The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  Baron von Hirsch, rischest and most devious of all railway promoters.

  Hirsch repeated his selling techniques with later issues, blatantly puffing his shares in newspapers paid for the purpose, and when his activities aroused opposition – especially because of his habit of building isolated stretches of line – he simply transformed his French company into an Austrian one, thus ridding himself of troublesome French directors.

  Not surprisingly no-one quite knows how much money he made. His receipts included his ‘turn’ on sales of the bonds, profits from the construction contracts (estimated at 100 million francs), operating profits of another 50 million and the substantial sums from unclaimed winning lottery bonds. He even won the law suit brought by disgruntled bondholders when the bonds he had issued suspended interest payments.

  Disreputable Hirsch undoubtedly was. Disagreeable he wasn’t. He was a tall, healthy, bustling fellow, a sportsman who found it natural to buy his way to prominence on the English turf, and thus to the attention of the Prince of Wales. Nevertheless he was not welcome in Society either in Paris or Vienna. As Sir Philip Magnus wrote in King Edward VII, ‘He was richer than the Rothschilds, but unlike them never assimilated himself socially. He was excluded from the Jockey Club, cold-shouldered, or treated, at best, with a mortifying condescension by most archdukes and great magnates and never received at Court.’

  Probably Hirsch did not mind, for his all-embracing cynicism included a disarming lack of any sense of self-importance. In La France Juive that notorious anti-semite Edouard Drumont treats him as a cheerful arriviste less ridiculous than his fellow Jewish bankers, his arrogance mitigated by his bad jokes and his bonhomie. ‘Whereas the Rothschilds believe they belong to the aristocracy, he believes the aristocracy belongs to him.’

  Margot Tennant, who later married Herbert Asquith, the future British Prime Minister, has left an hilarious account of a dinner in which he asked her to marry his son Lucien. When she objected that Lucien was ill he replied simply, ‘But no one would die if they married Margot Tennant.’ Unfortunately Lucien died in 1887 at the age of thirty-one, though after Hirsch’s own death his widow graciously accepted as his heir Hirsch’s illegitimate son, Count Arnold de Bendern, who became a British Member of Parliament and a well-known figure in British society.

  After Lucien’s death Hirsch was clearly at something of a loss. He sold off his investments. According to Kurt Grunwald in Turkenhirsch, he had only three passions, ‘hunting, law suits and the evasion of income and inheritance taxes, which he considered unjust.’ But these activities did not satisfy Hirsch’s energy. To Grunwald, ‘restlessness was Hirsch’s basic characteristic. The need for work, for activity … a footloose migrant, restless himself, who, possibly subconsciously aware of this inner restlessness, advocates rooting in the soil for the wandering Jew.’ Although Hirsch was an absolute anti-intellectual who hated the hypocrisy which he saw in religion, he was a generous supporter of Jewish causes, giving $4 million to the Alliance Israelite Universelle for the relief of Jews in Russia, as well as substantial sums to help his fellow-religionists in New York.

  His restlessness led him to back the idea of a Jewish homeland on the pampas, giving £2 million to Jewish immigrants in Argentina. Unfortunately they were more like Hirsch than he might have wished. In Grunwald’s words ‘many of the settlers and their children eventually moved to the towns, 4,000 in all.’ The year before Hirsch’s death Theodore Herzl presented him with the idea of a homeland in Palestine. Herzl claimed that Hirsch received the idea with some favour. Which leaves one unanswered question: was Hirsch too cynical, too practical a man to give his backing to an idea which seemed a mere dream at the time?

  * Lord Curzon. Imperialist and ‘superior person’.

  * The route to Constantinople passed through Hungary, Roumania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey. Eventually the Austrians found a way via Ouvatz and Mitrovitza. Not that Balkan railways were ever direct. To travel to Bulgaria from Russia or Bucharest you had to go round via Hungary.

  * Ms Suyin’s father was a Chinese railway engineer, educated in Belgium, where he had married a local girl. So Suyin was a well-placed, if obviously partisan, witness.

  * The details can be found in Herbert Feis Europe, the World’s Banker.

  † One of the most dramatic moments of the Erie Affair (see pages 126–30) involved the arrival of a steamship from London bearing masses of Erie stock which, it was assumed, would be dumped on the market.

  * In La Position Internationale de la France Maurice Levy-Leboyer reckoned that the losses between 1917 and 1921 amounted to between 15 and 16 billion gold francs, about five months of France’s national output.

  * This note is based on Han Suyin’s account in The Crippled Tree. Suyin was told the story by an eyewitness, Li Chiehjen, a writer known as ‘the Maupassant of China’ who was there at the time.

  2

  Dreams of Empire

  All major railway projects started as dreams, and many remained in the field of fantasy. Their number and variety is a reminder that railway building was a fundamental element in the dreams of a whole century – no country, no statesman, no businessman, no political scientist, it seems, was without his own locomotive vision. So they can tell us more about the nineteenth century’s collective subconscious than more practical projects. Railways liberated the imagination.

  Three of the most seemingly impractical dream railways – across the United States, Canada and Siberia – all came true. The most ballyhoo attached to the American Transcontinental: yet the Trans-Siberian was twice as long and the Canadians, by insisting on an all-Canadian route, handicapped themselves by having to tackle hundreds of miles of barren rock north of Lake Superior, terrain far more daunting than anything faced by the Americans east of the Rockies.

  As we saw in Chapter III, the Canadians built the railway to complete their country, and to retain British Columbia within the federation. The Russians were anxious to use the Trans-Siberian to open up Siberia as the Americans had opened up the Prairies. But the primary impetus behind the American desire for a transcontinental railroad was to reach the Pacific and thus the Orient. Walt Whitman’s railroad ‘from sea to shining sea’ was merely a means of reaching the ultimate dream ocean. The Pacific dream merged with the more practical desire to reach California after the discovery of gold there in 1849, and with the feeling that a railroad was an essential symbol of national unity, but the ‘Pacific’ element in the idea lingered on, and it was not until the mid-1870s that a best-selling guide-book (George A. Crofutt’s Great Transcontinental Rail Guide) finally fixed the word ‘transcontinental’ in the public consciousness.

  All three projects succeeded in girding their countries with hoops of iron. But the mere existence of a railway connection, however daring in conception, however exciting in construction, could not counteract underlying political, economic and social forces. In 1857, for example, the first six miles of the Western Railroad out of Buenos Aires were greeted with the cry ‘On to Chile’; and just over half a century later the dream was achieved, after a tunnel had been dug through the Andes at an altitude of 10,500 feet. But it did not generate much traffic; indeed the service was suspended for a number of years in the 1930s, when a stretch of line was washed away, and it has never been profitable. The mere existence of a railway couldn’t help fulfil the politicians’ dream of a Greater Argentina linked to, and thus dominating, Chile and Peru.

  There were many other dreams of railway empire that never even achieved their physical destination. They varied, but can broadly be divided into three categories: the individual projects; the globe-girdlers; and the lines which were inherent parts of a country’s imperial dreams.

  The most obvious and economically sensible individual project was a rail tunnel under the English Channel. But even this has been a century in the making* since it was first seriously promoted in the 1880s. At that point it was defeated by the objections of the British military, and even when it was fina
lly transformed into reality a century later it has had to face the hysterical objections of sundry British citizens who have camouflaged their deeply ingrained fears of losing their island status through a fixed link with Europe behind absurd claims that the British way of life would be threatened by terrorists, rabid dogs, drug dealers and the like.

  The next most obvious idea, a tunnel linking Europe and Africa under the Straits of Gibraltar, faces the problem that the Straits are too deep for a tunnel at their narrowest point. Nevertheless it has surfaced at times, and formed an essential link in the French dream of a railway from Paris to French West Africa via the Sahara. But we are now seeing the gradual realisation of a number of other longstanding dreams for tunnels or bridges, usually carrying road as well as rail traffic, like those linking Sweden with the European mainland and Japan’s northern and southern islands, Hokkaido and Honshu, with Kyushu, the mainland.

  Global railways have an even longer history than more practical, more limited schemes. The first proposal for a transcontinental railway was put forward by Angus B. Reach in a Comic Bradshaw, published in 1839. His fantasy provided details of Bradshaw’s timetable a hundred years in the future. Its authenticity, he assured his readers, ‘can be entirely relied on’. There would be trains from Shoreditch in London to Pekin, via Constantinople, Jericho (‘where Babylon used to was … omnibuses meet the trains at the Jericho Terminus’) Bagdad and Canton (‘Return tickets for Pekin available for three days’). He was followed by the entirely serious Saint-Simonian, Michel Chevalier, whose ‘Mediterranean system’ envisaged a railway from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf.

  It was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 which liberated the world’s imagination as to the true possibilities of modern transport systems. It was natural for Ferdinand de Lesseps, the visionary French diplomat who had guided the canal to its triumphant completion, to turn his attention to even more ambitious rail projects. ‘As early as 1873’, wrote Charles Beatty, ‘Ferdinand had sent [his son] Victor, now a foreign service officer in the family tradition, to explore the possibility of a railway joining Paris with Moscow, Pekin and Bombay. At first the Russians gave encouragement to the idea … but before he could report the scheme was dropped for political reasons. England and Russia were coming into conflict over Afghanistan and also in Northern China.’19

  A largely railway route round the world moved from the realm of the ridiculous to the merely fantastic once trains were running across the United States and the Trans-Siberian was under construction. By the end of the century that eminently practical railroad magnate E. H. Harriman had a perfectly clear plan for a ‘round-the-world transportation line, under unified American control.’20 Harriman planned to secure access to the Pacific by buying the railway through Manchuria, and acquiring trackage rights over the Trans-Siberian itself. Since Harriman owned the Pacific Steamship company and controlled major networks in the United States he required only a fleet of ships ploughing across the Atlantic to achieve his goal.

  Unfortunately the Japanese were unwilling to share control of the Manchurian railways they had acquired following their war with Russia, but that did not deter Harriman, although an alternative 1,200-mile line across the Gobi Desert proved too ambitious even for him. Another attempt to build a new line through Manchuria, well away from the existing tracks, was foiled by the death of the Empress of China and by the financial crash of 1907, and Harriman died before he could find alternative routes.

  The Pacific dream did not die. The Americans have always hankered after a major role in the Far East, especially in China, a mission which clearly necessitated railways from the Mid-West to ports in Mexico as a more convenient route to the Pacific than through California. In this instance a novelist anticipated the promoters. Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now revolves round a projected – and clearly fraudulent – ‘South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway’. The line ‘was to run from the [sic] Salt Lake City, thus branching off from the San Francisco and Chicago line, and pass down through the fertile lands of New Mexico and Arizona, into the territory of the Mexican republic, run by the City of Mexico, and come out on the gulf at the port of Vera Cruz’.

  A few years later Nature duly copied Art when a number of schemes followed Trollope’s routes. Most notably the American promoter Arthur E. Stilwell, who had already made Kansas City the hub of a railroad network with access to the Gulf of Mexico, came up with the idea of a trunk line to the little Mexican port of Topolobampo, one of the many such attempts to transform Mexico into an extension of what became the Sunbelt and to transform Topolobampo into the gateway to the Orient. Unfortunately his grandiosely-named Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway met the same fate as Trollope’s fictional line, though, unlike Trollope’s August Melmotte, Stilwell did not commit suicide after his scheme had collapsed.

  Even Stilwell’s scheme was less grandiose than the notion of a Pan-American railway extending from a convenient point on the Southern Pacific through Mexico, Central and South America. Since the time of President Monroe the Americans have believed in their civilising mission in Central and Latin America, and the mission clearly demanded a railway. This was first proposed in 1879 by an American diplomat ‘the famous abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper … [who] published a book advocating the construction of what he termed the “New World Longitudinal Double-Track Steel Railway”.’21 This would be a conscious attempt, designed, like many other such schemes, to assure even firmer American control over the western hemisphere, not, they felt, as colonialists but as liberators, as part of what the French would call their mission civilisatrice.

  Helper’s railway would have run from ‘the westerly shores of Hudson Bay to the midway margin of the Strait of Magellan: the two terminal points, measured along the line contemplated, being nearly, if not quite, eight thousand miles apart … in justice and fairness, and in conformity with the highest attributes of republican justice & fairness’ the line ‘should avoid, and thus isolate, the iniquitous dictatorship of Brazil’.

  Ten years later the First International American Congress created a ‘Committee on Railway Communication’ which in turn mapped out a possible route for a Pan-American Railroad. Over the next forty years progress was spotty. The Banana King C. Minor Keith contributed to the idea through his proposed ‘International railways of Central America’, but little progress had been made before the idea was overtaken by an alternative dream, that of a Pan-American Highway.

  The Americans liked to think that such schemes were not imperial. Other similar dreams were more nakedly so in spirit – and far less practicable. Every imperial power had its own pet projects. The dream which most nearly came to fruition was the German plan for a railway from Berlin to Bagdad. This was not merely an imperial dream, but also a way of unlocking the real riches in oil and agricultural produce of Mesopotamia, as well as providing a way of transporting troops to quash disaffected Bedouin tribesmen and of carrying pilgrims to Mecca, one of the few objectives actually achieved. None the less it was a dream, for it involved the resuscitation of the medieval land routes across Central Asia. The railway would ‘bring back to Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia some of the prosperity and prestige they had enjoyed before the explorations of the Portuguese and Spaniards had opened the new sea routes to the Indies’.22

  In the first years of the present century the project became deeply embedded in the German psyche as a means of carrying the German language, allied to German finance, trade, industry and engineering, to the very cradle of civilisation. ‘Here was a country which had been the much-sought-after empire of the great nations of antiquity, Assyria, Chaldea, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Here had risen and fallen the great cities of Nineveh, Babylon and Hit. To these regions had turned the longing of the great conquerors, Sargon, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Saladin.’23

  But the cultural sell concealed the line’s two eminently practical objectives: to reinforce the German military alliance with the Ottoman Empire and to
capture the massive oil reserves just being uncovered in the Mesopotamian valley. The route had been surveyed by an unsung engineering genius, Wilhelm von Pressel, although he was forced to take an inland route through the Amanus mountains because the easier route along the Mediterranean would have made it vulnerable to attacks by hostile warships.

  Building began a few years before 1914, and although construction continued throughout the war, the through service to Aleppo was inaugurated only in October, 1918, a month before the Armistice. Inevitably the line was sequestrated by the Allies. Afterwards an American syndicate proposed to reach Bagdad with the help of a 25-mile wide land grant along its whole length. But the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire has prevented any real progress from that day to this.

  Yet even in the 1920s, enthusiastic Syrians dreamt that the ancient entrepot of Aleppo would ‘become the crossroads of the world – a junction point for rail communication between Berlin and Bagdad, Calais and Calcutta, Bordeaux and Bombay, Constantinople and Cairo and Cape Town’.*

  Rhodes the Colossus inspires the Cape-to-Cario dream.

  The Berlin-to-Bagdad suffered very little domestic political interference within Germany. By contrast the British equivalent, the Cape-to-Cairo, was sabotaged by domestic politics, and was finally scuppered because it most influential supporter, Cecil Rhodes, was too practical a man to undertake himself a project of such dubious commercial viability. Despite its fame and the romantic aura which surrounds it, the Cape-to-Cairo was never a unified project, the only unifying factor was the name. As Lois Raphael wrote in The Cape-to-Cairo Dream (New York, 1936), ‘the railway followed mineral discoveries northwards’. Rhodes ‘wanted his Cape-to-Cairo railway to pay its way through Africa’. As a result the route was diverted hundreds of miles west of its most direct route to serve the coal deposits at Wankie in what is now Zimbabwe and the copper belt in Zambia.*