Confederate Engineers, Engineers and Engineers

"These guys, seen a video of it. They could take a raw timber down to a railroad tie to speck," he says. "They would hit on the down stroke and on the up stroke." The whole time, manipulating the piece of wood with one hand from time to time. He asks if confederate engineers had some kind of like team of essentially tie hacks who could just eyeball and use a hand axe to get things built to specks.