[Illustration: CONSTRUCTION ENGINEERS BLAZE THEIR WAY ACROSS THE FACE OF NEW COUNTRY]
[Illustration: THE MAKING OF AN EMBANKMENT BY DUMP-TRAIN]
[Illustration: "SMALL TEMPORARY RAILROADS PEOPLED WITH HORDES OF RESTLESS ENGINES"]
Then the real survey-work begins. The engineers divide the line, if it is of any great length, and the several divisions prosecute their work simultaneously. Each surveying party consists of a front flag-man, who is a captain and commands a brigade of axe-men in their work of cutting away trees and bushes; the transit-man, who makes his record of distances and angles and commands his brigade of chain-men and flag-men; and the leveller, who studies contour all the while, and supervisors, rod-men and more axe-men. Topographers are carried, their big drawing boards being strapped with the camp equipment; and a good cook is a big detail not likely to be overlooked.
In soft and rolling country this is a form of camp life that turns back the scoffer: busy summer days and indolent summer nights around the camp-fire, pipes drawing well and plans being set for the morrow's work. Another summer all this will be changed. The resistless path of the railroad will be stepped through here, the group of nodding pines will be gone, for a culvert will span the creek at this very point.
Sometimes the work of these parties becomes intense and dramatic. The chief, lowered into a deep and rocky river cañon, is making rough notes and sketches, following the character of the rock formation, and dreaming the great dreams that all great engineers, great architects, great creators must dream perforce. He is dreaming of the day when, a year or two hence, the railroad's path shall have crowded itself into this _impasse_, and when the folk who dine luxuriously in the showy cars will fret because of the curve that spills their soup, and who never know of the man who was slipped down over a six-hundred-foot cliff in order that the railroad might find its way.
It is then that the surveying party begins to have its thrills. Perhaps to put that line through the cañon the party will have to descend the river in canoes. If the river be too rough, then there is the alternative of being lowered over the cliffsides. Talk of your dangers of Alpine climbing! The engineers who plan and build railroads through any mountainous country miss not a single one of them. Everywhere the lines must find a foothold. This is the proposition that admits of but one answer--solution. Sometimes the men who follow the chief in the deep river cañons, the men with heavy instruments to carry and to operate--transits, levels, and the like--must have lines of logs strung together for their precarious foothold as they work. Sometimes the foothold is lost; the rope that lowers the engineer down over the cliffside snaps, and the folk in the cheerful dining-room do not know of the graves that are dug beside the railroad's resistless path.