The greatest difficulty Fox faced was his inability to get a clear sighting of the whole escarpment. At the foot of the cliffs the trees obliterated much of the view and clambering up only showed a narrow portion. On one day he spotted what appeared to be a likely ravine, but at the end they were greeted by a glorious sight but no route for a railway. A high waterfall tumbled down a sheer face, and the energetic young engineer decided to scramble up the side for a closer look. His efforts were rewarded: he spotted the valley of the Rio Mugy, rising at a comparatively gentle angle up through the Serra. He had found his line, but his problems were only starting.
After fifteen months of surveying, Fox was convinced there was no alternative route up the escarpment, but he was still faced with a drop of over 2500 feet in just five miles, an impossible gradient for conventional traction of 1 in 10. Fox’s solution was a series of cable-worked inclines. There were four altogether, varying in length from 5842 to 7017 feet but these were by no means the only problems encountered along the way. From Sao Paulo, the line was continued inland to Jundiahy, 68 miles from the top of the inclines. Work here was no easier than it had been in the climb up the Serra. The land was sliced through with ravines, making necessary a long procession of banks, cuttings, viaducts and tunnels. The loose rock of the mountains revealed an unhappy tendency to slide back into the cuttings. The only solution available to cope with one land slip was to wash it away. A ‘considerable mountain stream’ was diverted into the cutting and a small army set to work, one part of which was kept busy shovelling the loose material carried down by the water, while the rest used the same spoil to build up flood banks. Gorges were spanned by lattice girder bridges, cuttings were in places almost a hundred feet deep, yet the contractors, Robert Sharpe & Sons, finished within budget and ahead of schedule. The Sao Paulo Railway remained as a British company well into the twentieth century.
A construction train in the San Ramino ravine on the Santiago to Valparaiso railway, for which William Lloyd was the engineer.
There was a general belief in South America, in the early days, that British involvement in a railway scheme was a sure-fire guarantee of success. Alas, this was not so. Farmers promoted the Dom Pedro – later the Central – Railway. They paid for the Warring Brothers to come from England to survey a route, but had enough good bucolic common-sense to turn down a system that included conquering the Serra using compressed air. In 1854, the Brazilian Embassy in London was authorized to find a contractor to build this problematic line, and they came up with the name of Edward Price. The brief was splendidly vague: it specified merely the gauge (5 ft. 3 in.) and the two termini. The rest was left to Price.
Their decision turned out to be a disaster. The contractor had no affection for expensive earthworks so the line swayed all over the countryside as if it had been laid down by an incorrigible drunk. The workmanship was atrocious. Station buildings were thrown together using the cheapest lath and plaster. Floors were of beaten earth, and not even well-beaten earth – one station waiting room had to be weeded every week to prevent it becoming totally overgrown. He added to the costs by bringing bricklayers from England, although there were perfectly competent workmen available in Brazil. His outstanding achievement was to set a line across a flood plain which disappeared under water every time there was heavy rainfall.
Happily not all lines undertaken by British engineers suffered the same low standards. The Bahia and San Francisco Railway was engineered by Vignoles, with his son Hutton Vignoles as resident engineer. It was a line on which the British had a controlling interest but the workforce was international: 446 Italians, 107 English, 11 Germans, 4 French, 2 Swiss and 2069 Brazilians. The international appeal of Brazil is not difficult to understand: the Brazilians had an enviable reputation for prompt payment of bills and honouring of commitments. When the government spoke of ‘guaranteed payments’, then they stuck to their word. Webb gave his views of the cosmopolitan workforce in typically blunt terms. The Chinese navvies, who began to appear in 1855, ‘were evidently the scum of the population; utterly useless as labourers, they proved a continual source of annoyance and loss, and not one in ten was worth his food.’ The Portuguese labourers, on the other hand, were first rate, if a little conservative: they arrived already organized into gangs headed by sub-contractors.
Each of these men brought with him from sixteen to sixty of his countrymen, and the gangs, thus formed, dotted the line of the works with their triangular huts roofed with grass.
The Portuguese labourers are a very hardy race of men, who can endure greater privation and exposure than English labourers. At first, they refused to use the barrow and the shovel; the hoe, their only tool, was not, however, so objectionable along the steep sides of the Mangaratiba mountains, as it was on the plains of Manua; and in certain localities, from its acting as pick and shovel combined, it was even the best tool that could have been used.
The railways first executed in Brazil all had this international element as did those in other parts of South America as far as construction was concerned, but the British continued to own some lines, right through into the twentieth century. Cash spoke louder than the rival claims of local interest, multinational labour forces or old imperial allegiances. Lines throughout South America had an equally strong English accent.
While Brazil was establishing its rail network in the 1850s, neighbouring Argentina scarcely existed as a modern nation-state at all. Large areas were either self governing or scarcely governed at all. There was no rush into railway building largely because no one saw any need for railways: there was no manufacturing industry, no mineral wealth. A few far-sighted individuals did see, however, that railways could play an important political role in pulling the disparate elements of the country together. The group of provinces in the interior, the Argentine Confederation, was a potential nucleus for a unified country, and in 1853, the Confederation spokesman Juan Alberdi spelt it out in the simplest terms: ‘railways will bring about the unity of the Argentine Republic better than any number of congresses.’ In 1854 the Confederation engaged an American engineer – on the not always sound ground that he was the cheapest available – to survey a line from Cordoba to Rosario. There was then the problem of finding the cash, and the Argentinians approached another American, William Wainwright, to organize the fund-raising. He in turn approached the powerful corpus of British merchants based in Buenos Aires but they had nowhere near enough capital themselves, nor could they raise funds in London where the effects of the Crimean War were being felt. The plans were set aside, but the idea of railways out of Buenos Aires had nonetheless grabbed the imagination of the British merchants.
If grandiose schemes had to be temporarily shelved, a more modest beginning was possible. Daniel Gowland, chairman of the British Merchants committee in Buenos Aires, was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Ferrocarril al Oeste, the Western Railway. The local government gave the necessary official support: the building land was free, the capital equipment brought from overseas was exempt from customs duty and they put up a third of the money, but agreed not to take any dividends until private investors were receiving 9 per cent. The arrangements sound as if they were designed to finance an entire rail network, but it was, in fact, no more than a modest suburban line which built up over the years to a less than impressive 25 miles of track. Yet the locals still found it necessary to send to Britain for William Bragge, who came across with 160 navvies in tow. In due time rolling stock and locomotives were sent from England, and to show that the little suburban railway was in reality destined to be part of an altogether vaster enterprise the engines were given stirringly heroic names: Progreso and Luz del Desierto (Light of the Desert). The line was built to a broad, 5ft. 6in. gauge as were lines already begun in Brazil and Paraguay. This decision was attacked by Argentinian patriots who declared that the gauge had been set not out of any rational drive to link up with neighbouring railways, but because secondhand rolling stock from the Crimea was beginning t
o come on to the market.
The 1000 horse power steam engine powered winding system at the top of one of the inclines on the São Paulo Railway
A Locobreque that can be translated as brake locomotive on one of the inclines
The Serra viaduct on the São Paulo Railway
In May 1862 General Bartolome Mitre became President of Argentina, and the previously independent province of Buenos Aires came, if only partly, under the control of the new national government. There now began a period of western-style economic expansion which coincided with the new legislation in Britain that gave joint-stock companies their legal basis. It was a happy conjunction: Argentina wanted money for investment, Britain had the cash looking for a profitable home. And the Argentinian schemes were potentially very profitable indeed, with government guaranteed returns and handsome land grants. The cynical might say that the taxpayers of South America were being forced to hand out expensive sweeteners to the wealthy investors of Britain; defenders of the scheme would ask how else railways were ever to be built. Whatever the morality of the scheme, it certainly attracted funds. By 1875 over £23 million had been invested in Argentina of which nearly a third went on railway construction.
The impetus for railway building came, as it had in Brazil, very largely from the British merchants who had set up in business there. The leading figure was G.W. Drabble who had first come to Buenos Aires in 1842 as representative of the family’s cotton-exporting firm based in Manchester. He stayed on and eventually became Chairman of the Bank of London and River Plate and the principal promoter of the Central Argentine Railway. However assiduously local interests promoted the line, however, there was no disguising the fact that they were a good deal less enthusiastic about paying for it. The largest sum, invested by the richest family in the country, was £200 which contrasts with the £20,000 invested by a Mrs Sanders of whom nothing very much is known except that she lived in Derbyshire. Not surprisingly those most closely involved in construction were the major investors. On the Buenos Ayres Great Southern, the engineer who took the first contract, Thomas Rumball, was a heavy subscriber, as were the contractors, Brassey and Wythes, Peto and Betts. They acted wisely, for the success of the line ensured an excellent return. At the opposite extreme, financially as well as geographically, was the Northern Railway of Buenos Ayres (sic). It was promoted in England by E.H.S. Crawford MP and was to run from Buenos Aires to the Rio Maldonado at San Fernando where a new deep-water port was to be constructed. It was from the first a story of muddle and incompetence. When the line was open there seemed to be no shortage of passengers, but receipts were depressingly low. It was only when someone was sent to investigate that it was discovered that local railway employees were taking out sheaths of tickets and selling them from a booth outside the station at a third of the regular price.
Everyone expected to get something out of the railways. The government had fine phrases for each new opening ceremony. When Mitre took the ceremonial spade to inaugurate work on the Central in 1863, he declared that ‘Everyone must rejoice on the opening of this road, for it will tend to give riches where there is poverty and to institute order where there is anarchy.’ The railway would, the government hoped, encourage settlement along the route as the lines struck out into the open plains of the pampas, hence the land grants. It was a point not lost on speculators. They could buy land on the cheap and as the railway approached, sell on at great profit. The sharper practitioners realized that they did not even have to do that. They could buy up land, announce that they were promoting a railway over it, sell the land – and forget all about the railway. Mitre at least managed to stop this particular scam by announcing that the government would decide where railways were to be built, leaving it to private capital to finance them.
There was something of a confrontation between the British entrepreneurs and the American interests led by William Wheelwright. In 1862 Wheelwright finally got the concession to build the Central, the line he first proposed from Cordoba to Rosario. At the same time, the British group led by Edward Lumb was authorized to build the Great Southern from Buenos Aires to Chascomus. There were tax exemptions, land grants and guaranteed returns for both parties. The British got the more favourable guarantee, at a return of 7 per cent on a capital investment set at £10,000 per mile; Wheelwright, for his part, received a more generous land grant. He decided, however, that cash in hand was a better bargain than land and objected to the terms offered to the British interest. Lumb’s group won, not because they necessarily had a better case, but because they were more generous in their dishing out of bribes. It was estimated that they paid £22,000 to various officials. Work on the Great Southern got under way and an interesting array of speculators, engineers and contractors descended on the country. There was no question but that they did well out of it. Where locals used paper money issued by local banks – the bank of Cordoba, for example, circulated 33 million pesetas in notes, while holding 8 million in gold – the railway men got their cash in gold. The government kept handing out reserves, hoping one day it would come back in investment. Eventually the tail did manage to catch up with the dog.
The railway builders had a different view to the speculators: they saw themselves as public benefactors helping a backward country to achieve its rich potential. Helps in his biography of Brassey wrote, ‘I think that this Argentine enterprise of Mr Brassey’s will have more important results than any other of his undertakings’, and again, ‘I doubt whether, in the history of railway enterprise, there has been anything so largely beneficial to the country wherein a railway has been introduced.’ The contractors were not merely railway builders, that was the easy part. Indeed, the going was so easy for much of the way that all the navvies had to do was lay the sleepers on bare earth and spike the rails to them. These contractors were also colonisers, opening up the country, encouraging immigrants to settle. The railways themselves created a demand as the British Charge d’Affaires reported in 1866: ‘The supply falls very short of the demand, and unlimited employment can be procured without difficulty at most remunerative wages, as in this country artisans and labourers are greatly needed.’ Railway workers flooded in, mainly from Spain and Italy, with a few from Britain. They mostly took their wages, finished the job and went home again. Railway empire building did not go quite as planned: the men came as migrant workers, not as settlers. Nevertheless, until Peron took over all the railways in the country, the British had built and still owned some 16,000 miles of track in Argentina. They were never to dominate any other South American country to the same extent; for most of the rest of the region the dominant figure was supplied by the USA in the form of the swashbuckling contractor Henry Meiggs. That does not mean that the British did not make significant contributions to the work elsewhere. In 1865, for example, the Central Uruguay Railway was promoted using a guarantee that began at 7 per cent and when it was increased to 8 per cent on capital set at £10,000 per mile English contractors stepped in; it was the Argentine story all over again. When the line opened, much of the rolling stock and most of the locomotives were from England – specially-built components from Robert Stephenson, engines from such well-known companies as Beyer Peacock, Manning Wardle and Vulcan. More challenging situations appeared further south.
Beyer Peacock 4-6-0 with a train of cattle trucks on the Buenos Aires Great Southern Railway in Argentina in the 1920s
The story of construction in Chile brings back an engineer we last met in Scandinavia, William Lloyd. On his return to England in 1853 he heard that the Chilean government was looking for a railway engineer and Robert Stephenson recommended him for the job. This time he took his wife and two young children with him. It is easy to underestimate the sheer scale of the adventure it was for the railway pioneers and their families, setting off on long and difficult journeys for unknown lands. At least Valparaiso, their destination, was a civilized place. When Charles Darwin came with the Beagle in 1834 he declared it ‘a sort of London or Paris’ where one was �
��obliged to shave & dress decently’. This may have been encouraging for the Lloyd family, but first they had to get there.
The outward journey started pleasantly enough, with a voyage by paddle steamer across the Atlantic to New York. Then their troubles started. The Californian gold rush that had begun in 1849 had not yet run its course, and there was still a huge demand for ships to take the fortune hunters either all the way round Cape Horn to California or at any rate as far as Panama, from where they could take the fetid trail across the isthmus to the west coast. Anything that could float was pressed into service and no niceties, such as limiting the numbers that could be crammed in, were observed. The Lloyds booked passage on a ship, which turned out to have started its life as the Vanderbilt’s 200-ton yacht, days of glory which were now faded memories. The Lloyd family found themselves in the company of 900 rough and rowdy gold diggers. They left the overcrowded vessel on Panama’s east coast and took to the partly built railway across the isthmus, finally finishing their journey to Panama itself by mule. It was not a welcoming sight: ‘a mouldering den of fever grog shops, low gambling halls, of flies, mosquitoes, oppressive heat and social disorganisation.’ It was with a good deal of relief that they boarded ship again. Almost the first passenger they met was Lloyd’s old navvy companion from French days, Tom Breakwater. He was en route for Peru, but already had succumbed to one of the fevers that haunted Central America. Within a day he was dead. The Lloyds were more fortunate and all made the journey of sixty-three days safely.
In the annals of railway building it is easy to overlook the role of wives and families who followed the men to remote parts of the world. No one has written the story of the numerous Mrs Lloyds, uprooted from home, bringing up families among strangers. There was one consolation: Valparaiso had a large English community of merchants and traders who here in the southern hemisphere played cricket and rode to hounds as if they were back in Surrey or Berkshire. William Lloyd, however, had some unpleasant surprises in store.
Railway Empire Page 14