J.C. Bourne in his book, The History of the Great Western Railway stated that the entire original English railroad, more than 118 miles long, that the whole line with the exception of the inclined planes, may be regarded practically as level. The British Parliament Session in 1862 that approved its construction recorded in Order No. 44 for the proposed railway, That the section be drawn to the same HORIZONTAL scale as the plan, and to a vertical scale of not less than one inch to every one hundred feet, and shall show the surface of the ground marked on the plan, the intended level of the proposed work, the height of every embankment, and the depth of every cutting, and a DATUM HORIZONTAL LINE which shall be the same throughout the whole length of the work.
One hundred and eighteen miles of LEVEL railway, and yet the surface on which it is projected a globe? Impossible. It cannot be. Early in 1898 I met Mr. Hughes, chief officer of the steamer City of Lincoln. This gentleman told me he had projected thousands of miles of level railway in South America, and never heard of any allowance for curvature being made. On one occasion he surveyed over one thousand miles of railway which was a perfect straight line all the way. It is well known that in the Argentine Republic and other parts of South America, there are railways thousands of miles long without curve or gradient. In projecting railways, the world is acknowledged to be a plane, and if it were a globe the rules of projection have yet to be discovered. Level railways prove a level world, to the utter confusion of the globular school of impractical men with high salaries and little brains. Thomas Winship, Zetetic Cosmogeny
That in all surveys no allowance is made for curvature, which would be a necessity on a globe; that a horizontal line is in every case the datum line, the same line being continuous throughout the whole length of the work; and that the theodolite cuts a line at equal altitudes on either side of it, which altitude is the same as that of the instrument, clearly proves, to those who will accept proof when it is furnished, that the world is a plane and not a globe. Thomas Winship, Zetetic Cosmogeny
Engineer, W. Winckler, wrote into the Earth Review October 1893 regarding the Earths supposed curvature, stating, As an engineer of many years standing, I saw that this absurd allowance is only permitted in school books. No engineer would dream of allowing anything of the kind. I have projected many miles of railways and many more of canals and the allowance has not even been thought of, much less allowed for. This allowance for curvature means this that it is 8 for the first mile of a canal, and increasing at the ratio by the square of the distance in miles; thus a small navigable canal for boats, say 30 miles long, will have, by the above rule an allowance for curvature of 600 feet. Think of that and then please credit engineers as not being quite such fools. Nothing of the sort is allowed. We no more think of allowing 600 feet for a line of 30 miles of railway or canal, than of wasting our time trying to square the circle
