Remarks on the Present System of Road Making: With Observations, Deduced from Practice and Experience, With a View to a Revision of the Existing Laws, and the Introduction of Improvement in the Method of Making, Repairing, and Preserving Roads, and Defending the Road Funds from Misapplication. Seventh Edition, Carefully Revised, With an Appendix, and Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, June 1823, with Extracts from the EvidenceMcAdam, John Loudon
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Remarks on the Present System of Road Making: With Observations, Deduced from Practice and Experience, With a View to a Revision of the Existing Laws, and the Introduction of Improvement in the Method of Making, Repairing, and Preserving Roads, and Defending the Road Funds from Misapplication. Seventh Edition, Carefully Revised, With an Appendix, and Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons, June 1823, with Extracts from the Evidence
McAdam, John Loudon
Macadam roads; Roads -- Great Britain
If a road be made smooth and solid, it will be one mass, and the effect
of the substrata, whether clay or sand, can never be felt in effect by
carriages going over the road; because a road well made, unites itself
into a body like a piece of timber or a board.
In making a road under these circumstances, do you make the whole of the
depth of materials at once?—No, I prefer making a road in three times.
Three different times?—Yes.
To what size would you break the hard materials?—To the size of six
ounces weight.
Do you not think that is an indefinite criterion; had you not better
mention the size?—No; I did imagine myself, that the difference existed
to which you allude, and I have weighed six ounces of different
substances, and am confident there is little difference in appearance
and none in effect; I think that none ought to exceed six ounces; I hold
six ounces to be the maximum size. If you made the road, of all six
ounce stones it would be a rough road; but it is impossible but that the
greater part of the stones must be under that size.
Do you find a measure or ring through which the stones will pass, a good
method of regulating their size?—That is a very good way, but I always
make my surveyors carry a pair of scales and a six ounce weight in their
pocket, and when they come to a heap of stones, they weigh one or two of
the largest, and if they are reasonably about that weight they will do;
it is impossible to make them come exactly to it. I would beg leave to
say, in all cases of laying new materials upon an old road, I recommend
loosening the surface with a pickaxe a very little, so as to allow the
new materials to unite with the old, otherwise the new materials being
laid on the hard surface never unite, but get kicked about, and are lost
to the roads; wherever new materials are to be put down upon an old
road, I recommend a little loosening; but that I don’t call lifting.
Have you stated what thickness of new materials you would lay down on an
old road?—I should consider an old road would not want new materials if
it had ten inches of materials before, but I should only pick up the
materials, and break the large stones; and if there were any want of
materials, I would lay on as much as would bring it up to somewhere
about the ten inches.
Would you prefer doing that in dry weather or in wet weather?—In wet
weather, always; I always prefer mending a road in weather not very dry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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