“The art of doing well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion”

A paragraph on what we might today call “good transit” in Railroaded:

What distinguished railroads from the natural geography through which they ran was their centrality to measures of value; they transformed everything around them. There is no such thing as a badly placed river on a mountain, although humans may wish they were located elsewhere. They are wehre they are, but engineers located railroads for human purposes. There were good locations and bad. To determine the line between “the utterly bad and the barely tolerable” in railway location, Wellington relied on a second abstract measure: the dollar. Wellington thought engineering should not be considered the art of construction but rather “the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.” How to build a railroad was widely studied, but “the larger questions of where to build and when to buil, and whether to build them at all” had been neglected.

Hm, if only there were some process for building infrastructure that “relied on the dollar”…