The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's HandbookBoulnois, H. Percy (Henry Percy)
Science
The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's Handbook
Boulnois, H. Percy (Henry Percy)
Municipal engineering; Sanitary engineering
[10] Experiments made by the direction of the French Government on the
tramway between Sèvres and Versailles, showed that a horse on a level
tramway draws three-and-a-half times the weight, at the same speed and
with the same expenditure of power, that he can do on an ordinary
road. Up a gradient of 1 to 100, he is capable of drawing 2·25 times
the weight he can do up the same gradient on an ordinary road, and up
a gradient of 1 to 25 he can draw one-and-a-half times the load he can
do under similar circumstances on the ordinary road.
[11] ‘Report on accidents to Horses on Carriageway Pavements,’ by
William Haywood (1874).
CHAPTER V.
MACADAMISED ROADWAYS.
I do not propose in this work to speak of any of the engineering
operations necessary to lay out or construct long lines of connecting
roadways, as that is a duty which seldom falls to a town surveyor to
perform, and there are a great number of treatises and books upon the
subject already published. The object of this chapter will be to give
some information and hints upon the construction and maintenance of what
are known as macadamised roads, suitable for urban and suburban traffic.
There can be little doubt that roadways of this description are
expensive luxuries where the cost of their maintenance, owing to
excessive traffic or other causes, exceeds 2_s._ per square yard per
annum, but they are often necessary luxuries when the requirements of
the locality are considered, a point to which I drew attention in the
preceding chapter upon “Traffic.” For purposes of what may be styled
“pleasure traffic,” macadamised roadways are unequalled when well
constructed and maintained, but there are many objections to them which
will be considered in their place in this chapter.
The word macadamised is, as is well known, derived from one John Loudon
Macadam, who in the year 1816 first took up the question of putting
broken metal upon a road instead of the boulders previously used.[12]
His name, being rather a peculiar one, has been attached to this
description of road ever since.
As a matter of fact, the “macadamised” roadways of the present day are
constructed after a method introduced by Thomas Telford as an
improvement upon Macadam’s principles, and a perusal of the two
following specifications will, I think, show that there is not very much
difference between the method introduced by Telford and that followed at
the present time.
_Specification of a Roadway as designed by Thomas Telford more than
fifty years ago._[13]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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