"The Path Between the Seas"

It's hard to comprehend all the work that was done:

• The creation of Gatun Lake would mean that.. an area as large as the island of Barbados would vanish under water.. .. The Panama Railroad, nearly everything along the path of the French, not to mention most of the new towns being built , would be lost beneath the lake.
• If all the material from the canal were placed in one solid shaft with a base the dimension of a city block, it would tower nearly 100,000 feet - nineteen miles - in the air.
• The overriding problem remained Panama itself - the climate, the land, the distance from all sources of supply.
• Perhaps as extraordinary as anything that can be said is that the work could not have been done any faster or more efficiently in our own day.. everything ran on rails. And because of the mud and rain, no other method would have worked half so well.
• Night track crews set off surface charges of dynamite to make way for new spurs for the shovels, while coal trains servicing the shovels rumbled in , their headlights playing steadily and eerily up and down the Cut until dawn.
• Lord Bryce called (Culebra Cut) the greatest liberty ever taken with nature.
• Construction of the canal would consume more than 61 mil pounds of dynamite, a grater amount of explosive energy than had been expended in all the nations wars until that time.
• About 160 trains a day were running in and out of the Cut, and the degree of planning needed to handle such traffic can be further appreciated when it is taken into account that most of the track had to be shifted - removed, replaced, relocated - time and again.
• The track shifter .. was a huge crane-like contraption that could hoist a while section of track - rails, ties, and all -and swing it in either direction.
• The shovel never had to move; as much as it dug, the slide replenished.
• It was as if the flying buttresses had been removed from the wall of a Gothic cathedral: the exposed wall of the Cut simply buckled outward under its own load and fell.
• The walls of the Panama locks were poured from overhead, bucket by bucket, into gigantic forms. And within those forms there had to be still other forms to create the different culverts and tunnels.. Everything had to be created first in the negative.
• The advantage of such an overhead delivery system was that the work area could be kept free of everything except the essential forms within which the concrete was poured.
• Yet, however comparatively crude the level of theoretical technology may have been regarding the material, the results were extraordinary. After sixty years of service the concrete of the locks and spillways would be in near-perfect condition.

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