The Longest Run: Public Engineers and Planning in France

Abstract

"THERE IS NO COUNTRY IN THE WORLD where so small a proportion of the capital invested within the last forty years in canals and railroads has been wasted or where traveling is safer, or in which travel and trade are accommodated at more reasonable rates than in France." So Moncure Robinson told the American Philosophical Society in 1880. If his praise was suspect because he had studied in Paris over a half-century earlier, other leading American engineers assembled at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 had also admired the French transport exhibit. Whatever they thought of the layout of the main rail lines converging on Paris in the pattern known as the Legrand Star, they envied the monumental bridges, solid roadbeds, and especially the massive cuttings, fillings, and embankments French engineers had used to give their railroads the uniformly gentle grades and broad curves so rarely seen in America, where competing railway designs proliferated.' At the Paris Exposition of 1900, the results of central transport planning were obvious to visitors. Displays showed the main lines of the Legrand Star leading to Paris, with secondary and branch lines reaching out to virtually every town. While Britain had sacrificed its canals to the railroad, France had invested 2 billion francs in a waterway system intended to complement the railroad: the 4,000 kilometers of waterways standardized to accommodate the 300-ton Flemish barge relieved the railroads of 5 million kilometric tons of encumbering bulk-almost a third of total freight. (...)