Railroad Engineering
Octave Chanute was widely considered a brilliant and innovative railroad engineer. During his career he designed and constructed the United States' two biggest stock yards -- Chicago Stock Yards (1865) and Kansas City Stockyards (1871). He designed and built the Hannibal Bridge which was the first bridge to cross the Missouri River in Kansas City, Missouri in 1869. The bridge established Kansas City as the dominant city in the region. He designed many bridges during his railroad career, including the Illinois River rail bridge at Peoria, the Genesee River Gorge rail bridge near Portageville, New York, now Letchworth State Park, the bridges at Sibley, Missouri across the Missouri and at Fort Madison, Iowa across the Mississippi and the Kinzua Bridge in Pennsylvania.
Chanute also established a procedure for pressure-treating wooden railroad ties with an anti-septic that increased the wood’s life-span in the tracks. Establishing the first commercial plants, he convinced railroad men that it was commercially feasible to make money by spending money on treating ties to conserve natural resources. As a way to track the age and longevity of railroad ties and other wooden structures, he also introduced the railroad date nail in the United States.
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Famous quotes containing the words railroad and/or engineering:
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes.”
—Merle Colby, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)