On 24 May 1854 the first temporary dam was begun. Caissons, 188 feet long and 90 feet wide were towed out into the channel and sunk, they had to be pumped out, refloated and towed away again each winter to prevent the ice from wrecking them. It was not, however, to be the practical difficulties of the work that made for slow progress. Disease haunted the workings. In winter, the men who had come over from England and were wholly unprepared for the conditions, suffered dreadfully. Many suffered from frostbite of noses, ears and feet. The fine snow blowing into their faces combined with the brilliance of the sun caused temporary blindness. Summer offered no respite. Along with the warm weather came ‘ship fever’ or cholera and at one time as many as one in three were laid low. A great many never recovered. Hodges recorded his dismay at the number of strikes: ‘Besides strikes occasioned by other causes, it is almost a custom in Canada for mechanics and labourers to strike twice a year, let the rate of wages be what it may. The first period of general strike is in the Spring when increased activity in every business is occasioned by the arrival of the Spring fleet. The second is at commencement of harvest, where there is abundant demand for labour.’
Construction of the Pojucca tunnel on the Bahia to San Francisco railway engineered by Vignoles
Hodges also faced technical problems. Before leaving England he had left plans for a ‘steam traveller’ which was to be used for shifting stone at the site. A machine was duly built, shipped to Canada and found to be totally useless. The expensive machine was abandoned and one of the sub-contractors, Mr Chaffey, built a new one in the winter of 1854-5. It had none of the finished elegance of the English machine, but it had one distinct advantage – it worked. It was, in effect, a travelling crane running along rails on a 50-foot-high gantry, and it made the moving and sorting of the huge blocks of limestone a comparatively simple matter.
The principal difficulty, however, was cash. The Crimean War had sent prices rocketing and made nonsense of estimates. However, the contractors pushed on as fast as they could and in 1859 the bridge was open. Hodges now praised the engineer, contractors and their workforce: ‘They have left behind them in Canada an imperishable monument of British skill, pluck, science, and perseverance in this bridge, which they not only designed, but constructed.’ They also left behind a fortune spent in construction and the contractors took home a considerable loss rather than the expected profit. There was a general feeling that this was not a sensible way to build railways in Canada. Old world technology did not necessarily have the right answers to New World problems. The problems of the steam traveller were symptomatic of what the Canadians saw as a more general malaise. Why order machines, ironwork or, indeed, skilled men from abroad when all were available more conveniently and at lower price closer to home? Increasingly they looked to American experience as a more reliable guide to Canadian development than that offered by the very different railway world of Britain. And British engineers found that as they travelled the world as peripatetic railway builders they too met circumstances where America offered a more useful model. Laying out a line among the green fields of Kent was not at all the same as setting out a route through dense uncharted forests. James Robert Mosse wrote a short treatise on The Principles to be Observed in the Laying Out of Railways in Newly Developed Countries. In densely forested areas there was, in his opinion, ‘no better method than that practised in America’.
The party generally consists of four surveyors with from twelve to twenty men as chain-men, axe-men, carriers of baggage, &c; they are furnished with tents and provisions, and where practicable with two or more horse-teams. The surveyors include the chief of the party, the theodolite man, the leveller, one man taking cross-sections, and one spare surveyor.
After obtaining what knowledge of the country is practicable from its general features and from the course of rivers, the chief reconnoitres with an aneroid and a compass some 2 or 3 miles in advance of the party, and he then directs the courses to be taken with the trial lines. The theodolite man then cuts these courses in straight lines (not trusting to the compass) puts in pegs every 100 feet, enters in his notebook the courses, width of rivers and streams, and sketches the general topography of the country. The third surveyor records the levels, and the fourth man follows the level, taking at every 100 feet length cross-sections with a clinometer graduated to percentages of inclination, so that if the index mark 6, and the distance be 400 feet, the difference of level between the two points would be 24 feet; and a figured sketch of each cross-section is then entered in the note-book. By this system, the line cut through the forest is levelled and cross-sectioned on the same day; in fact, the ground covered by the cross-sections is thoroughly ascertained. Where the forest is not too thick, an average of 1¼ mile of line can be thus surveyed in one day, provided the axe-men and chain-men are experienced.
Bahia station under construction, 1861
The engineering world of the nineteenth century was being turned on its head. The British engineer was no longer teaching the newcomer overseas, he was learning from him. And when it came to railway construction in South America, British and US engineers and contractors were to find themselves in direct competition. And, at times, they found themselves faced with conditions for which even Mr Mosse’s carefully formulated rules proved quite inadequate. Yet a visitor to South America could be forgiven for believing that all the local influences were British. Visit the Central Station at Montevideo and the stony faces that frown down on you are those of James Watt and George Stephenson. The station at Sao Paulo in Brazil is based – loosely it has to be said – on the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. And nowhere is British influence more obvious than in Argentina. The vast curved roof of the Retiro Station at Buenos Aires is held up by ironwork supplied from Liverpool, while the tiles that decorate the booking hall at the Central Station come from Royal Doulton. Out in the country, in the great wild plains of the pampas are little half-timbered stations that seem to have strayed from Surrey. The first railway to be built in South America, admittedly a very minor affair, was in British Guinea and opened in 1848. Impressions are misleading, however: it is, in reality, a more complicated story in which money provides the main theme.
Retiro station, Buenos Aries at the end of the 19th century.
The first thoughts about railway building in the South American continent had a marvellous breadth of vision; nothing was excluded. In 1827 an Englishman resident in Brazil, Charles Grace, sent a petition to the Emperor for permission to build an ‘Iron Rail Way’ from Rio to Itaqui on the Argentine frontier. He was promised that his proposal would be given careful consideration. Documents accumulated steadily over the next ten years, each carefully filed and docketed, but nothing actually happened and eventually the project died, smothered under a blanket of paper. Then in 1836, the Government of Sao Paulo granted a splendidly all-embracing concession for ‘ways of iron or others of the most modern and perfect invention, or canals, or one thing or another’. Vehicles to use this nebulous transport system could be powered by steam, and if that was unacceptable they could be steamless. It would have required a deal of ingenuity to devise a system that did not fit the bill. There was even provision for a system to be worked entirely by stationary engines to cross the range of coastal mountains. At least engineers were encouraged to come and see for themselves, and shortly after the granting of the concession the British engineer Alfred de Mornay arrived to carry out the first railway survey in the country. Others soon followed and a range of proposals was put forward including one for a system powered by ‘elastic water vapour’. Real progress looked likely when an English merchant based in the port of Santos, Fred Forum, proposed a line from there to Sao Paulo. Matters advanced far enough for a consultation with Robert Stephenson after a cursory survey had been made. The proposed route was undeniably direct, but achieved this by charging headlong at the hills bordering the coast. Stephenson proposed a longer and gentler route along a river valley.
What is of the greatest im
portance, it is entirely free from works of magnitude, such as render an accurate calculation of expense not only extremely difficult, but absolutely impracticable, for throughout my experience I have found that the application of ordinary estimates to works of extraordinary magnitude is worse than useless, as it never fails to mislead. This remark is peculiarly applicable to your project, for you are preparing to execute work in a country where the facilities are not only few but limited, where the simplest and cheapest, rather than the most refined and expeditious, methods of operation must be made available.
The advice scarcely mattered since neither line was followed. Shortly afterwards in 1845 another British merchant, Thomas Cochrane, was given a concession for a track to Sao Paulo. All he had to do was raise the money, and he proved himself nothing if not enthusiastic in this regard. He decided he needed a gimmick to pull in possible investors, so he toured the country with a circus using a clown to hand out prospectuses. Whether the Brazilians felt that a railway promoted by a clown lacked gravitas or whether they thought that any railway promoted in Brazil was a bit of a joke is uncertain. In either case, no funds materialized. Eventually legislation was needed to create a climate in which work could actually get under way. The government agreed to make land freely available, and not just enough land to provide space for the tracks. There were land grants along the route, designed to encourage development, and a strip 30 kilometres wide was declared a no-go zone as far as other railway promoters were concerned, ensuring that the pioneers would not be challenged by rivals. New schemes began to appear.
Building the Johannes viaduct on the Bahia to San Francisco railway.
The main problem all the early would-be railway builders came up against was the line of hills running parallel to the coast and rising to a height of nearly 3000 feet, the Serra do Mar. Even road builders found them a major obstacle. Communication between ports on the coastal plain was comparatively simple, but routes inland were another matter. Mule tracks were the main form of transport and long lines of the beasts, each carrying loads of around 250 lbs, would toil up the steep slopes. That was when they were passable at all. In the torrential tropical storms of the region, exposed surfaces were open to the erosion of the rain: rocks were washed away and deep gulleys were carved into the hillside down which the water thundered. When a small town, Petropolis, was established at the top of the Serra as a summer retreat for the court and high officials, a decent road was created to reach it. An idea of the likely cost of rail building can be gauged from the fact that this roadway was costed, by the government, at £40,000 per mile, even when the land came free.
There was, however, a case for a line that would ease the journey along the sandy, dusty plain at the foot of the Serra. A concession was granted to Senor Ireneo Evangelista De Sorze (later Baron Mava) to build the line. William Bragge was brought over from Britain in 1851 and he opted for the 5 ft. 6 in. gauge then in use in Spain. In 1852 before the line was complete Bragge was replaced by another British engineer, Edward Webb, whose first task was to look at ways of extending the line north from Petropolis; the awkward problem of what to do about the towering cliffs of the Serra do Mar was simply put to one side. It was difficult enough surveying on the top of the plateau, as Webb explains. His first problem came with local maps.
Maps there were in name, but they were worse than useless, because some reliance continued to be placed upon them, until their inaccuracy was proved. These maps are little better than itineraries depicted in lines; the distances upon them having been mainly determined, by the daily, or hourly progress of a saddle mule. A mule’s march per day, is reckoned at about a Brazilian league, or four miles per hour; and the distance between two places is marked by leagues, regulated by hours. If the roads were rectilinear and horizontal, such a calculation might approach to the truth; but as they bend in all directions, and at times, ascend gradients of 1 in 4, no true distance can be thus laid down on paper. On the same map, for example, an inch will represent at one part, a league, and at an another, two leagues, or more; positions of towns will be found interchanged, and rivers running in impossible directions. The Author was, therefore, obliged to discard these maps. All they are serviceable for is to point out a tolerably true line of coast, and to give the names of interior towns, rivers, mountains, &c, in the various provinces.
The first locomotive to work the Bahia-San Francisco line.
Then came the physical ardours of the survey itself.
Gangs of blacks were constantly employed in cutting paths, or headings, through the forests for the chain, theodolite, and level. It often happens, that to bring down one tree, six, or eight others must be felled, so closely do they grow together, and so firmly are their branches united, by ropes of wood. The surveying party lived in tents, and on no occasion desisted from work on account of the tropical rains, or heat. The survey and levels for the selection of a length of main line extending to thirty miles, were executed in four months and a half.
At the end of it all, the effort was wasted: the line was not built so Webb went on to finish the Manao Railway instead. This line offered few topographical difficulties other than one ‘deep, unhealthy swamp’; the difficulties that did appear were those caused by the lack of even the most basic equipment. Local Indians were disinclined to take up the work, and earned the scorn of the upright English engineer: ‘he plants a few banana trees, clears a small patch of ground for the mandioca root, or for the cultivation of black beans and rice, and all he cares for beyond, is to earn a trifle for clothes, rum, and tobacco.’ It was, needless to say, well beneath the dignity of any white man to work as a labourer, so the railway was built by slaves. The slave owners on the plantations were paid Is 4d a day for the use of ‘their’ men and women; the slaves themselves received approximately 7d a day’s worth of food. Webb’s only complaint about this system appears to be the high price.
Excavation along the line was carried out by the men, jerking the earth behind their backs with hoes, after which it was collected in baskets by women who carried it away on their heads. In dry weather it was more like dust than soil, and almost useless for building embankments; wet weather was so wet that virtually no work at all was done. Bridges were lightweight timber affairs, put together in a hurry to get the line open. Timber seems an obvious material to use in a country covered in dense forest, but it was that very density that caused the problems. Webb explains:
The Brazilian forests never present considerable areas covered with the same description of good timber, as in the pine forests; a serviceable tree generally stands in the midst of a group of various kinds of no actual value. The labour of dragging the squared balk from the place of its growth is almost inconceivable. A separate path for each piece of timber has, probably, to be cut, and the log has afterwards to be dragged, by bullocks, down precipices, over ravines, and through swamps.
Working conditions were far from ideal.
The district through which the line runs is very swampy, and it proved most unhealthy. All who were engaged in the works, sooner or later, were struck down by marsh fever. The heat, at times, was excessive; the temperature of the ballast, pure quartz, larger than sand and smaller than ordinary gravel, rose to upwards of 140°. Yet sickness in such situations seems attributable, as much to the impurity of the water consumed by the labourers, as to the excessive heat, or to the vitiated air. A supply of pure water to workmen, in similar positions, would repay a large expenditure for its carriage.
The cost of the 11-mile line, counting rolling stock, was about £15,500 per mile. In 1852 a 2-2-2 locomotive by Fairbairn of Manchester took Brazil into the railway age. The first part of the Maua Railway was complete.
There was no great rush into construction following the opening of the Maua Railway, but Baron Manua himself was now a dedicated enthusiast. He revived the idea of the Sao Paulo Railway and persuaded other Brazilians to join him in the enterprise. They offered a concession with a guaranteed return of 7 per cent on the £2 million c
apital and a promise that the line could be extended. It was in many ways an attractive proposition, in spite of the physical difficulties, for the line did serve a genuine commercial need: it linked the rich, coffee-growing area of the plateau to the coastal port. Once again, the obvious place to go to raise both finance and find expertise was Britain. Baron Manua had asked local engineers to survey the route, but they had only travelled as far as the edge of the plateau and had abandoned the whole idea. Now a new approach was made to the eminent British engineer James Brunlees who accepted the challenge. Like other leading engineers of the day, he could take on the consultancy without having to leave home, but he needed a trustworthy engineer to go out to Brazil for the survey. His choice was 26-year-old Daniel Fox who had some experience of the mountains having worked on a narrow gauge line in North Wales and done some surveying in the Pyrenees. He also spoke Spanish, which was considered a great advantage in Brazil – where the language is Portuguese! He accepted the job. It turned out to be even more arduous then Webb’s surveying work on the Manua.
Only those engineers who have made surveys through tropical forests can form a definite idea of the immense labour involved in the exploration and selection of a railway route in a country like Brazil, and especially on the precipitous and rugged sea face of the Serra do Mar. To add to the difficulties, the whole escarpment, from the deepest gorge to the loftiest peak, is covered with almost impenetrable primeval forests, through which the explorer has to drive narrow paths resembling ‘headings’. The exploring party usually remained in the jungle three weeks at a time, living in huts covered with the leaves of the palmetto, exposed to tropical rains and hardships of which it is difficult to convey an adequate idea, and emerging from the woods blanched from want of sunlight, which rarely penetrates the thick gloom of a Brazilian forest.
Railway Empire Page 13