They will put down two to three miles of this, and then I hope to see a great
many miles of it. Mr. Mellville, of Pittsburg, has been making experiments with
it and is now building a small section of it, but had to give it up until spring.
Mr. Mellville made some tests on a road of this kind. He makes it of angle iron



Stone — Phases of the Road Question. 19

and plate, but he has not come to the point of rolling rails for it. He has made
careful experiments regarding traction on it, and finds that it is only 2} pounds
to the ton, or about one-third of the ordinary load for traction on railways. He
had a wagon amounting to 2 J pounds to the ton, and it would pull to the weight
of three pounds. I found, when coming to talk about this in the newspapers,
other people were working on it in the United States. A gentleman named
Bliss, an engineer in Alliance, told me he had such a piece of road, and asked
me to come and see it. It was both cheap and efficient, apparently. It was
simply two eight-inch channels about ^ of an inch thick, or less than J of an
inch. The lightest kind of channel iron was used, and laid down in a soft spot
in an Alliance road, without any support underneath except mud, and no ties even
— not tied together at all. You could go to one end of the track and pick it up.
