To cross those watersheds at a sharp diagonal meant "heavy work"; and the engineers, to run their straight-cut, low-grade line, found that they would have to make tremendous cuts and fills--these last alone totalling 14,600,00 cubic yards. The Lackawanna's engineers will give you a faint idea of the stupendous size of these embankments. To build them up of stone and earth at the rate of a cartload a minute for each working-day of the year would require 81 years for the job. To do it in less than three years has meant the employment of whole trains of dump-cars, the purchase of 600-acre farms for single borrow-pits, the energy and administration of real engineers. There have been cuts through solid rock, 65 bridges and culverts to be wrought of concrete, a single embankment (at the Pequest River) three miles in length, 110 feet high, and 300 feet wide at its base. The traveller who rides over the completed double-track road will have but a faint idea of the human labor and the human energy that have gone to construct it. * * * * * The great railroad that traverses the State of Pennsylvania is another monument to the engineer. The Pennsylvania Railroad was no wobbly affair at any time. Its grades and curves, considering the character of the country through which its trunk rests, are not excessive. It has been a good standard railroad for a good many years past. But in 1902, the Pennsylvania found that its troubles rested in the volume of traffic that was being offered it. Over its middle division from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh it was handling as much tonnage as J. J. Hill's entire Great Northern system. The heavy tonnage business began to clog the road's fast passenger traffic (its especial pride) and the fast freight traffic (the mainstay of its shippers), and appeal was made to the reconstruction engineers. It was no slight appeal at that. Pittsburgh, handling 400,000 freight cars a month, was clogged, congested with such streams as had never before tried to crowd through that narrow neck of the Pennsylvania's bottle and the orders that went forth for relief were emphatic. Vice-presidents, general managers, superintendents and general superintendents, and engineers of every sort crowded into the president's office in Broad Street Station, and out of that conference the plans for an exclusively low-grade freight line from New York to Pittsburgh and for the traffic relief of Pittsburgh itself were born.