Expeditious work.
Allusion has already been made by one of our contemporaries to the possibly unexampled energy and promptness with which the Virginia and Tennessee railroad has been repaired and put in running order after the extensive injuries done to it by the
Yankee raids.
Colonel R. L. Owen, the
President of the company, has laid the company and the public under obligation for the successful manner in which he has directed the affairs of the road in the trying emergency.
The following is a more detailed statement than we have yet given of the repairs alluded to above:
There have been in the past year six different raids, destroying the greater part of the bridges and depots on the road — those of May and June burning all the depots but three between
Lynchburg and
Wytheville, (one hundred and thirty-five miles）, and burning all the bridges from
Lynchburg to Salern, together with those between
Dublin and
Christiansburg.
The total length of bridges destroyed was upwards of four thousand lineal feet.
One of these, over
New river, was eight hundred feet long, fifty-six feet above the water of the river from five to twelve feet deep.
This was re-built of green timber, cut from the woods, in
nineteen days. The bridge over Little Otter, seven hundred and forty- five feet long and ninety-six feet high, was rebuilt also in nineteen days in the same manner. --One over Big Otter, four hundred and fifty feet long and eighty-five feet high; one at
Elk creek, seventy-three feet high, and all the smaller bridges, were re-built of green timber, and the track which had been torn up in several places, in one place for eight miles, and all the cross-ties burnt, the rails bent, burnt and broken, by mechanics detailed for that purpose, were straightened and re-laid upon new cross-ties, amounting to eighteen thousand or twenty thousand, and the water-tanks, &c., re-built, and the whole road running in sixty day!
This cost the company about half a million of dollars, and, with the exception of a company of sappers and miners, was done by the company's own hands and with their money.
