Really, though...
...for practical purposes, Creation on the Railroad (ahem!) happened this way...
First, there was the Grade, and the Grade was very close to level. The Grade was itself in the Book of Visions, Chapter 1, titled 'Planning'. And Man opined that it was good.
The next day, Man created the land form, with its valleys raised up and its hills made low, and called it a Plywood Pacific. And Man judged it good.
On the third day, upon waking from a sweat-drenched sleep fraught with dreams of steel rainbows and wooden trellises, Man jumped out of bed and taking his mighty hammer, destroyed the Plywood Pacific because it was an imposter...an abomination that was totally not, like, good.
Later that day (Man was not a procrastinator), and with a different plan borne of his fitful dreams, he began to lay out a track plan. It felt natural, and it flowed with slight rises and dips, gradual turns, occasionally crossing over itself. In one instance, the track grade he was building (he played with cookie cutter, splines) came to an obvious place for a gully or a dip. He continued to build splines across the gully, temporarily supported by a riser held up by a frame member at the nadir of the terrain he had in mind. And so he continued until he had closed up the intended ends, or looped, his tracks. It was good. No nightmares that night. Holy crap, was that last one a bitch!
On the fourth day, arising refreshed and ready to build, it occurred to him that Man ought not to need sleep....but, after a moment of pondering this puzzle, he shrugged and commenced the next phase of his vision. It seemed natural to then build the terrain around the carefully planned and constructed track system. He did that using all sorts of materials, and was careful to have a clear idea of the gulley's contours when it came to fashioning them around that temporary riser. He intended to bridge that gully first by cutting out part of the suspended roadbed, removing the temporary riser, and then continuing to fashion the terrain in the gully and up to where he thought the bridge abutments would likely have to be. When all was done, it was very good...and still damp, so he went to bed.
On the fifth day, Man arose, thought it weird that he had a hankering for a hot drink he decided to call coffee, Son of Juan. He decided why not join the land of the living, and had one...it was good. So he had another, pondering his next move on his track plan. He decided to build the wooden trellis he had in his vision, but thought that the name seemed odd, so he changed it to trestle. With that, he considered that he might mess up his trestle if he didn't have a template of sorts, one showing the curvature at grade, and also the profile of the gully, itself. He used the removed section of the spline roadbed as his template...the spline curved exactly according to the radius of the curve across the gully, and that became the template, once transferred to graph paper, of the trestle deck. As for the profile of the gully, he roughly measured where each bent would meet the ground up to the grade and thought, "D'Oh! I should have done this when the section of roadbed I removed was still in place!" It would have been simple to place a ruler or a measuring tape at distances between bents down to the roughed in terrain below, and simply kept a record of the height of the bents. Instead, Man had to place a board across the gap and measured to the bottom of the board. Throughout that day, Man built the trestle...and unfortunately had to use much of the sixth as well.
On the sixth day, Man placed the completed trestle in the gap and found, as he had hoped, that the bents were too long universally. He commenced a series of removing the trestle, nipping the bottoms of each bent a bit at a time, and then replacing it in the gap until he could see it met the intended track grade perfectly when it stood on the bents. He then quickly measured how timbers made of strip wood 1/4" on the side would comprise abutments that could be filled with gravel. He made them, stained them, filled behind them with sand and crushed bits of the leftover ground goop he had used to make the terrain, and glued it so that it was well stuck. He then inserted the trestle, ensuring once again that its deck did not deviate appreciably from the intended grade on either end. He mixed up more goop, and began to place bits of it around the base of the trestle for mud sills which he had placed there during the fitting phase, for the purpose of allowing the bent timbers to rest on those sills. Eventually, the trestle was firmly in place with the stringers at each end extending over the lips of the abutment top edges and on for several scale feet. By that time, the marathon was ended, and it was midnight, and Man felt a powerful compulsion to call it a day. And it was good!
On the seventh day, Man was ordered by She Who Must be Obeyed to attend to her side while she worshiped at a large outbuilding with a pointy tower on the roof. A large and sweaty man broke forth and waxed about philosophical matters at one point, but Man's mind wandered to how he would next build a water vessel on his track plan.
But that's another chapter in the Book of Visions.
