Annette posted the follwoing on the Small Talk board:

The railway was built in the following stages: first, the surveyors, then the grading gangs that cut the trees down in the path marked by the surveyors, followed by the measuring gangs. After came the levelling gangs, followed by the topographers who recorded the type of terrain the line would be going through. Next it was the NAVVIES turn. The navvies were the construction workers that built a solid roadbed on which the trains would travel. They used picks to create drainage ditches and shovels to pack down two layers of crushed stone, called sub-ballast and ballast, that were hauled to the location by teams of horses and wagons. When they were finished, horses dragged a giant scraper across the surface of the ballast to make it flat for the laying of the rails.
So next time you walk across a railway track and hear the crushed rock under your feet you can think of the navvies in the CRT!!
Info taken from "Discovering Canada - The Railways" by Livesey and Smith


For more on navvies, see http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/navvies.htm

[This message has been edited by Auburn Annie (edited July 29, 2004).]

Annette posted the follwoing on the Small Talk board:

The railway was built in the following stages: first, the surveyors, then the grading gangs that cut the trees down in the path marked by the surveyors, followed by the measuring gangs. After came the levelling gangs, followed by the topographers who recorded the type of terrain the line would be going through. Next it was the NAVVIES turn. The navvies were the construction workers that built a solid roadbed on which the trains would travel. They used picks to create drainage ditches and shovels to pack down two layers of crushed stone, called sub-ballast and ballast, that were hauled to the location by teams of horses and wagons. When they were finished, horses dragged a giant scraper across the surface of the ballast to make it flat for the laying of the rails.
So next time you walk across a railway track and hear the crushed rock under your feet you can think of the navvies in the CRT!!
Info taken from "Discovering Canada - The Railways" by Livesey and Smith


For more on navvies, see http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/navvies.htm

[This message has been edited by Auburn Annie (edited July 29, 2004).]

you know i was just thinking. a the time of his TV performance of the song,and since the album that CRT was from had not been released yet, i wonder when people did buy the album the song was off of, did they expect to hear the sound of the rr men singing with Gord and the sound of them working on the rr as on the TV special. i doubt all of that was on the original recording and it may sound silly that people would think that but you never know sometimes.

you know i was just thinking. a the time of his TV performance of the song,and since the album that CRT was from had not been released yet, i wonder when people did buy the album the song was off of, did they expect to hear the sound of the rr men singing with Gord and the sound of them working on the rr as on the TV special. i doubt all of that was on the original recording and it may sound silly that people would think that but you never know sometimes.

Click on the the footage now you can no longer see the whole performance it's cut off to 32 minutes and it's been that way for sometime now. I wrote to them about it and they never replied to my email.

Click on the the footage now you can no longer see the whole performance it's cut off to 32 minutes and it's been that way for sometime now. I wrote to them about it and they never replied to my email.

I was going to post this on the Small Talk section but thought perhaps here would be more appropriette. http://www.railroadforums.com/forum/...ad.php?t=11919

I was going to post this on the Small Talk section but thought perhaps here would be more appropriette. http://www.railroadforums.com/forum/...ad.php?t=11919