Talpa

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m. A PRACTICAL BEGINNING. It was urged by Mr. Brunei, as a justification tin more attention and expense in the laying of the rails of the Great Western, than had been ever thought of upon previously constructed lines, that all the embankments and cuttings, and earth-works and Stations, and Law and...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: m. A PRACTICAL BEGINNING. It was urged by Mr. Brunei, as a justification tin more attention and expense in the laying of the rails of the Great Western, than had been ever thought of upon previously constructed lines, that all the embankments and cuttings, and earth-works and Stations, and Law and Parliamentary expenses?in fact, the whole of the outlay encountered in the formation of a Railway, had for its main and ultimate object a perfectly smooth and level line of rail; that to turn stingy at this point, just when you had arrived at the great ultimatum of the whole proceedings, viz: the Iron Wheel-track, was a sort of saving which evinced a want of true perception of the great object of all the labor that had preceded it. It may seem curious to ourexperiences, in these days, that such a doctrine conld ever have needed to be enforced by argument; yet no one will deem it wonderful who has personally witnessed the unaccountable and ever new difficulty of getting proper attention paid to the leveling of the bottom of a Drain, and the laying of the tiles in that continuous line, where one single depression or irregularity, by collecting the water at that spot year after year, tends toward the eventual stoppage of the whole drain, through two distinct causes, the softening of the foundation underneath the sole, or tile flange, and the deposit of soil inside the tile from the water collected at the spot, and standing there after the rest had run off. Every depression, however slight, is constantly doing this mischief in every drain where the fall is but trifling; and if to the two consequences above mentioned, we may add the decomposition of the tile itself by the action of Water long stagnant within it, we may deduce that every tile-drain laid with these imperfections in the ...