.. Up and down the hill was a pisser because with the slope you could only get ten or twelve feet before you ran off the top or bottom of the rod.
This is where I was taught how to "boot" the stadia rod. "Boot it!" as a bellowed order across a stream be from he on the transit,
et al, and "BOOTED! the shouted response as I complied ...and he with the log book added the height of a surveyor's boot-top so we got the longer shot and didn't get wet as often! You'd have to know Western Pennsylvania or the like?
All the sightings go in the log book,
In "indelible" pencil, on waterproof paper. So it was good even many years later after swimming a river or working in the rain.
Mistakes had to be left in place as "
indelible pencil " was exactly what it sounded like.
Whatever was lined-out was meant to still be readable, new entry following, adjacent. ELSE a page of explanatory notes if an error was not caught until later.
Same as "dead tree" era financial books were kept, back in the hand-written days.
I did say "tedious"?
OTOH, three surveys were "standard" before breaking ground. More went on during the project.
Thankfully.....
Contractors dozer "etc" fleet are roaring down "Redbank Creek" near Pittsburgh dredging, widening, and sloping the banks so next spring's floods, the water gets to go several feet wider for very foot it rises.
Wuddn' yah know it? The team at desk and drawing-board in the Federal building, downtown Pittsburgh screwed the pooch. As the field team, just ahead of the 'dozers going Hell squared for Hades cubed to beat the next season's rain and flooding stakes & string-lines it they can see the neat and tidy reshaping is going to hit one of the
abutments of an active highway bridge, not go UNDER it.
Big kerfluffle, they re-calc and alter the drawings, file at a combat speed, rush the new information out to the field.
Only to find Redbank Creek is where it is meant to be, dozers already a loong way past the sneaky walk-about bridge?
And the curve is dead-nuts on the new specs when they take them out of the tubes and check!
They ask Dad how TF he calculated that out in the mud and rain without the Marchant and Monroe-Matic "computers" they used, early/mid 1950's?
He turns over a logbook... and some triangles crayoned onto .... friggin' full-sized 4' X 8' sheets of plywood!
"Same as the Egyptians".
"
Scaled it off successive triangles!"
"It DOES help with
accuracy if you start at the passage UNDER the bridge ...and work BACK to the existing cut .... eyeballing it, staking as you walk it - so the 'dozers don't go idle @ $100,000 dollars a day penalty because it is the GOVERNMENT's fault!
He had done the math AFTERWARDS ... for no other remaining reason than to call the people behind their penzils, tell them where and HOW they had got it wrong - so as to get the records corrected to match the reality for NEXT maintenance project.
T'was ever thus between desk and field...
... else they'd have gotten the FIRST pyramid at Giza "right", needed no more practice, and gone off to build a chain of more useful shopping malls or brothels.
Think I'm kidding?
Stonehenge was the
second go! Same stones.
Whole rig was taken down and MOVED from a previous site!
Damned good job Pennyslvania's highway bridges are not as easily frightened! Traffic jams are bad euf' already!