only five years.
39:37However, the vision for it goes back for centuries.
39:42The fact that it has taken so long to get together the forces to build it
39:46only adds to its mystique and the lore that surrounds it.
39:50I believe it was Napoleon who even thought of doing it,
39:54but it never took place because it was such a technological barrier to overcome.
40:01French engineer Albert Mathieu Favier presented plans for a Channel Tunnel in 1802,
40:07and an attempt was actually begun in 1877,
40:11but abandoned because of extreme geological difficulties.
40:14The English started a similar effort in 1881 and again in 1975,
40:20but each time the work was abandoned.
40:23The Channel Tunnel took almost 200 years to build,
40:26if you look at it in a certain way,
40:29because there were proposals to try to cross the Channel in one form or another
40:34from the beginning of the 19th century and the 20th century,
40:37which didn't get very far and then came to a halt.
40:41So it was not until our time that they were finally able to pull together the financing
40:46and build that enormous project.
40:51In 1988, work finally did begin.
40:54Digging from both sides simultaneously,
40:57the route ran from portals near the Shakespeare Cliff at Folkestone in England
41:01and from Sengat near Calais in France.
41:08But the technology used to develop that tunnel
41:11was very much adapted from the American experience in construction of the Moffat Tunnel
41:16and even a little bit earlier in the construction of the trans-Hudson tubes
41:20of the Pennsylvania Railroad under the Hudson River.
41:24A number of boring devices that were used in the Channel
41:27were direct descendants of that which Moffat developed
41:31and his engineers developed for the Moffat Tunnel.
41:36The Channel is not, in the strictest sense, a tunnel.
41:39It is three tunnels.
41:41Each outer tube carries train traffic in one direction and is 25 feet in diameter.
41:46The smaller connecting center tube, 16 feet in diameter,
41:50is for ventilation and service
41:52and is linked to the main tunnels by cross passages every 1,230 feet.
42:00The Channel Tunnel was built largely with tunnel boring machines
42:04and those have been around for a long time
42:08but they've become very advanced in recent years.
42:11Probably the earliest tunnel boring machine was one I mentioned
42:14that was tried on the Hoosick Tunnel in Massachusetts back in the 1840s.
42:18It didn't work but that was the first time somebody got the idea of a machine
42:22that would bore a hole into a mountain
42:25or under a body of water as in the case of the Channel.
42:31During those construction years,
42:33it was difficult to notice by looking at the surface of the Channel
42:36that work was in progress.
42:38But indeed it was.
42:40Huge boring machines, conveyor trains and hundreds of highly skilled workmen
42:45were down there digging a tunnel
42:47that at mid-Channel was almost 328 feet below sea level.
42:57The TBMs were the children of the Moffat
43:00but they were operated by computer and guided by laser.
43:06Their huge cutting heads cut into the chalk underground at a speed of 6 inches a minute.
43:12Following behind the TBM came the huge conveyor train to carry away the waste.
43:18Ultimately the waste would be moved to the surface and used as fill.
43:25The historic breakthrough that connected France with England
43:28for the first time since the Ice Age
43:30occurred on the 1st of December in 1990 in the Service Tunnel.
43:35The North and South Main Tunnels were finished by June of 1991.
43:41The lining, track and electrification was completed
43:45and the Channel was ready for shuttle traffic in 1994.
43:50The final price tag, 15 billion dollars.
43:56The Channel traffic is managed with a state-of-the-art centralized control command center.
44:01Safety is built in.
44:05In 1994, Queen Elizabeth and President Mitterrand
44:09traveled on the shuttle train from Calais, France under the Channel to Folkestone, England.
44:15Ceremonies followed to officially open the Channel.
44:19Clearly the Channel is the marvel that brings us into the new millennium
44:23and will again bring with it profound changes to the United Kingdom and all of Europe
44:30where now you're able to leave London and a few hours later be in Paris
44:36without having left a very comfortable seat in a passenger train that moves at high speed.
44:45Today, passengers use the Channel with assurance.
44:48They travel at speeds between 90 to 180 miles an hour
44:52as they move back and forth between England and mainland Europe.
44:57One wonders what the passengers of the 1830s who walked with terror
45:01alongside the canal boats of the Portage Railroad inclined planes
45:05would think of contemporary marvels such as the Channel.
45:10But the early visionaries of the railroads built better than they could have ever known.
45:15Their great achievements still stand today as monuments to their genius.
45:25Out of clouds of steam and billowing smoke,
45:28the railroads continue their journey from the glory of the past
45:32to the promise of the 21st century and the marvels yet to come.
46:02Thanks for watching!
46:32Thanks for watching!