The line between a clever hybrid design solution and a Rube-Goldbergesque kludge isn’t thin: it’s non-existent. What looks like a clever mix of design elements at one time or for one purpose may look like a mess at another time or when the goals change. The question about any design, therefore, is whether it made sense when implemented. Were the goals achieved?
The picture above is not a flooded railroad. It’s an inclined plane, a way to get canal boats past hills without using a flight of locks. Old canal boats were small and relatively light, and could be hauled up the plane while sitting in what was effectively a railroad flatcar. This idea has been used since antiquity, but was rediscovered during the UK’s eighteenth-century canal-building spree. Use of this idea in the US followed a little later.
There were a number of short, mostly level-ground canals building in the US before 1820. It’s hard to overstate how wild the Erie Canal (built 1817-1825) was in the context of the country’s existing canals: it was over 360 miles long versus the roughly 30-mile routes that were already built. While the Erie Canal had a 600-foot drop from Lake Erie down to the Hudson River (at sea level), te slope was fairly gradually because of, among other natural land features, the Mohawk River valley. The success of the canal spawned similar projects in areas with less-good geography. The Pennsylvania Canal, for example, required inclined planes to get past the spine of the Allegheny Mountains. The entire issue became moot later in the century as railroad superseded canals.
The picture above is the Morris and Essex Canal, connecting the Delaware and Hudson Rivers across the width of New Jersey. For comparison to Erie, it had 900 feet of elevation change (in the middle, rather than between its sea-level endpoints) in about 100 miles of length. Rather than have a lot of locks in a short distance, the designers went for an inclined plane. The picture above shows the bottom at one end. Here’s a boat in the process of being hauled up the plane in 1900:
From a modern perspective, there’s a all sorts of things wrong with this idea. Hauling the boats out of the water increases the rate at which they age, as they are subjected to stresses other than the uniform hull pressure of water. Switching back and forth between canal and inclined plane is an interruption in the schedule, which matters if the canal is busy (as the M&E was in its early years). The ropes could break and did, resulting in smashed boats and lost cargoes. Maintenance of the inclined planes is of a completely different type than maintenance of the canal proper, and so greatly increased the work required. And modern engineers, exposed to the ideas of network logistics, prefer seamless transitions to abrupt changes.
On the other hand, it worked. And without inclined planes, a number of mid-1800s canals would not have worked.
Hybrid or kludge? Pick your perspective and you have your answer.
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