The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  The idea did not lack supporters. ‘I can conceive of no more civilizing influence that could be brought to bear than the laying down of a railway throughout that great continent,’ declared a British politician. An active group of ‘Little Englanders’ was always at hand, determined to scotch such Imperial dreams but the biggest blow was struck by an Imperialist Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury when he allowed the Germans sway over Tanganyika as far west as the Belgian Congo, thus interposing a foreign power directly in the path of the all-red dream.† Indeed the Germans took the idea more seriously than the British themselves. ‘The placing of British South Africa in communication with the Sudan by a railway would be equivalent to the premeditated ruin of our colonial empire in Africa,’ declared the Taglische Rundschau.

  The Cape-to-Cairo dream evaporated because its supporters were too hard-headed. The French equivalent, the Trans-Saharian, though long lived and never without powerful supporters, could never be accused of excess practicality. Yet this manifestly absurd idea was taken seriously from the 1880s until 1943, when the Vichy government actually started to build it. No other project illustrates so clearly the power of the Saharan dream in French public life – although, ironically, the money lent by French investors to build that more practical dream, the Trans-Siberian, was lost just as surely as if it had been poured into the sands of the Sahara.

  Although French generals proposed the idea in the middle of the century as they forged France’s African empire, the idea first entered the political arena at the end of the 1870s as part of the Freycinet plan for vastly expanding the French railway network, a plan naturally attacked as politically rather than economically motivated. The Trans-Saharan idea erupted sporadically over the next sixty-five years – first in 1898 when the French had to retreat in ignominy from Fashoda in the Sudan. Unfortunately its supporters could never decide whether it was primarily strategic, or could provide the key to unlocking the supposedly vast riches of the great plains surrounding the River Niger. A third argument employed the Trans-Saharan as part of grandiose schemes to rely on colonisation to counter the demographic advantages possessed by France’s enemies – most obviously the Germans.*

  Assuming that a tunnel was built under the Straits of Gibraltar the Trans-Saharan, said its proponents, was the only line able to bring the capital of a great imperial power within a week’s journey of its rich tropical colonies, a mere third of the time required to traverse Siberia. Supporters like the economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (Le Sahara, le Soudan et les Chemins de fer transsahariens) poured scorn on the prevailing wisdom that the Sahara could never be developed, arguing that its very real subterranean water resources provided it with considerable potential.

  Opponents relied on extending the existing network of railways in French West Africa to bring tropical produce to the Atlantic, while protagonists made much of the endemic fevers, and the sandbars blocking the harbours of French West Africa. Not surprisingly successive governments temporised, afraid of accusations that they were betraying a railway so vital to France’s eternal and ubiquitous mission civilisatrice. In the late 1920s they even set up an ‘Office du Transsaharien’ to study the projected route, but the dream evaporated after the downfall of the Vichy government.

  Every Imperial power, however small, felt entitled to its own dream. Leopold II of Belgium, not content with the personal ownership of the Congo, dreamt of a new Belgian-controlled Eldorado in the heart of China, Kansu province on the old Silk Road. This involved Belgian control over the railway to the China Sea, an ambition he tried to conceal by pretending that the Belgian emissaries in fact came from the ‘Independent State of the Congo’. The Chinese viceroy Li Hungchang punctured the pretence with the simple question: ‘You are supposed to represent an African state. How is it then that you are not at all black?’ In the event the Belgians did indeed build the railway to Kansu, but Leopold’s death and the First World War ended any further ambitions.

  Curiously and ironically the most useful dream was a Japanese plan designed to bridge an island-studded strait over a hundred miles wide between their Southern island of Kyushu and Pusan on the southern tip of Korea, a country then (in the 1930s) part of the Japanese Empire. The crossing formed an essential element in an Axis dream to link Tokyo and Berlin via Moscow. In anticipation, the authorities bought land to enable the line to run from Tokyo to Kyushu. The dream died in 1945 but the preparations ensured that nearly a third of the land required for the New Tokkaido line, the first high-speed railway in the world, already belonged to the Japanese authorities when it was built in the early 1960s.

  * This is a record, although the railway across Swaziland to the Indian Ocean, first projected in the 1880s, was finally built eighty years later.

  * Earle op cit. The Aleppans were not alone in devising such a grandiose plan. Sun Yat-Sen envisaged that one of his projected lines would connect ‘with the future Indo-European line and through Bagdad, Damascus and Cairo, will link up also with the future African system’ – thus connecting Peking directly with Cape Town.

  * See also Leo Weinthal, Cape to Cairo (London 1923).

  † In the words of an 1887 agreement, ‘where one power occupies the coast another power may not, without consent, occupy unclaimed regions in its rear.’

  * See Commandant ECV Roumens, L’Imperialisme Francais et les Chemins de fer Transafricains.

  VII

  THE ARMIES OF STEAM – AND

  THEIR BATTLEFIELDS

  1

  The Great Captains – and their Mercenaries

  The construction of the world’s railway systems presented an almost superhuman challenge. It was eagerly taken up, for railways were a carrière ouverte aux talents in even the most hierarchical of societies. Building, and then running, railway systems required the capacity to organise and control industrial armies of unprecedented size, sometimes dispersed along thousands of miles of track, and this gift was not related to an individual’s social standing.

  The military simile came naturally to observers, like the Peruvian journalist describing the building of a railway through the Andes in 1872:1

  The army (distributed along the line in eleven camps), consisting of Don Enrique’s* engineers and labourers, was attacking the Andes. The scouts went ahead to determine the best and least costly route; the advance guard followed in their tracks, staking out the exact course to be followed; next came the main body, leveling the barriers, making fills and cuts and piercing tunnels; lastly there was the rear guard, putting down ties and laying rails.’

  The men in charge obviously possessed that indefinable capacity for command found in all successful generals. More specifically they shared with their military equivalent a degree of daring – knowing what was truly impossible and what was merely unprecedented – a knowledge they combined with a scrupulous attention to detail. But railway generals waged campaigns which lasted years, decades even, which brought into play another of their characteristics, patience and resilience. When Thomas Brassey was told that an expensively-built line in Spain was being washed away by a succession of floods, he said simply, ‘I think I shall wait till the rain has entirely ceased; then we’ll go over and find out what is left of the works, and I shall thus be saved some useless journeys.’

  Robert Stephenson was one of the few members of this select band to harbour inner doubts as to his own capacities, but not even he ever dared express them, for one of their major assets was a reputation for overcoming obstacles, including – and especially – those deemed insurmountable by their contemporaries. This outward confidence was combined, as with the best generals, with an extraordinary eye for the landscape through which they were to build their railways, an equally extraordinary intuitive awareness of the best possible route – and a prodigious reservoir of energy, which they all drained with heroic recklessness. As a result, most of the greatest engineers died from prolonged and unremitting overwork from 20-hour days, seven-day weeks, the wear and tear of constant travel on pri
mitive, bumpy, roads, often frozen or soaked to the skin.

  Navvies: the unsung heroes of the world’s railways.

  The death rate was most obvious among the heroic band which built the tunnels under the Alps. Many of them were from Italy, a country which depends on tunnels to provide routes between many of its major cities. But the work also represented a challenge to the Italians’ powers of improvisation under stress: ‘In life the best system is not to be too systematic,’ in the words of Giorgio Lanino. The words came from his bitter experience on the Cristina tunnel, one of the six under the Apennines between Naples and Foggia. The tunnel has lived in the nightmares of tunnellers ever since because of the clay through which it was dug: clay that lacked any cohesion, clay that entailed the excavation of a deep trench filled with masonry before the timbers supporting the tunnel could be erected.

  The pioneer of Alpine tunnelling, Germain Someiller, provided a model for his successors. He was charged with building what we now call the Mont Cenis* tunnel within twenty years. In the event he achieved his aim in a mere fourteen, dying after the eight-and-a-half-mile tunnel was finished, but before the first train had run through it.

  Quite apart from proving that the Alps were not invincible, he left both a technical and a human legacy – technical in the new rock drills and drilling methods he devised, human in the care he took of his workers. The precedents, as far as the latter was concerned, were not encouraging. The excavation of the Woodhead Tunnel between Manchester and Sheffield ten years earlier had been marked by scandalous neglect of the workforce, and Someiller was working in a far bleaker and more deserted area. Someiller rebuilt the hovels in the village nearest the entrance to the tunnel and then created a new, modern town on the site for the 4,000 men he employed.

  Louis Favre, instigator and victim of the St Gotthard tunnel under the Alps.

  Someiller lived to see his work completed, a satisfaction denied to poor Louis Favre, the Genevan contractor who accepted the awesome task of excavating the tunnel under the St Gotthard pass. Inevitably, by ‘the summer of 1879 Favre was broken by the combination of evil forces – seven years of incessant struggles with the mountain, during which he had spent days on end submerged in water up to his waist personally supervising the work, the shocks and frustrations, his long persecution by the railway management, and, lately, his deteriorating economic conditions’.2

  Favre was buried with the rest of the tunnel’s victims in an ever-expanding cemetery. He was not its only distinguished victim. Alfred Escher, the banker whose vision had seen the project through endless obstacles, died seven months before it was opened, and his second-in-command had died before him. Favre, a rich man before he embarked on his last contract, died bankrupt. The railway company honoured his memory by granting an annuity of a mere hundred francs a month to his only surviving daughter. Such ingratitude was not uncommon.

  Navvies in Arizona, crossing the American desert.

  As the single biggest challenge available in the nineteenth century, and one, moreover, open to men of a wide variety of talents, railway building naturally attracted more than its fair share of the world’s chancers, many lines resembling playgrounds for adventurers rather than rational enterprises. Their leaders’ habits were echoed, on a smaller scale, by thousands of suppliers who overcharged, sold short, bribed the purchasing clerks.

  The ‘soldiers’ the builders commanded had enlisted for reasons which were many, various, generally unsurprising, and often comparable to those found in recruits to more orthodox armies: a need to earn a living; a sense of adventure; a desire to prove themselves; greed; wanderlust; a means of escape from domestic problems – or from the police. Frederick Talbott, himself a former surveyor, admitted that at first sight the work appeared to be an unappealing combination of danger and discomfort. Nevertheless, he said, he would not exchange the virgin country, with its invigorating air and life of exciting adventure, for a smoke-begrimed centre of activity for any consideration. He quotes another surveyor, ‘if it is not the natural difficulties or the hostility of the natives which lend variety to the work, the chances are a hundred to one that a revolution will fill the gap, especially in China or the South Americas’.3

  In developed countries most railway lines were defined by the towns and cities they were connecting, so the routes were pretty obvious, the builders were working within relatively narrow parameters. It was very different in the Wild West, or the Andes, or Siberia. Someone had to find a route, often through mountains which had proved impassable even for the surest-footed mule. The job could not be done by legislators or financiers – the entrepreneurs building the Canadian Pacific Railway, for example, surveyed a better route through the Rockies in half the time it had taken their bureaucratic predecessors.

  The politicians were at the mercy of the men on the spot, who could be engineers, surveyors, contractors – the labels were applied haphazardly in an age which lacked precise professional or functional demarcation marks – everyone connected with railway building aspired to be the sort of ‘Renaissance engineer’ typified by George Stephenson. The transition from known to unknown country was not always easy however. The railway across the Isthmus of Panama destroyed the reputation of Minor C. Story. He used the same materials on the Panama railway as he had, successfully, in New England. His wooden bridges collapsed within a few months and he fled ‘bankrupt financially, tarnished in reputation and broken in spirit’.4

  The Cheyenne do their best to halt the railroad.

  Daring was often rewarded. Finding a route from the Peruvian coast up to Arequipa, Peru’s second city, over 7,500 feet up in the Andes, was left to two self-styled ‘engineers’:

  ‘Echegaray knew nothing about railway surveying but happened to possess an old and very inaccurate theodolite, which was the party’s sole instrumental equipment. Blume, for his part, was presumably gifted in some subtle way – not that it mattered; the Government knew nothing of surveys and in any case were not willing to spend any money on it.’ (Brian Fawcett, Railways of the Andes).

  Yet theirs was the route chosen, and built.

  The surveyors were the advance guard and naturally took the brunt of local opposition. In civilised countries this was mainly verbal: elsewhere it was physical. In the Rockies dozens of surveying parties were ambushed by local Indians, killed or, if they were lucky, merely scalped – and this despite the best efforts of an army commanded by General Sherman in person.

  Employers could be as dangerous as Red Indians. The surveyors seeking a route through the Canadian Rockies were led by an absolute monster, one Major A. B. Rogers, hated by his men who frequently starved on the minimal rations he took with them. Rogers ‘resembled many of the other railway surveyors, each of whom embraced the cause of a piece of real estate almost as if he were married to it’.5 After several years of hair-raising adventures, Rogers finally found the watershed at which the streams flowed in different directions. It was named Rogers Pass, the only reward he was seeking – he merely framed the $5,000 cheque he was given for finding the pass.

  The influence of the ‘experts’ was personal, dependent on their character rather than any formal qualifications they might possess. One man, William Dargan, ‘built, promoted, financed and guided the Irish railway system for three decades’ from the 1840s to the 1870s. More daring and far-sighted was ‘Crazy’ Judah, the brilliant engineer who earned his nickname from his fanatical belief that a railroad across the United States was a practical proposition. He turned out to be right, for he was one of the many visionaries whose apparently impractical ideas became triumphant reality within a few years. Before he died, while on a visit to New York to try and interest Wall Street in the idea, he had surveyed a practicable route east from Sacramento; although it was a pharmacist from the little town of Dutch Flat, anxious to promote his town, who first found a route through the High Sierras, a discovery which Judah then exploited.

  Some of the century’s greatest heroes are to be found in the ranks of
the engineers. Yet, with the notable exception of the British pioneers, few of their names are remembered today. This is partly because engineers’ lives have not attracted the attention of historians, partly because they were overshadowed, even in their own lifetime, by the promoters and financiers who exploited their talents. On the biggest projects like the Union Pacific even the most powerful engineers like Grenville Dodge needed the help of General Grant, a future president, to gain the upper hand over an incompetent rival backed by Dr Durant, trickiest of promoters. Poor Peter Dey, Dodge’s predecessor, who resigned in the face of Durant’s dishonesty, was immediately forgotten.6

  Not surprisingly the engineers, the ‘coolest’ of men, ranked worldly honours well below the esteem of their professional colleagues. Thomas Brassey, in character more an engineer than a contractor, spoke for all of them when he thanked Louis Napoleon for one of the numerous decorations he was awarded with the words, ‘Mrs Brassey will be pleased to have it.’ He followed the example of the great canal engineer, Thomas Telford, and the Stephensons, father and son. They accepted awards from foreign monarchs out of politeness and certainly without attempting to ingratiate themselves, while scorning British titles. It was Brassey’s worthy but far less distinguished son who acquired a peerage. The great captains of the armies of steam felt they needed no formal recognition. Their memorials were the lines they built.