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I didn't quite follow all that, but I grew up in North Dakota when the Great Northern still stopped in little farm communities; I would ride the train 30 miles to visit my aunt and uncle who ran the hotel across the street from the depot. I remember the circus train (RB,B&B) coming to town in 1950 or so.
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Your little biopic started me on a new train of thought, tsuwm, one which led me to discover that I have an incredibly tenuous connection to Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. It turns out that his father and my grandfather worked for the same railway company, Northwestern Railways, at the same time. While this might seem to be grasping at illusory straws, this sort of link is par for the course in New Zealand. Whenever anything of note happens involving anyone of note, our media will bend themselves into all sorts of tantric contortions in attempt to establish a NZ link to the event, many of which connections are much less substantial than my deep abiding karmic bond with the great physicist.
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There's actually a connection between canals and railroads, at least topographically. Within a few hundred yards of my house here in the Denver area there is a canal called the High Line Canal. It meanders some 75 miles from where the South Platte River exits the mountains on the SW side of Denver all the way here to Aurora, where it finally disappears in the plains a bit NE of where I live. The settlers built the canal by hand to carry water for irrigation about a hundred years ago. It's still in use. I cannot imagine how they built it, but it follows a line that is a gentle drop from the mountains all the way to here, which is only about 25 miles as the crow flies.
But how does this equate to railroads? My five year old is a train freak, and I take him on train rides occasionally. Two years ago we took a narrow guage line from Chama NM to Antonito CO. The last third of it was across the plains. That train followed the same sort of line that the High Line Canal follows. Basically the path of least steepness. It was easier and cheaper to do this than to run in a straight line, because they would have had to fill in dips and cut through hills. Trains have a physical limit on how steep a slope they can climb.
TEd
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Yes, roman engineers and industrial revolution engineers both had the same problems to solve, and came up with often very similar solutions-- Most of the advance in bridge building (not all) came from railroad engineers working out solutions for strong, (trains are heavy) simple (workman where not always literate--or if they were, not always in English or another common language.) flexible (so the same solution could be refitted to a variety of terrains) trestles.
They also had some of the worst disasters. The Tacoma Narrows bridge stand out-- but there have been so many failures of railroad bridges that i am sure everyone on this board can site one local to them (if you define local as 100 miles and are willing to back 100 years), or one that impacted there family...
but getting back to Words-- why are railroad bridges always called trestles? Is a trestle a specific style of railroad bridge- and non rail road people like me just use the term generically (and incorrectly) ?
NY has arched bridges, and swing bridges, and drawbridges, of course our wonderful suspension bridges-- Brooklyn is great--I can see it from windows at work--not my window-- (i don't have one)but George Washington is my personal favorite.. but RR bridges-- all of them are trestles..
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