For villages and cities, and for lands devoted or adapted to special purposes, an accurate estimate of the cost of reproduction of the right of way can be determined only by a specific investigation of the conditions in each community. While it is difficult to conceive all the activities and sentiments which have growth in, from, and of railway operation, as being in existence without the railway, it is only through such an assumption that one can estimate correctly the make-up of the items of cost of reproducing a railway as such railway may now exist. To assume that the railway, not existent for the purpose of estimating the cost of reproduction, will now receive the donations of land and moneys that were made half a century ago, is merely going back to a determination of what the road has actually cost; and that is contrary to the intent of the theory of the cost of reproduction. The conception of a parallel line is not correct, for it imposes thereby a further burden on properties which have already contributed to the public good, probably to an extreme extent, and gives an abnormal cost for right of way, as shown when a railway seeks to enlarge its terminals in a crowded community, or to find a new entrance into a populous city. So, too, in estimating on the formation of the roadway, one must consider the roadway to be reproduced as being obliterated—all cuts and borrow-pits refilled, and all embankments and spoil banks removed from the right of way—but all other lines of transportation, except the railway to be reproduced, must be considered as being in existence as they actually are at the date when the estimate of cost of reproduction is made, and that such other lines of transportation are available for bringing in machinery, tools, teams, materials, and supplies for the construction of the railway to be reproduced. It is only by such an assumption that the benefit of the improved means and methods of construction now prevalent can be obtained; but it is not permissible to estimate for the construction of a railway with different grades, alignment, roadbed, widths, or with different materials than that of the railway to be reproduced merely because such construction at this day might be actually cheaper or better than to construct it in exact duplication. For example, if the rock cuts on the roadway to be reproduced be only 18 ft. wide, with ¼:1 slopes, one must not figure on the greater economy of steam-shovel excavation, because the steam shovel cannot be worked in cuts of that width; nor can the spoil from such cuts be carried long distances to eliminate a possible solid-rock borrow originally made elsewhere, because long hauls are practicable in steam-shovel work, but wanting in excavations where the mule is the transportation force. So, too, it is not permissible to estimate on reinforced concrete bridges to take the place of more costly cut-stone arches, if cut-stone arches are the structures that have been actually built.