ANNUAL ADDRESS. III. 
six, and the sharpest curve is twelve degrees or four hundred and 
seventy-seven feet radius, There are steeper grades and sharper 
curves crossing the Rocky Mountains to Colorado, and the summit 
height is over 10,000 feet above sea-level. At Colorado the rail- 
way up Pikes’ Peak, which ascends to a height of about 14,000 
feet above sea-level, is constructed on the Abt system. The 
gradients contain some long stretches of one in four. The loco- 
motive used is of special construction, and there is a double rack, 
laid midway between the ordinary rails, into which gears a spur 
pinion carried on the engine. The speed attained is about five 
miles an hour. At Denver, on the Union Pacific Railway, there 
are some excellent examples of cheap railway construction, some 
of the cross sections consist of an earth road bed, which is used 
without ballast, where earth of a suitable character exists, both 
in cuttings and embankments ; other cross sections show ballast 
consisting of gravel, cinder, burnt clay or broken stone. The rails 
are of the ordinary American section, and weigh from forty to 
Seventy-five pounds per lineal yard, with angle fish-plates at the 
joints; the sleepers consist of pine or red spruce timber, spaced 
generally, about nineteen inches apart, centre to centre, and six- 
teen inches apart at the joints. ‘The formation is always thorougly 
drained, and in the earth road it is arched up forming a convex 
surface, which rapidly discharges the rainfall to the side drains. 
The abundance of cheap timber of suitable quality has resulted in 
a very free use of timber viaducts, not merely as flood openings, 
~ but for carrying the railway over depressions in places where we 
should use an ordinary embankment. Such timber viaducts are 
however, looked upon as a temporary expedient, and when the 
timber shows signs of decay they are filled in with earth and 
buried in the permanent embankment. 
The American railway in the portion of the country referred 
to is constructed at a cost much below that of Australian railways, 
yet railway travelling is quite as comfortable, which is due mainly 
to the special design of the locomotive engines and rolling stock. 
The Pullman Cars on passenger trains; and the long covered 
