Panama Canal Railway - Rebuild 1904–1912 For The Panama Canal

Rebuild 1904–1912 For The Panama Canal

The construction of the Panama Canal was envisioned by John Frank Stevens, chief American railroad construction engineer, as a massive earth moving project using the extended railroad system. Many tracks were added temporally to transport the sand and rock from the excavation. Stevens used the biggest and heaviest duty equipment available. The French equipment was nearly all judged obsolete, worn out, too light duty and nearly all their railroad equipment was not built for heavy duty use. Ironically, some of this French equipment was melted down and converted into medals presented to men working on the Panama Canal. Also, since the 1855 route followed the Chagres valley (which would become the Gatun Lake) the route had to change. The new railroad, starting in 1904, had to be massively upgraded with heavy duty double tracked rails over most of the line to accommodate all the new rolling stock of about 115 heavy duty locomotives, 2,300 dirt spoils railroad cars and 102 railroad mounted steam shovels brought in from the United States and elsewhere. The steam shovels were some of the largest in the world when they were introduced. The new permanent railroad closely paralleled the canal where it could and was moved and reconstructed where it interfered with the canal work. In addition to moving and expanding the railroad where needed, considerable track additions and extensive machine shops and maintenance facilities were added and other up grades were made to the rail system. These extensive improvements to the system were started at about the same time the extensive mosquito abatement projects were undertaken to make it safer to work in Panama. When the mosquitoes were under control much of the railroad was ready to go to work.

The railway greatly assisted the building of the Panama Canal. Besides hauling all the millions of tons of men, equipment and supplies the railroad did much more. Essentially all of the hundreds of millions of cubic yards of material removed from the required canal cuts were broken up by explosives, loaded by steam shovels, mounted on one set of railroad tracks, and loaded onto rail cars and hauled out by locomotives pulling the spoils cars running on parallel tracks. Most of the cars carrying the dirt spoils were wooden flat cars lined with steel floors that used a crude but amazingly effective unloading device—the Lidgerwood system. The railroad cars had only one side and steel aprons bridged the spaces between the cars. The rock and dirt was first blasted loose by explosives. Two sets of tracks were then built or moved up to where the loosened material lay. The steam shovels, moving on one set of tracks, picked up the loosened dirt and then piled it on the flat cars traveling on a parallel set of tracks. The dirt was piled high up against the one closed side of the car. The train moved forward as the cars were filled until all cars were filled. A typical train had twenty dirt cars arranged as essentially one long boxcar. On arrival of the train at one of the approximately 60 different dumping grounds a three-ton steel plow was put on the last car (or a car carrying the plow was attached as the last car) and a huge winch with a braided steel cable stretching the length of all cars was attached to the engine. The winch, powered by the train’s steam engine, pulled the plow the length of the dirt loaded train by winching up the steel cable. The plow scraped the dirt off the railroad cars allowing the entire train load of dirt cars to be unloaded in about ten minutes or less. The plow and winch were then detached for use on another train. Another plow, mounted on a steam engine, then plowed the dirt spoils away from the track. When the fill got large enough the track was relocated on top of the old fill to allow almost continuous unloading of new fill with a minimum of effort. When the steam shovels or dirt trains needed to move to a new section, techniques were developed by William Bierd, former head of the Panama Railroad, to pick up large sections of track and their attached ties by large steam powered cranes and relocate them intact—without disassembling and rebuilding the track. A dozen men could move a mile of track a day—the work previously done by up to 600 men. This allowed the tracks used by both the steam shovels and dirt trains to be quickly moved to where ever it needed to go. While constructing the Gaillard Cut, about 160 loaded dirt trains went out of the cut daily, and returned empty—a train about every one and half minutes of the day.

The railroads, steam shovels, enormous steam powered cranes, rock crushers, cement mixers, dredges, and pneumatic power drills used to drill holes for explosives (about 30,000,000 pounds (14,000 t) were used) were some of the new pieces of construction equipment used to construct the canal. Nearly all this new equipment was built by new, extensive machine building technology developed and built in the United States by companies such as the Joshua Hendy Iron Works. In addition the canal used large refrigeration systems for making ice, extensive large electrical motors to power the pumps and controls on the canal's locks and other new technology. They built extensive electrical generation and distribution systems—one of the first wide scale uses of large electrical motors. Electrical powered donkey engines pulled the ships through the locks on railroad tracks laid parallel to the locks. New technology, not available in the 1850s, allowed massive earth cuts and fills to be used on the new railroad that were many times larger than those done in the original 1851-1855 construction. The rebuilt, much improved and often rerouted Panama Railway continued along side the new canal and across Gatun Lake. The railroad was completed in its final configuration in 1912, two years before the canal, at a cost of $9,000,000--$1,000,000 more than the original. After World War II, few additional improvements were made to the Panama Railway, and it declined after the U.S. government handed over control to the government of Panama in 1979.