ABSTRACT
The railroads were in the vanguard of major wood consumers and their appetite for forest products was so great that one writer labeled them the "insatiable Juggernaut of the vegetable world." During the first half of the nineteenth century everything about the American railway was wooden. The track structure, stations, engine houses, bridges, snow sheds, water tanks, coaling stations, freight and passenger cars, locomotive fuel-even the brake shoes and rail joints. The composite track structure was barely adequate when new but a few seasons in the weather left it a hopeless ruin. To keep the locomotive and cars on the track, very broad, cupshaped wheels like gigantic spools or pulleys straddled the top contour of the pole rails. An uncritical review of the facts might suggest that the railroads' involvement with wood technology ended with the nineteenth century. Wood-burning locomotives vanished by the middle eighties; strap rail tracks were already gone by a quarter of a century.
