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Show Heavy-Duty Roads Like Romans' Via THE POUNDING destruction of heavy traffic on modern highways' high-ways' has caused the revival of some of the basic engineering principles prin-ciples used 2,000 years ago in -construction of the famous roads of ancient Rome. Most renowned road in the Roman Ro-man system, which at its peak totaled to-taled some 50,000 miles, was the 412-mile Via Appia (Appian Way), leading from Rome southeastward to Brundisium (modern Brindisi) and its port of Hydruntum (Otran-to). (Otran-to). In the heel of the Italian boot. A recent survey by American engineers showed that the Appian Way is in better condition than many modern highways and streets. In other parts of the ancient an-cient Roman empire traces of once fine roads can be found from Britain's Scottish border to Egypt and Syria. The Roman roads owed much of their longevity and quality to care-ful, care-ful, painstaking construction and to the engineering principle ' of building extremely deep, heavy foundations. Soma of the roads are mora than 40 Inches from their base of large, hand-laid and fitted stones to the top of the pavement. Breakup of thin pavements under un-der heavy traffic led engineers back to the Roman theories. But now great machines do everything from basic excavation to final finishing. fin-ishing. In Roman times the work was done by hand, with slave and military labor. Foundation and surface paving blocks were laboriously labo-riously fitted together. It would probably cost more than $500,000 a mile to reproduce the hand-built Roman road today. The excellent basic construction principles of the Roman roads are returning to use, but other features fea-tures would rule the ancient high-ways high-ways out for modern traffic. Because Be-cause they were used largely by foot soldiers and comparatively slow moving wagons and chariots, some grades were extremely steep much too steep for easy negotiation negotia-tion by modern wheeled vehicles. |