[AT] A new one

[James Peck]

Later sixties I saw the Hocking River straightened and channelized around Athens, Ohio. They used cable operated pan scrapers pulled by steel tracked Caterpillars. Cat did not design the rubber treaded Challengers for construction work. 

The Hocking intersects the Ohio.. One wagon party I know about followed the Rappahannock river to the Potomac at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Then up along the Potomac to Harpers Ferry. Then south down the Shenandoah on the great wagon trail and took the Kanawha Trail into the New river and onto to the Kanawha. They ferried across the Ohio near where the Kanawha joins the Ohio, point pleasant then Virginia. From there they went across land to the Virginia Military Lands in the Mad River valley. In the mountains it was every able bodied person out and pushing uphill. The Hocking intersects the Ohio considerably upstream of the Kanawha.

[Cecil Bearden] Here in OK west of I-35 we have the red clay that is left from the bed of the old Permian sea.  Our red soil has a 5 minute window of opportunity between being too wet and too dry to work.. When dry, the soil breaks up into very hard clods.  Those clods get into the tracks and when they get between the track and sprocket, the track stretches. Those tracks are not cheap.  I have a contractor friend who used Cat Challengers for a  long time pulling scrapers.  Every time he got a rock or hard clod in the tracks it was $10K for a track.  Now they only use them on sandy ground with no sandstone rocks.