The transportation of the spoil from Culebra Cut was a tremendous job. A large percentage of it was hauled out in Lidgerwood flat cars. Twenty-one cars made up the average Lidgerwood train. It required about 140 locomotives to take care of the spoil, and the average day saw nearly 3,700 cars loaded and hauled out of the cut. In a single year 1,116,286 carloads of material were hauled out. There were 75 trains in constant operation, for each 2-1/2 miles of track in the Central Division, which was approximately 32 miles long. A huge steam shovel, taking up 5 yards of material at a mouthful, would load one of these trains in less than an hour with some 400 yards of material. Then the powerful locomotive attached to it, assisted by a helper engine, would pull the train out of the cut, and then, unassisted, would haul it to the dumping ground some 12 miles or more away. [Illustration: AVERAGE SHAPE AND DIMENSIONS OF CULEBRA CUT] Arriving near the scene of the dump, another engine, having in front of it a huge horizontal steam windlass mounted on a flat car, was hooked on the rear end of the train. Then the locomotive which had brought the train to the dump was uncoupled and moved away, and in its stead there was attached an empty flat car, on which there was a huge plow. A long wire cable was stretched from the big windlass at the other end of the train and attached to this plow. As the drum of the windlass began to turn it gradually drew the plow forward over the 21 cars, plowing the material off as it went forward. The cars were equipped with a high sideboard on one side and had none at all on the other. A flat surface over which the plow could pass from car to car was made by hinging a heavy piece of sheet steel to the front end of each car and allowing it to cover the break between that car and the next, thus affording a practically continuous car floor over 800 feet long. The operation of unloading 400 yards of material with this plow seldom required more than 10 minutes. After the plow had finished its work it left a long string of spoil on one side of the track which must be cleared away. So another plow, pushed by an engine, attacked the spoil and forced it down the embankment. This process of unloading and spreading the material was kept up until the embankment became wide enough to permit the track to be shifted over. Here another especially designed machine, the track shifter, was brought into play. It was a sort of derrick mounted on a flat car, and with it the track shifters were able to pick up a piece of track and lift it over to the desired position. With this machine a score of men could do the work that without it would have required a gang of 600 men. In addition to the Lidgerwood dirt trains there were a large number of trains made up of steel dump cars which were dumped by compressed air, and still other trains made up of small hand-dumped cars, and each class found its own peculiar uses.