In the summer of 1906, a laborer on the concrete foundation crew in Moodna Creek valley, in Orange County, New York, was laying the base course for one of the towers of a viaduct that would cross the valley at 193 feet above the stream when completed. Moodna Creek at the crossing was not a large river. It was a tree-lined valley stream passing through the broken highlands of the Hudson Highlands. Its banks were so steep that the railroad originally built through this region had been paying a grade penalty to cross it since 1851.
The worker pouring concrete in the summer of 1906 was working at the bottom of that stream, in the pit the foundation crew had opened to reach bearing material beneath the gravel and clay, in the heat the wooded valley trapped at the bottom of the creek through July and August, and in the conditions provided by the construction camps the contractor maintained along Erie Railroad’s main line for a temporary workforce. He was laying the foundation that would carry the tallest railroad bridge in New York State. The name of the worker pouring that concrete in the summer of 1906 exists in the construction records of the Erie Railroad’s Moodna Bridge project at the level those records required to track the cost of his labor. It does not exist in those records at the level required to track him as a human being.
This distinction between cost and person—between what the accounting of 1906 required to be recorded and what would have been needed to record an individual—is not incidental to the history of the Moodna Bridge. It is structural to it. It runs through the project the way the stream runs through the valley beneath everything built over it. The Moodna Bridge was built because the Erie Railroad had a grade problem, and it had that problem because it had built its main line across terrain that the engineering capacity of 1845 had treated differently than the engineering capacity of 1900 would have.
The Erie Railroad received its charter from New York State in 1832 and completed its main line from Piermont on the Hudson River to Dunkirk on Lake Erie in 1851. The route chosen by the surveyors headed west from the Hudson through the highlands of Orange County, crossed the Delaware River at Port Jervis, passed through the upper Delaware River valley above the Pocono Plateau, and ran west across the Southern Tier of New York to the lake. It was a route chosen to avoid competition from the older Erie Canal corridor to the north and to serve the southern counties of New York that the canal bypassed entirely. It was also a route across terrain that imposed operating costs on the railroad that the original construction decisions had not fully absorbed.
The highlands of Orange County between the Hudson Valley and the Delaware River crossing at Port Jervis are not a mountain range in the sense of the Alleghenies or the Blue Ridge. They are a dissected plateau, with the ridges and valleys of the Reading Prong of the New England Highlands running roughly northeast to southwest across the path the railroad had to follow west. Moodna Creek drains a large watershed west of the Hudson Highlands, and its valley cuts through the ridge line before turning south to join the Hudson near Newburgh. The location of the Erie main line’s crossing of Moodna Creek determined the grades locomotives would climb on both sides of the crossing.
The crossing at valley level was inexpensive to build. It was expensive to operate. A high crossing required a massive bridge, and that required capital the railroad had not spent in 1851. The original Erie main line crossed Moodna Creek at a point where the valley was open enough to build without a large bridge.
The grade penalty the early surveyors accepted was the slopes on either side of the crossing: the descent from the heights to the stream level, then the climb up the other side. The locomotives of 1851 weighed between 20 and 30 tons. The grades they could handle at reasonable speed while pulling trains were manageable grades. The operating costs of those grades, for those locomotives and the traffic Erie was running in 1851, were costs the railroad accepted when it built down into the valley and up the other side rather than spending capital on a high bridge.
By 1900, the locomotives the Erie Railroad used in freight service on its main line weighed between 80 and 120 tons. The freight goods Erie carried between Jersey City and the industrial cities of the Ohio Valley across the Orange County highlands in 1900 were the product of an economy that had seen continuous industrialization for five decades. The grades the early surveyors had accepted to save capital in 1845 were now facing heavier locomotives pulling longer and heavier trains, requiring extra costs for helper engines dedicated to pushing freight cars upgrade, reduced operating speeds across the grade sections, and continuous maintenance expenses for the fleet of helper locomotives that the grade required. The grade at Moodna Creek was not the only grade problem on the Erie main line through the highlands.
It was one of several. Together they represented the operating cost of a railroad whose infrastructure had been designed for the traffic conditions of 1851 while being asked to carry the traffic conditions of 1900. The Erie Railroad was not, in 1900, in a position where capital investment in grade reduction was easy. Erie had suffered financial difficulties for most of its existence.
The railroad’s board of directors and its financial managers had devoted much of the 1860s and 1870s to manipulating the company’s stock rather than maintaining its infrastructure. The years between 1866 and 1872 were the years of Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and James Fisk—years in which the Erie Railroad was used as an instrument of financial speculation on a scale that left the railroad in worse physical condition than any competitor of comparable traffic density. The tactics used in those years—printing convertible bonds to dilute the holdings of shareholders seeking control, bribing legislators in Albany to legalize that dilution retroactively, and using operating revenues to support speculative positions in the company’s own stock rather than replacing worn-out track and outdated equipment—were profitable for the men who ran them and ruinous for the railroad they occupied. Erie underwent a reorganization in 1875, was reorganized again in 1878, was placed in receivership in 1893, and was finally reorganized as the Erie Railroad Company in 1895.
Each reorganization addressed the railroad’s financial structure without fully addressing the infrastructure deficiencies accumulated through years of underinvestment. The management that took over after the 1895 reorganization recognized that the Erie main line would require substantial capital investment in its infrastructure to compete with the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad in the east-west freight traffic they were also carrying. The New York Central’s water-level route from New York to Chicago via Albany and Buffalo carried similar traffic on grades the mountainous Erie route could not match. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s main line from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and beyond carried the densest freight traffic in the United States.
The Erie main line through the Orange County highlands and the Southern Tier carried important freight. But it carried it on grades that penalized the railroad’s operating efficiency against its competitors with every train movement across the mountain sections. The grade reduction program developed by the Erie engineering department in the late 1890s and early 1900s was the engineering department’s response to the operating problem the railroad’s financial history had deferred for 30 years. It was not a single project.
It was a systematic relocation of the main line in several sections where the original design imposed the highest operating costs. The Moodna Creek section was central to this program. The solution the engineering department developed for the Moodna Creek crossing was a high bridge carrying the main line across the valley at the elevation the design required, eliminating the descent and ascent and the need for helper engines that had been part of Erie’s operating costs since 1851. The design produced by the Erie Railroad engineering department for the Moodna Creek crossing called for a steel bridge with a maximum height of 193 feet and a length of 3,200 feet from east abutment to west abutment.
The decision to build in steel rather than stone was not a considered institutional choice as the Pennsylvania Railroad had made at Rockville in 1899, when it specified granite stone arches for the Susquehanna crossing and committed to a structure it would build only once. The Erie Railroad in 1905 did not resemble the Pennsylvania Railroad of 1899 in institutional philosophy, financial position, or operating culture. Pennsylvania in 1899 was the largest corporation in the United States, calling itself the Standard Railroad of the World, preferring stone because it intended to build the Susquehanna crossing once and in materials capable of withstanding any future requirement beyond any planning horizon the engineering department might set. In 1905, Erie was a railroad reorganized to rebuild infrastructure decayed by decades of financial mismanagement, operating within a capital budget constrained by its recent financial history to create the grade reductions needed to compete.
High steel railroad bridge construction in 1905 was the method American engineering had mastered, what the structural steel industry could fabricate and supply at a price consistent with Erie’s capital program, and what contractors bidding on the work had already built in similar structures. The mountain railroads of the West had been building high steel bridges since the 1880s. The technique was proven. The economic feasibility was known.
Contractors understood the nature of the work. The design division divided the crossing into tower bents spaced at regular intervals across the valley floor. Each tower bent was a self-contained steel structure: four columns rising from a concrete base to deck level, braced horizontally and diagonally against lateral movement, carrying the truss that connected it to adjacent bents and supported the track on top. The integrated structural system—the concrete foundations below, the steel tower columns rising 193 feet, the deck trusses spanning between tower tops, and the train track above—was the system developed for high bridge construction on the western mountain railroads, applied by the Erie engineering department to Moodna Creek valley with modifications appropriate to the span lengths, heights, and load requirements specific to this crossing.
The engineering analyses performed by the department determined the dimensions of every component. The concrete foundations had to reach sufficient bearing material to support the tower weights without settling under the heaviest locomotives Erie operated. The tower columns had to carry the dead weight of the steel above them plus the live load of trains passing at operating speed, without dynamic amplification of that live load creating stresses exceeding the allowable capacity of the steel. The deck trusses spanning between tower tops had to carry the same combined dead and live loads in bending and shear, without deflecting enough to affect the track alignment geometry above them.
The engineers performing this analysis in 1905 worked with structural mechanics tools the bridge engineers of the 1850s had not possessed, drawing on test data on structural steel behavior under repeated loads produced by laboratories in the intervening decades, and on the operating experience of a railroad system that had been building and carrying steel bridges for 30 years. The specifications they produced determined the quantities and dimensions of every structural component. The purchasing department took those specifications to the structural steel mills of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, and to concrete aggregate suppliers and timber suppliers for the forms and shoring. Construction contracts went to contractors capable of providing the workforce and equipment to build what the specifications required, on the schedule Erie’s operating needs demanded.
The foundation work in Moodna Creek valley preceded the steel erection by a full construction season. The concrete base for each tower bent had to be excavated to bearing material, formed in timber, poured with Portland cement concrete mixed on site, and left to cure until it gained sufficient compressive strength before the first sections of steel columns were placed on it. The construction window was subject to the same seasonal constraints as foundation work in any northern river valley. The ground had to be unfrozen, the creek level controllable, and the work advanced far enough before winter ended the construction season to protect fresh concrete from frost damage.
The labor that performed the foundations at Moodna Creek in 1906 was the same class of labor that had built the pier foundations of the Rockville Bridge in Harrisburg six years before. It was Italian immigrant labor organized through the padrone system that had been supplying American railroad construction projects with Italian men since the mid-1880s. The men who dug the foundations and mixed and poured the concrete at Moodna Creek in 1906 had come to Orange County, New York, from the same agricultural communities of southern Italy and Sicily that had been losing their populations to the American construction labor market for 20 years. They came from Calabria, Campania, and Sicily, from communities where the agricultural economy that had sustained rural populations for generations had been collapsing since the 1880s under combined pressures of land consolidation, the phylloxera blight that destroyed the vineyards of the Mezzogiorno through that decade, and the structural poverty of a region the unified Italian state had absorbed economically without integrating it in any other meaningful way.
They moved toward the wages paid by American railroad construction work the way men move toward wages when livelihoods at home have failed: by the most direct available route, regardless of the cost of the journey. The wages paid by foundation, excavation, and concrete crews in the United States in 1906 to men willing to do work the labor market classified as unskilled were wages strong-bodied men who possessed neither American language nor American capital could earn. They were enough to survive. They were enough to send something home.
They were not enough to save in any meaningful way while their bodies were being spent in the work. The padrone who organized the foundation crews at Moodna Creek contracted with the Erie construction contractor at a fixed daily rate per man. He recruited them from the Italian neighborhoods of Atlantic port cities, and through his connections in the home regions of the men he supplied, arranged transportation to the construction site, housing in the construction camps the contractor maintained along the Erie main line in Moodna Creek valley, and supply from the camp store where the men bought food, tools, and necessities of living at a construction site in rural New York. The wage paid by the construction contractor went to the padrone.
The padrone paid the men what remained after the cost of camp housing he deducted from their wages, after the profit margin on goods he supplied from the camp store, and after the fees he kept for organizing and managing the arrangement. The net that reached the individual worker was what remained of the market rate after the intermediary had taken his share. The construction camps the padrone maintained for his men in Moodna Creek valley in 1906 were the housing railroad construction companies provided for temporary workforces in rural New York in the early twentieth century. They were adequate to keep the men near the work and fit to perform it.
Moodna Creek valley in Orange County is not an inhospitable climate in summer. It is a wooded upland valley, milder than the coastal cities, with a stream running through it. But the construction camps were not designed for comfort. They were designed to extract labor at the lowest possible housing cost.
The men in them were not in a howling wilderness. They were in a working rural region 20 miles northwest of Newburgh beside a major railroad line. They were also, in that region, in a particular social situation: men who had arrived without mastery of the language, without established community connections, without the documents American institutions used to determine individual status, and without the labor market alternatives that would have given them bargaining power over the conditions the padrone arrangement imposed. New York State labor law in 1906 provided these men no effective means of addressing the conditions created by the padrone system.
The reform of the padrone system, which labor organizers and immigrant advocacy groups had worked toward for two decades, had produced legislative attention and public awareness. It had not produced the structural change that would have altered the relationship between the construction contractor, the padrone, and the individual worker at the level of what actually reached the worker. The wage structure at Moodna Creek in 1906 was the wage structure produced by the construction labor economy of that year. The steel erection that followed the foundation work through 1907 and into 1908 was a different class of construction in a different class of time.
The ironworkers who connected the structural steel of the Moodna Bridge were not the same group of men who had dug the foundation pits. They were structural ironworkers, men who had learned to connect steel in the high places of previous bridge and viaduct work across the American railroad system, moving from project to project as that system’s need for high bridges emerged in new places. They were skilled craftsmen in a way the foundation workers were not classified as skilled, and their wages and their visibility in the construction records reflected that classification. The work of the ironworker gangs on the steel tower bridge was receiving the prefabricated structural members and connecting them at the heights the design required.
The column sections for the tower bents arrived at the construction site on the Erie main line. The railroad company building the bridge also provided the rail connection that carried the steel to the site, where it was unloaded and staged near the structure. A derrick mounted on the growing structure itself lifted each column section from the staging area to the connection point above. The ironworker at the connection point received the swinging section, guided it into the bolt holes in the base below, and held it in place while the riveting crews drove the rivets that secured it.
The sequence repeated tower by tower, section by section, from base level up through 193 feet of tower height to the deck truss connections at the top. The men receiving the column sections and driving the connection rivets at 150 and 190 feet above the floor of Moodna Creek valley in the summer of 1907 were working in conditions no modern safety standard would consider acceptable. There was no fall protection of the kind modern practice requires. The work platforms used by the ironworkers in erecting the steel structure in 1907 were limited by what the construction sequence and the structure’s geometry permitted, not by what the safety of the men on them required.
The risk of a piece of steel swinging into the connection point without precise control imposed by the nature of the weight and the dynamics of the lines was a risk the ironworker at the connection point managed through experience, attention, and the particular physical confidence in high work that experienced ironworkers of that era had developed through years of exactly this kind of work. This was not a risk that New York State labor law in 1907 required an Erie Railroad construction contractor to document or mitigate in the forms a modern construction project would generate. The Moodna Bridge construction records reflect the ironworker gangs at a higher level than the foundation crews. The names of the ironworker foremen are recorded.
The gang production records, the members installed, the connections completed, the trusses placed—all are recorded with the precision required by the accounting of skilled trades in 1907. The individual ironworkers below the foreman level exist in the records at the level the accounting conventions of the trade preserved for them. They are more visible than the Italian foundation workers. But they are not visible at a level that permits a complete list of the names of the men who connected the steel of the Moodna Bridge from base level to bridge deck height in 1907 and 1908.
The bridge was completed and opened to Erie Railroad traffic in 1908. The first trains to cross it were the main-line freight trains Erie operated between Jersey City and the Ohio Valley cities. The Consolidation and Prairie locomotives that handled most of that service in 1908 crossed Moodna Creek valley on the new high track at the speed the reduced grade permitted, without needing a helper engine as the old route had required, imposing on the new steel and the new concrete foundations the loads the structural analysis had defined. The bridge towers did not deflect detectably.
The foundation settlements that occurred as the structure took its first live loads were within the allowable limits set by the engineering specifications. The deck trusses carried the trains without the track geometry showing any distortions that would have resulted from insufficient stiffness of the supporting structure. The structure designed by the engineering department and built by the construction crews performed exactly as the engineering analysis had predicted. The Erie Railroad operated its main line over the Moodna Bridge from 1908 onward through the full development of twentieth-century railroad motive power.
The heavy Mikado locomotives of the United States Railroad Administration, assigned by the federal government to Erie and other major railroads during World War I, crossed Moodna Creek valley at the speed the grade permitted. The Berkshire H-class locomotives Erie developed for its main-line freight service in the 1920s—the first true Berkshire, with a wheel arrangement designed by the Erie engineering department specifically for the grades and traffic of its main line—crossed the Moodna Bridge in the service for which they were designed, outperforming the locomotives they replaced. The tower bents, supported by the concrete the foundation workers had placed in 1906 and connected column by column by the ironworkers in 1907, carried the full development of Erie steam freight power for four decades without any structural damage attributable to overloading. The transition from steam to diesel in the 1950s brought locomotives that imposed their loads on the structure without the reciprocating piston and connecting rod forces that steam power had transmitted to the track and through it to the bridge structure.
The nature of the loads was different. They were not smaller. The freight tonnage Erie carried over the Moodna Bridge in 1955 was heavier in total train weight than what it carried in 1908, because the freight cars operating in 1955 were heavier and larger than the cars of 1908. The tower bents carried what the railroad brought to them.
The Erie Railroad entered receivership in 1938, was reorganized, and continued operating as the Erie Railroad through the 1950s. It merged with the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in 1960 to form the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. The Erie Lackawanna went bankrupt in 1972, a victim of the broader collapse of northeastern railroad profitability that brought down the Penn Central, the Reading, the Central of New Jersey, the Lehigh Valley, and the Ann Arbor within a single decade. The federal government consolidated the operating assets of the bankrupt northeastern railroads under Conrail in 1976.
Conrail operated the former Erie main line through Moodna Creek valley from 1976 to 1999. Norfolk Southern acquired the tracks of the former Erie main line through the Conrail breakup in 1999, and operates the Moodna Creek crossing today. The railroad crossing the Moodna Bridge daily in the second decade of the twenty-first century is the legal heir—through generations of receivership, merger, acquisition, and federal intervention—of the Erie Railroad chartered by New York State in 1832 and completed to Lake Erie in 1851. The bridge the reorganized Erie paid for in 1905 at the Moodna Creek crossing still stands on that main line.
The Norfolk Southern freight trains carried today are the traffic of the eastern industrial economy the Erie Railroad built its system to carry: the same categories of freight, manufactured goods, raw materials, and intermodal containers carrying the products of an economy the founders of Erie could not have imagined, over the same main-line corridor between the Hudson Valley and the Ohio Valley interior. If you stand in Moodna Creek valley in Orange County, New York, and look at the structure crossing it, you see a steel bridge 193 feet high, stretching 3,200 feet from east abutment to west abutment. The steel has the surface it acquires after more than a century of weathering in a wooded New York valley. The paint maintenance cycles required for railroad bridges have preserved its serviceability, but the steel itself carries a visible record of a century of Pennsylvania winter storms and summer humidity, the slow surface oxidation of a structure that has performed its work without interruption since 1908.
The concrete foundations beneath the tower columns have been in the ground since 1906. The stream runs beneath the structure the same way it has run since the first Erie trains crossed it. A Norfolk Southern freight train on the former Erie main line gives you enough warning through its sound in the valley to locate the bridge before it crosses. The sound arrives from the east and deepens as the train approaches the valley edge and mounts the deck of the structure.
The locomotive, carrying 200 tons of diesel power, crosses the valley in about two and a half minutes—the time a freight train at normal speed takes to cover the 3,200 feet of the steel bridge. The tower columns do not respond visibly, the concrete foundations do not move, and the creek below continues at the level the season determines, indifferent to the crossing that has taken place above it for 115 years. A historical marker stands at the Moodna Bridge site. The marker records the structure’s height and length and notes its status as the tallest railroad bridge in New York State.
The Erie Railroad is named on the marker as the builder. The engineering department that designed the steel bridge is represented by the institution that built it and whose corporate successors still operate it. The Italian workers who dug the foundations of Moodna Creek valley in 1906, who mixed and placed the Portland concrete on which the towers rest, are not named on the marker. The padrone contractors who organized those workers, transported them to Orange County, housed them in the construction camps along the Erie main line, supplied them from the camp store, and administered the wage structure between what the construction contractor paid per man and what reached the worker after deductions for housing, store margins, and padrone fees, exist in the Erie Railroad construction accounts at the level those accounts required to track aggregate payments to subcontractors.
The individual men below the padrone level exist in those accounts at the level required to track costs, not at the level required to track human beings. The ironworkers who connected the steel structure of the tower columns and the bridge trusses at 150 and 190 feet above the floor of Moodna Creek valley in 1907 and 1908, the men who guided the swinging column sections into the connection points on scaffold platforms without fall protection recognized by any current safety regulation, and who drove the rivets that fastened the steel together while standing on the structure they were building above the creek, exist in the construction records at the level that their professional status in 1907 made visible. Their foremen’s names are recorded. Their gang production numbers are recorded.
The individual men below the foreman level appear as men always appear in construction records of that era, at the level the labor market and accounting conventions of the early twentieth century required. The historical records of the Erie Railroad passed through the Erie Lackawanna, then through federal receivership and Conrail, and now reside in several repositories. The National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution holds parts of the Erie engineering archive. Whether the daily time books, crew lists, and individual labor records of the Moodna Bridge construction still survive in accessible form, and what level of detail they originally preserved, is a question the engineering histories of the structure have not fully addressed.
The engineering drawings still exist in good condition. The structural calculations still exist. The steel purchase records survive at the level Erie’s financial management required to track expenditures against budget. The men who poured the concrete on which those tower columns stand survive in those records as an aggregate cost of their labor.
They exist in those records as a line item in the construction budget. They do not exist in those records as human beings. The bridge still stands. The trains still cross it.
The concrete the Italian workers placed in the foundation excavations of Moodna Creek valley in 1906 is still in the ground beneath the tower columns. The steel the ironworkers connected in 1907 and 1908 is still in the towers and trusses above the creek. The grade problem the Erie engineering department solved with the Moodna Bridge has been solved for 115 years. The trains cross the valley at the speed the flattened grade permits, without the need for helper locomotives.
The operating costs imposed by the original grade have vanished since 1851. The men who laid the groundwork for that solution in Moodna Creek valley in 1906, for the two construction seasons the work required, left as soon as it was done. The name of the contractor who supplied them appears in the contractor’s records in the form the system required for documentation. The men that contractor supplied exist in the records as an aggregate cost of their labor.
They are listed in the records as one of the project’s costs. But they are not listed in the records as human beings. The concrete they poured still stands in the ground. The tower bents still stand above it.
The bridge is still there.
