In the summer of 1906, a laborer on the concrete foundation crew in Moodna Creek Valley, Orange County, New York, was laying the base for one of the towers of a railroad bridge that would cross the valley 193 feet above the creek when completed. Moodna Creek at the crossing point is not a large river. It is a tree-covered valley stream that passes through the cut-up highlands of the Hudson Highlands. Its banks are so steep that the railroad originally built through this region had been paying a grade penalty to cross it since 1851.
The laborer pouring concrete in the summer of 1906 was working at the bottom of that creek, in the pit the foundation crew had opened to reach load-bearing material beneath the gravel and clay, in the heat that the wooded valley trapped at the creek bottom through July and August, and in the conditions provided by the construction camps the contractor maintained along the Erie Railroad’s main line for temporary labor. He was laying the foundation that would carry the tallest railroad bridge in New York State. The name of the laborer 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 work. It does not exist in those records at the level required to track him as a human being.
That distinction—between cost and person, between what 1906 accounting required to be recorded and what would have been required 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 creek runs through the valley beneath everything built above it. The Moodna Bridge was built because the Erie Railroad had a grade problem, and it had that grade problem because it had built its main line through terrain that the engineering capacity of 1845 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 the surveyors chose ran west from the Hudson through the highlands of Orange County, crossing the Delaware River at Port Jervis, passing through the upper Delaware River valley above the Pocono Plateau, and heading west through 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 through terrain that imposed costs on railroad operations that the original construction decisions did not fully absorb.
The highlands of Orange County between the Hudson Valley and the Delaware River crossing at Port Jervis are not a mountain range in the familiar sense of the Alleghenies or the Blue Ridge. They are a dissected plateau, where the hills and valleys of the Reading Prong region of the New England Highlands run roughly northeast to southwest across the path the railroad had to follow westward. Moodna Creek drains a large watershed west of the Hudson Highlands and cuts its valley through the ridge line before turning south to empty into the Hudson River near Newburgh. The location of the Erie main line’s crossing of Moodna Creek determined the grade the locomotives would climb on both sides of the crossing.
Crossing at valley level was cheap to build. It was expensive to operate. Crossing at high level required building a massive bridge. 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 accessible enough to build without a major bridge. The grade penalty the early surveyors accepted was the slopes on both sides of the crossing: the descent from the highlands to creek level, then the climb back up the other side. The locomotives of 1851 weighed between twenty and thirty 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 the Erie was running in 1851 were the costs the railroad accepted when it built down into the valley and up the other side rather than spending capital on a high bridge. The locomotives the Erie Railroad was using in freight service on its main line by 1900 weighed between eighty and 120 tons. The freight the Erie carried between Jersey City and the industrial cities of the Ohio Valley across the Orange County highlands in 1900 was the product of an economy that had undergone continuous industrialization for five decades. The grades the early surveyors accepted to save capital in 1845 now confronted heavier locomotives hauling longer, heavier trains, requiring the added costs of helper engines dedicated to pushing freight trains upgrade, reduced operating speeds across the grade sections, and ongoing maintenance expenses for the fleet of helper locomotives the grade required.
The grade at Moodna Creek was not the only grade problem on the Erie main line across 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 in 1900 was not in a position where capital investment in grade reduction was easy.
The Erie had suffered financial difficulties for most of its existence. The railroad’s board of directors and financial managers devoted considerable attention during 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: the years when the Erie Railroad was used as an instrument of financial speculation on a scale that left the railroad in worse physical condition than any comparable competing line. The tactics used in those years—printing convertible bonds to dilute the shares of stockholders seeking control, bribing legislators in Albany to retroactively legitimize that dilution, and using operating revenues to support speculative positions in the company’s own stock rather than replacing worn-out track and obsolete equipment—were profitable for the men who ran them and destructive for the railroad they operated.
The Erie underwent reorganization in 1875, was reorganized again in 1878, was placed under receivership in 1893, and was finally reorganized as the Erie Railroad 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 charge 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 business they were also carrying. The New York Central’s water-level route from New York to Chicago via Albany and Buffalo carried comparable 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 across 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 divisions. The grade-reduction program developed by the Erie engineering department in the late 1890s and early 1900s was that department’s answer to an operating problem deferred by the railroad’s financial history for thirty 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 that 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 height the design required, eliminating the descent, the ascent, and the need for helper engines that had been part of the Erie’s operating costs since 1851.
The design produced by the Erie Railroad’s 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 the deliberate institutional choice the Pennsylvania Railroad had made at Rockville in 1899, when it determined to use granite stone arches for its 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. The 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, in materials capable of bearing any future requirement beyond any planning horizon the engineering department might set.
In 1905, the Erie was a railroad reorganized to rebuild an infrastructure degraded by decades of financial mismanagement, working within a capital budget constrained by its recent financial history to make the grade reductions needed to compete. Building high steel railroad bridges in 1905 was the technique American engineering had mastered, which the structural steel industry could fabricate and supply at a price compatible with the Erie’s capital program, and which the contractors bidding on the work had built in similar structures before. The mountain railroads of the West had been building high steel bridges since the 1880s. The technical method was proven.
The economic feasibility was known. The contractors understood the nature of the work. The design division divided the crossing into tower piers spaced at regular intervals across the valley floor. Each tower pier 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 the adjacent piers and supported the track on top.
The integrated structural system—concrete foundations below, steel tower columns rising 193 feet, deck trusses spanning between tower tops, and the train track above—was the system developed for high bridges on the western mountain railroads, applied by the Erie engineering department to Moodna Creek Valley with appropriate modifications for the span lengths, heights, and load requirements specific to this crossing. The engineering analyses performed by the department determined the dimensions of every component of the system. The concrete foundations had to reach sufficient load-bearing material to support the tower weights without settling under the weight of the heaviest locomotives the Erie operated. The tower columns had to carry the dead weight of the steel above them plus the live load of passing trains at operating speed, without the dynamic amplification of that live load creating stresses exceeding the permitted 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 geometry of the track alignment above them. The engineers performing this analysis in 1905 worked with structural mechanics tools unavailable to bridge engineers of the 1850s, 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 on steel bridges for thirty years. The specifications they produced determined the quantities and dimensions of every component of the structure. The purchasing department took those specifications to the structural steel mills of Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley, to the concrete aggregate suppliers, and to the timber suppliers for the forms and falsework.
Construction contracts went to contractors capable of providing the labor and equipment to build what the specifications required, on the schedule demanded by the Erie’s operating needs. Foundation work in Moodna Creek Valley preceded steel erection by a full construction season. The concrete base for each tower pier had to be excavated to load-bearing material, formed with timber, poured with Portland cement concrete mixed on site, and cured until it achieved 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 foundation work at Moodna Creek in 1906 was of the same class as the labor that had built the Rockville Bridge pier foundations in Harrisburg six years earlier. It was Italian immigrant labor organized through the padrone system that had been supplying Italian men to American railroad construction projects since the mid-1880s. The men who excavated 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 population to the American construction labor market for twenty years.
They came from Calabria, Campania, and Sicily, from communities where the agricultural economy that had sustained the rural population for generations had been collapsing since the 1880s under combined pressures of land consolidation, the phylloxera blight that destroyed the vineyards of the Mezzogiorno throughout that decade, and the structural poverty of a region the unified Italian state had absorbed economically without integrating in any other meaningful way. They moved toward the wages paid by American railroad construction work the same way men move toward wages when livelihoods at home cease, by the most direct route available, regardless of the cost of the journey. The wages paid by American foundation and excavation and concrete crews in 1906 to men willing to do work the labor market classified as unskilled were wages strong-bodied men without American language or American capital could earn. They were enough to survive on.
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’s construction contractor at a fixed daily rate per man. He recruited them from the Italian neighborhoods of the 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 supplies from the camp store where the men bought food, tools, and the 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 retained for organizing and managing the arrangement. The net amount reaching the individual worker was what remained of the market price after the intermediary took 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 labor forces in rural New York in the early twentieth century.
They were sufficient 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, gentler 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 twenty miles northwest of Newburgh beside a major railroad line. They were also, in that region, in a particular social circumstance: men who arrived without mastery of the language, without established community connections, without the documents American institutions use 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 the padrone system created. 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 time category. The ironworkers who bolted the structural steel of the Moodna Bridge were not the same group of men who had excavated the foundation pits. They were structural ironworkers, men who had learned to bolt steel at height on previous bridge and viaduct jobs across the American railroad system, moving from project to project as that system’s need for high bridges created work in new places. They were skilled craftsmen in a way the foundation laborers were not classified as skilled, and their wages and their visibility in the construction records reflected that classification.
The ironworker crews’ task on the steel tower bridge was to receive the prefabricated structural members and bolt them together at the elevations the design required. The column sections for the tower legs arrived at the construction site on the Erie main line. The railroad company building the bridge provided the rail connection that transported the steel to the site, where it was unloaded and prepared near the structure. A crane mounted on the growing structure itself lifted each column section from the preparation area to the connection point above.
The ironworker at the connection point received the swinging section, guided it to the bolt holes in the base below, and held it in place while the bolting crew drove the bolts securing 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 members and driving the connection bolts 150 and 190 feet above the floor of Moodna Creek Valley in the summer of 1907 worked under conditions no current safety standard would consider acceptable. There was no fall protection of the kind modern practice requires.
The working platforms ironworkers used in erecting the steel structure in 1907 were limited by what the construction sequence and the geometry of the structure allowed, 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 ropes 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 developed through years of precisely this kind of work. This was not a risk New York State labor law in 1907 required the Erie Railroad construction contractor to document or mitigate in the forms a modern construction project might generate. The construction records of the Moodna Bridge reflect the ironworker gangs at a higher level than the foundation gangs.
The names of the ironworker foremen are recorded. The production records of the gangs, the members installed, the connections completed, the trusses placed, are all recorded with the precision required by the accounting of skilled trades in 1907. The individual ironworkers below foreman level exist in the records at the level preserved for them by the accounting conventions of the trade. They are more visible than the Italian foundation laborers.
But they are not visible at a level that would allow a complete list of the names of the men who bolted 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 mainline freight trains the 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 allowed, without the helper engine the old route had required, imposing on the new steel and the new concrete foundations the loads the engineering analysis of the structure had specified.
The bridge towers did not noticeably deflect. 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 appearing on the track geometry as deformations 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 its function exactly as the engineering analysis had predicted.
The Erie Railroad operated its main line across 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, which the federal government allocated to the Erie and other major railroads during World War I, crossed Moodna Creek Valley at the speed the grade allowed. The H-class Berkshire locomotives the Erie developed for its mainline freight service in the 1920s—the first true Berkshires, 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 they were designed for, performing better than the locomotives they replaced. The tower piers, supported by the concrete poured by the foundation laborers in 1906 and bolted 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 whose loads bore 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 character of the loads was different. They were not smaller. The freight tonnage the Erie carried across the Moodna Bridge in 1955 was heavier in total train weight than in 1908, because the freight cars operating in 1955 were heavier and larger than the cars of 1908.
The tower piers carried what the railroad brought to them. The Erie Railroad entered receivership in 1938, was reorganized, and continued to operate 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 also bankrupted Penn Central, Reading, Central of New Jersey, Lehigh Valley, and 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 across Moodna Creek Valley from 1976 to 1999. Norfolk Southern acquired the tracks of the former Erie main line in 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 freights carried today are the freight 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 the Erie could not have anticipated, across the same main-line corridor between the Hudson Valley and the interior Ohio Valley. 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, extending 3,200 feet from east abutment to west abutment. The steel has the patina acquired by more than a century of weathering in a wooded New York valley.
The paint maintenance cycles required for railroad bridges have kept it serviceable, but the steel itself carries a visual record of a century of Pennsylvania winter storms and summer humidity, the slow surface oxidation of a structure that has done its work without interruption since 1908. The concrete foundations beneath the tower columns have been in the ground since 1906. The creek runs beneath the structure the same way it ran when the first Erie trains crossed it. A Norfolk Southern freight train on the former Erie main line gives you sufficient warning through its sound in the valley to locate the bridge before it crosses.
The sound comes from the east and deepens as the train approaches the valley edge and climbs onto the bridge deck. The locomotive, 200 tons of diesel power, crosses the valley stream in about two and a half minutes, the time a freight train at normal speed takes to cover the 3,200 feet of steel bridge. The tower columns do not respond visibly, the concrete foundations do not move, and the creek below continues at its seasonally determined level, indifferent to the crossing that has occurred 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 the bridge and whose corporate successors still operate it. The Italian laborers who excavated the Moodna Creek Valley foundations in 1906, mixed and placed the Portland concrete on which the towers rest, are not named on the marker.
The padrone contractors who organized those laborers, 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 housing fees, store profit margins, and padrone fees, exist in the Erie Railroad’s construction accounts at the level those accounts required to track aggregate payments to subcontractors. The individual men beneath 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 bolted the structural steel of the tower columns and the bridge trusses 150 and 190 feet above the floor of Moodna Creek Valley in 1907 and 1908, the men who guided the swinging column sections to their connection points on scaffolding platforms without fall protection any current safety regulation would recognize, and who drove the bolts that bound the steel together while standing on the structure they were building above the valley stream, exist in the construction records at the level their occupational status made visible in 1907. Their foremen’s names are recorded.
Their crew production numbers are recorded. The individual men below foreman level appear as they 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, through federal receivership and Conrail, and now reside in several repositories. The National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution holds portions of the Erie engineering archive.
Whether the daily time accounts, crew lists, and individual employment records of the Moodna Bridge construction 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 survive in good condition. The structural calculations survive. The steel purchasing records survive at the level the 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 for 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 laborers poured into the foundation excavations of Moodna Creek Valley in 1906 is still in the ground beneath the tower columns. The steel the ironworkers bolted 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.
Trains cross the valley at the speed the flattened grade allows, without helper locomotives. The operating costs imposed by the original 1851 grade have vanished. The men who laid the basis for that solution in Moodna Creek Valley in 1906 stayed for the two construction seasons the work required, and left as soon as it was finished. 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 for their labor. They are recorded as one of the project’s costs. But they are not recorded as human beings. The concrete they poured still stands in the ground.
The tower piers still stand above it. The bridge is still there.
