Excerpt from American Railroad Bridges
The existing and the accepted types of bridges in use to-day on American railroads being the results of a true evolution, no attempt to present them intelligently would be complete without a brief sketch of the past history of bridge; in America.
The rapid development of the new world and the enormous number of bridges that has been built within the limits of the nineteenth century, have furnished us with a wide experience, from which we have been able to select the good and reject much that was bad or undesirable.
The pioneer life, not only of the earlier settlers, but of each genera tion to the present day, has developed to a high degree the energies, ingenuity and self-reliance of the American people. These pioneers were compelled to be men of all trades. Their limited resources and the lack of time or opportunity to seek for past precedents, impelled them to solve each problem anew. They, thought with vigor and were not fettered with the trammels of science, before they were capable of ex erting their mental faculties to advantage, as Sir Joseph Banks wrote to Thomas Paine in 1788.[from transactions or american society or CIVIL engineers.
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