This book will blow your mind, if you've had the good fortune to drive out West - especially along Interstate 80 from Omaha, Nebraska to Sacramento, California.
Those railroad tracks and trains you see paralleling the interstate highway are the subject of the book. You're looking at the transcontinental railroad.
Shoveling my driveway, and it's a pretty big one including the apron, allowed me to think about the 30,000 men who used their bare hands to do all the work day after day in just about any weather.
In the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California the industrious and hard-working Chinese immigrants had to shovel away, by hand, enormous piles of snow from the tracks so the supply trains could move rails, ties, fishplates, bolts, food, and everything else to the crews hard at work in the Great Basin in Nevada. I'm talking 30-foot snow drifts they had to hand shovel.
They didn't have fancy Gore Tex fabric to keep them dry. Can you imagine the quality of the shoes or boots they had?
Cuts through solid rock were done by hand. Tunnels up in the Sierra Nevada mountains were created all by hand at the mind-numbing rate of less than a foot of progress per day on each of four rock faces in the grand summit tunnel. That was even with crews working around the clock.
There were no power tools, no giant machines to cut or drill into rock. Blasted rock and soil were lifted by hand in most cases into wheelbarrows and horse-drawn carts.
There were crude horse-drawn graders that worked in the soft soil of the Great Plains, but hundreds of miles of track was laid on ground where men had to move the material with their hands.
This is a FANTASTIC book that will hold your interest. I guarantee it.
Winter Topics
Two days ago I received a press release about a newer deicing product. It was a typical press release that extolled all the benefits but, as usual, avoided the "How does this compare in cost to regular deicing salt?" question.
I decided to do the math for you. I BEG YOU to just skim over this very short column. I want it to just be a reminder for you to get out some paper and a pencil when a salesperson is trying to play one or two Jedi mind tricks on you.
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