He had left England under the impression that he was required to ‘put the finishing touches’ to the railway from Valparaiso to Santiago: he was not to know that no one had yet done very much in the way of starting touches. There was no equipment worth mentioning and no trained workforce.
By him, the Chilian navvy, who had all his life transported earth or other material in hide bags on his back, the wheel of a barrow was regarded as an ornament, not for use, therefore he hoisted the clumsy contrivance on to his shoulder in triumph.
The only way he could get them to use even the simplest cranes was to threaten them with the sack if they refused. Lloyd tackled the problems he met with great vigour. He soon found that though his Indian workforce knew nothing of western technology, they were totally honest and trustworthy and he developed a great respect for them. He had no respect for the site chosen for Valparaiso station when he first rode out to see it. It was in a poor area, where the streets were ‘almost girth-deep in foetid mud’ and surrounded by a huddle of crude, insanitary fishermen’s huts. Lloyd had the huts pulled down and arranged for new, far better houses to be built at the railway company’s expense and for the foul swamp that was left behind to be filled in. All this then had to be protected by a sea wall – by no means the last to be built on the line. The first section of line ran out along the foot of the cliffs, and at one place a tunnel had to be cut through a spur of rock. It was the first railway tunnel on the Pacific Coast, so the completion in 1855 was marked by an official breakfast and a rendition by the local band of God Save the Queen. They began track laying in May of that year and they set a target of completing the first eight miles in time for another official opening on 18 September, Independence Day. The track was completed on time, but there was a problem. Two locomotives had arrived, crated up, but there were no fitters and no driver. Lloyd showed his customary resourcefulness and inveigled a ship’s engineer from a visiting mail steamer to help him set up the engines. Together they drove the first train in triumph.
The cattle train seen in the previous picture represents half the story: this illustration shows the carcases being transported in refrigerated trucks
Work was going well, but ahead lay a formidable obstacle. The line had to pass through the outlying hills of the Campana Mountains in a long tunnel. The contract was given to a local man, in spite of Lloyd’s protestations that he had no experience: local pride won the day. Lloyd washed his hands of the affair and got on with constructing the line on the far side of the ridge. The inevitable happened, the contractor folded and eighteen months were spent in legal wrangles. Meanwhile the track was still advancing, and Lloyd once again displayed his ingenuity. He built inclines up either side of the ridge and hauled a locomotive up to the top to act as a stationary engine. There it remained as a ‘temporary expedient’ for four years, pulling trucks up one side and lowering them down the other. Things began to improve in 1860 when he was finally given control of the tunnel workings. Even then he had his problems. On one occasion a German sub-contractor announced that he had no money to pay his 300 navvies, and he had no intention of standing in front of that many angry men and telling them so. The task went to Lloyd who had to suffer the consequences. He was forced to escape to a wooden house which was pelted with stones and there he stayed until the militia came to rescue him.
Lloyd had done his best, but by 1861 only 33 miles of railway had been completed. The task required greater resources than he had at his disposal. At this stage, Henry Meiggs stepped in and offered to finish the line in three years for 6 million pesos, with a bonus of 510,000 pesos for every month he came in ahead of that term. The deal was struck and within two weeks there were 4000 men at work – the line was completed in two years, three days – with a very handsome bonus. Lloyd had already moved on.
He was to work on other lines in Chile. In 1861 he was put in charge of the 33-mile long Coquimbo Railway. The first section was financed by the government who paid half and a consortium consisting of two Chilean and one English banker who paid the rest. There was a difficult passage through the mountains involving three tunnels, a 150-foot-high viaduct and a steady rise on a cruel gradient of 1 in 44 for twelve miles. There was one extravagant example of ‘cut and fill’ where spoil from a 70-foot-deep cutting went to build up an astonishing 300-foot-high embankment. At least the task facing the locomotives was not as severe as on a line in the silver-mining district on which he was asked to report and which he discovered had the alarming gradient of 1 in 20.
At the end of his work on the Santiago line, Lloyd stayed for another six months to ensure that everything was in good order and then headed home for England and, he believed, an interlude of peace and quiet. It was not to be. He had scarcely got his feet up in front of the fire before a request came through for him to return to South America to build a line in Mexico. He agreed, but this time the family stayed at home: Mexico in the 1860s, torn by revolution, ravaged by bandits, was not the ideal spot to take his wife and children, particularly as he was offered the job because his English predecessor had been murdered. The line was to run from Vera Cruz to Mexico City, a difficult line made doubly difficult by the presence of two armies, the French army of occupation and the Emperor Maximilian’s Austrian troops. Lloyd seemed remarkably sanguine about the whole thing:
I knew also that a few miles of line had been made and opened for traffic under the direction of an English engineer, who had been shot dead in a train by brigands, and I therefore was by no means unprepared to find that the direction of these works over a hundred leagues in a mountainous and sparsely populated country could entail considerable personal risk to health and life; therefore I took the precaution, of considerably increasing my life insurance, and of adding a medical officer to my staff.
In October 1864 he set sail for Vera Cruz. First impressions were even worse than those he had found in Panama. Vera Cruz was ‘a foul and miserable place’ with ‘a festering reef in front, extensive swamps hard by, high walls all round the city, and no water supply.’ Not surprisingly, it was infected with yellow fever. After Vera Cruz even a journey through bandit country made a welcome change. He took a 20-mile journey to Cameron along the line on which his predecessor had been shot, and found that a branch line to the north was totally unusable because of bandits. The next step of the journey, a 30-mile ride to the hills, was by diligence – the stage coach familiar from a thousand Hollywood Westerns. Lloyd was taken ill on the journey so they were forced to make a stop at a French army post, where they found matters were even worse. Fever had laid everyone low, including the army doctor, and Lloyd’s own doctor was soon earning his keep. Forty hours later they set off again for the mountain pass with a guard of twelve Mexican lancers who, Lloyd said, looked highly picturesque but inspired little confidence. The coach stuck deep in the mud, but even so they overtook a dispirited band of French soldiers, one of whom was lying motionless, face down on the ground. It rapidly became clear that he was neither sick nor injured but just plain drunk. He reeled to his feet and the first thing he saw was the brightly uniformed lancers. These he decided must be the enemy come to kill him and he began shooting. Had he been a touch more sober he might even have hit someone. To an outside observer it might have been hilarious – the terrified lancers, the roaring drunk, the astonished Englishman – but this incident was probably a lot less amusing for the weak, sick engineer confronted by an inebriated soldier firing real shot from a real gun. They went on through dense forest until they emerged on the high plateau where the highway led on to Mexico City and its background of snow-capped mountains. The dangers and trials were over, if only for a time, and Lloyd and his party settled into a comfortable house that was to be home base.
The Camber Railway at Port Stanley, Falkland Islands: someone has humorously named the trucks first class, second class and smoker. The ship in the background is the famous SS Great Britain, now back in her home port of Bristol.
The first task they faced was surveying, and hea
dquarters was established at the entrance to the pass of Maltrata. This time they were given real protection in the form of a troop of cavalry and a company of infantry. By 1865 work was under way with thousands of South American Indian workers. They arrived with their entire families and looked after their own food and lodgings. On the line, the women and children filled baskets with earth, which the men then carried away. Each Friday night they all left for home and each Monday morning they were back again. At the height of the working period there were around ten thousand of them and Lloyd declared that ‘a score of British workmen would have given him more difficulty to control’. There were problems, however. Each month around £25,000 had to be brought as far as 300 miles through bandit country to pay the workers, and the railway company had no option but to set up their own private army to protect it. Compared with this, building a railway might have seemed easy. In fact the route was far from simple, with a descent from the mountains to 4000 feet at 212 feet per mile. He pushed on until 140 out of the 300-mile route was completed and another hundred miles was ready for track laying. Then politics and a financial crisis brought everything to a halt and Lloyd left Mexico, just in time to miss the revolution that swept away the French. He was probably disappointed, for his undimmed sense of adventure spurred him on to further work in South America.
He surveyed routes in Argentina and Brazil, the latter proving just as exciting as his escapades in Mexico. This time, however, the problems were rather more natural than man-made. He surveyed a vast amount of ground including a section along the River Iraby. It was fearsome country with jungle reaching to the water’s edge and no settlements for 260 miles. Previously two corps of engineers had been sent out but had achieved nothing. No food had got through to them; the jungle was too dense for hunting, and they were terrified of the native Indians. Lloyd sorted that out. He had stout canoes built and hacked regular portage tracks round the rapids so that a supply route could be maintained. The engineers welcomed the food supplies, but they would much rather have been told to go home. The river was never safe. A tropical storm turned it into a torrent, and at one time Lloyd had to abandon his hut even though it was built 30 feet above the waterline. Other surveyors had equally strenuous tasks, on the Matto Grosso and up the River Parana, which in places was six miles across. For two years they lived under canvas in a hostile environment, but the task was eventually completed. William Lloyd was only one of a number of engineers working in the Americas in equally appalling conditions – we know his story simply because he lived to a comfortable retirement during which he wrote his memoirs.
Throughout the region there were engineers and contractors at work on lines large and small. In 1915, the Royal Navy built the Camber narrow-gauge railway along the northern edge of Stanley harbour in the Falkland Islands; it ran from Navy Point to the radio transmitters at the edge of Port Stanley, a modest distance of around four miles. It would scarcely be worth a mention were it not for one idiosyncratic feature. The wind in the Falklands is notorious, so the little trucks were built with sockets into which a mast could be fitted. A small lug sail was attached enabling personnel to bowl along the track at some speed. More conventional transport was provided by a pair of Kerr Stuart ‘Wren’ class locomotives, and the author was delighted to discover that they had survived the 1982 war. They sit on the quayside, rusty, far from complete, but still there, having been hauled off a rubbish dump. Something at least has survived of one of the last lines to be built by the British in South America.
One of the most challenging lines ever built in South America was that of the São Paulo Railway Company. The line was proposed to provide a route that would link São Paulo and the important upland coffee plantations to the coast at Santos for export. The difficulty was that between the plateau and the coast lay the steep slopes of the Serra do Mar, 800 metres above sea level. The Brazilians turned to Britain for help, and the experienced Scottish engineer James Brunlees travelled to Brazil to view the problem for himself. He realised that it would be extremely difficult and very expensive, to construct a conventional railway over such country, but he was sure the problems could be solved. He recommended that the job of engineering the line should go to Daniel Makinson Fox, who although only 26 years old had experience in working in hilly country in Wales and the Pyrenees. He proposed constructing a 20 km long conventional adhesion railway and to conquer the slopes of the Serra do Mar he would build four cable-worked inclines.
Brunlees approved the plans and work began on the adhesion line in 1860 and went on rapidly in spite of many difficulties, including cutting rock that was so loose and friable that explosives could not be used. Everything had to be cut away by hand, and in places the line had to be carried on embankments to raise it above the flood plain. Work began on the inclines in 1861 and the whole was opened in 1867. It was an immense success, so successful in fact that a second inclined system had to be built parallel to the first to take the huge increase in coffee trade and the rapid growth of São Paulo. The new system was worked in five sections by 1000 horse power winding engines, and special small locomotives were used to handle traffic between the inclines. Today it has become a popular tourist attraction.
CHAPTER FIVE
Asia
Early railway building in Asia was inseparably entwined with the process of colonization. Britain had not set out to acquire an Asian empire, but had more or less stumbled into it by the early nineteenth century. At its heart was the vast territory of India. It is not possible to understand the complexities of railway building here without first having at least a notion of the underlying political situation. Even the name ‘India’ has meant different things to different people at different times; it has never been prudent to anticipate a long shelf-life for a map of India.
The British had very little interest in the Indian sub-continent during the early years of exploration and colonization. When Elizabeth I granted a royal charter bestowing trading rights in Asia, it went to the East India Company. The name is significant: the objective was the spice islands of the East Indies but unfortunately the Dutch had got there first and established territorial rights and a trading monopoly. They were also strong enough to defend their position. The British looked instead to India. That country was already carved up into areas of influence. Much of the land was ruled by the Moghuls who had migrated south from Persia early in the sixteenth century. The early British traders must have been overwhelmed by the capital Agra, with its opulent temples and palaces behind massive fortress walls. And by 1632 they could have looked downriver to where that most famous of all Indian palaces was being built, the Taj Mahal. But already the Moghul Empire was beginning to slide and disintegrate and two European powers, France and Portugal, had important enclaves. There was plenty of room still for the British to shoulder their way in and join in the wholesale exploitation of the country. International rivalries were inevitable: the native princes quarrelled with each other, and France and Britain were soon at war. The Seven Years War began in Europe but spread to India, and the British victory signalled an end to French involvement in the sub-continent. The Portuguese were more concerned with religious introspection than trade, and they were left to their tiny enclave of Goa. By the end of the eighteenth century, the most effective force in India was neither the government nor the princes, but the privately run trading empire of the East India Company. In 1765 Robert Clive, commander of the British forces, formally accepted the state revenue of Bengal, making that state, in effect, a colony – and one that was to be stripped of its assets with no thought for the future. The age of the nabobs had arrived, the men who went out to India, nominally to serve Britain, in practice to serve themselves and come home flaunting huge wealth. It was all very well being flamboyant in India, but in Britain it caused deep resentment and envy. The government acted. There was now to be a division between trade and administration, and the two should never again mingle. No administrator could ever again legally use his public office for private profit
. It was a difficult and confused time: India, or a large part of it, was effectively under British rule, but relations with the British Parliament were distant. The Governor General could – and did – overrule his Council. There was an excellent Civil Service – the best paid anywhere in the world – and two armies, one owing allegiance to the Crown, the other to the East India Company. It all made for complexity, and complexity does not make for decisive rapid action, as the early railway promoters were to discover.
The crest was designed to show the value of railways: contrasting the bearers struggling with a palanquin with the steam locomotive and its train of carriages
The case for railways was easily made. Trade with Britain meant that communication and transport had taken on a new importance; and the current state of the roads was atrocious. It is always difficult to assess accounts of bad transport systems of a century and a half ago, but in the case of India one can at least use the yardstick of the modern road system. Most would come to the conclusion that if this is what the roads are like at the end of the twentieth century, they must have been truly appalling 200 years ago. Even today, traffic is dominated by the lumbering cart drawn by bullock or camel or by pack animals. An engineer visiting India while the railways were first being planned wrote,
Indian railways will not, therefore, as in England, be the substitution of a perfect system of conveyance for other convenient means, at the demand of a prosperous nation; but they will be, at least in many districts, the first introduction of any communication whatever.
Railway Empire Page 15