Fortunately the detachments of the Construction Corps which escaped were so distributed that even before Hood had left the road two strong working parties were at work, one at each end of the break at Big Shanty, and this gap of ten miles was closed, and the force ready to move to the great break of twenty-five miles in length, north of Resaca, as soon as the enemy had left it. The destruction by Hood's army of our depôts of supplies compelled us to cut nearly all the cross-ties required to relay this track and to send a distance for rails. The cross-ties were cut near the line of the road and many of them carried by hand to the track, as the teams to be furnished for hauling them did not get to the work until it was nearly complete. The rails used on the southern end of the break had to be taken up and brought from the railroads south of Atlanta, and those for the northern end were mostly brought from Nashville, nearly 200 miles distant. Notwithstanding all the disadvantages under which the labour was performed, this twenty-five miles of track was laid, and the trains were running over it in seven and a half days from the time the work was commenced. Concluding, however, that it would be unwise to depend on the railway during his further march to the sea, Sherman collected at Atlanta, by means of the restored lines, the supplies he wanted for 600,000 men, sent to the rear all the men and material no longer required, and then, before starting for Savannah, destroyed sixty miles of track behind him in so effectual a manner that it would be impossible for the Confederates--especially in view of their own great lack, at this time, of rails, locomotives and rolling stock--to repair and utilise the lines again in any attempted pursuit. It was, in fact, as much to his advantage now to destroy the railways in his rear as it had previously been to repair and rebuild them. All through Georgia, for the 300 miles from Atlanta to Savannah (where he was able to establish communications with the Federal fleet), Sherman continued the same tactics of railway destruction; and he resumed them when his army, now divided into three columns, turned northward to effect a junction with Grant at Richmond. On this northward march, also, there was no need for Sherman to make a direct attack on Charleston. By destroying about sixty miles of track in and around Branchville--a village on the South Carolina Railroad which formed a junction where the line from Charleston branched off in the directions of Columbia and Augusta respectively--one of Sherman's columns severed Charleston from all its sources of supply in the interior, and left the garrison with no alternative but to surrender. Commenting on this event, Vigo-Rouissillon remarks, in his "Puissance Militaire des États-Unis d'Amérique":--