Railway Empire
Page 16
A civil servant described a twelve-hour journey which involved seven hours of bone-rattling travel over a dirt track masquerading as a main road: ‘On his way the manslutdar amused us with several stories of accidents which had occurred on this road, one of which related to the sad fate of a banion, or trader, who received such a jolt as to make him inadvertently bite the end of his tongue off.’ There were, however, more pressing needs for transport improvement than to improve the travel conditions for junior civil servants. India was attempting to build up a prosperous cotton exporting industry. Mr Mangle, one time Chairman of the East India Company, had no doubts about what was holding back the process: ‘I have made the largest admissions with reference to the want of roads, which I say, is the only real obstacle to the exportation of cotton in large quantities from India.’ Other powerful interests found the lack of efficient transport a severe hindrance. Sir William Andrews put the military point of view and quoted a telling example:
In 1845, when the First Sikh War broke out, all officers, whose regiments were in the field, were ordered to join the army. About 100 engineer, cavalry and infantry officers were required to go from Calcutta to the north-west frontier of India. They were sent at the public expense, and with the greatest despatch, but the Postmaster-General could only send three daily! As the journey took 16 days, travelling day and night, few of these officers rejoined their regiments before the war was over.
This could, of course, be taken as an argument that armies manage perfectly well without their officers, but it also reinforces the point that no one in British India was happy with the old transport system inherited from the Moghuls. The army were to become builders of railways on their own account, though some of the officers seem to have been afflicted by decidedly wild notions. One military engineer, Lieutenant Colonel John Kennedy, began his proposals for construction with a full-scale tirade in which he ‘condemned heartily and completely, all that railway engineers had accomplished in England.’ One of his fellow officers, Lieutenant Colonel L.W. Grant, was so worried about the threat from wild animals, that he proposed hanging an entire railway from chains; the resulting track was eight feet above the ground, like a vastly elongated suspension bridge. Happily, other military engineers had rather more practical, and conventional, schemes to put forward.
The main impetus for railway construction, however, came from the civil section of Indian life – indeed the beginnings can be put down largely to one enthusiastic individual, Rowland Macdonald Stephenson. His ambitions, according to a piece in the Calcutta Review in 1856, were large. He wanted ‘to girdle the world with an iron chain, to connect Europe and Asia from the furthest extremities by one colossal Railway … to connect so much of the two continents as should enable a locomotive to travel from Calcutta to London with but two breaks, one at the Straits [Dover] and one at the Dardanelles.’ His early proposals had a more limited end: to see a line built that would join Calcutta, then the capital, to Delhi. Stephenson had the advantage of a sound background in civil engineering and a long family connection with India. An ancestor had negotiated a treaty on behalf of the East India Company, and other members of the family had kept up the tradition. Only his father had let the side down, absconding from the firm in which he was a partner and taking the company cash box with him. Perhaps Stephenson’s enthusiasm for public works stemmed from a desire to restore the family honour. He himself worked for a while for the East Indian Steam Navigation Company which lost out to the Peninsular and Oriental (P&O). When in 1841 he began his propaganda war, his background and experience ensured that he was given a hearing, but it was not until 1844 that he gained a positive response. He wrote to the government of Bengal and received an encouraging reply: he had found a supporter in the important figure of the Deputy Governor. The Secretary to the government wrote, ‘The Deputy Governor desires me to add that he is deeply sensible of the advantages to be gained by construction of Rail Roads along the principal lines of communication throughout the country, and is anxious to afford to any well-considered project for that purpose his utmost support.’ And to make clear that this was not a casually issued offer of help, the Deputy Governor published his reply in the Calcutta Gazette.
Armed with the goodwill of the government and with the backing of local merchants, Stephenson set off to promote his line, now christened the East India Railway, in the money markets of London. British investors had never shown themselves particularly keen to put their cash into schemes in distant India and they were no more enthusiastic about railways. They would only invest if the government put up cash as well. This was not very encouraging, and Stephenson went on to approach the Court, the ruling body of the East India Company, with a good deal more trepidation than he had shown when contacting the government of Bengal. He suggested that they should offer to guarantee a comparatively modest return of 4 per cent on capital, but even this was more than the Company was prepared to offer. They came up with an array of reasons why the railways would not work: the country was poor, no one could afford to travel, and there would not be enough freight traffic to make good the difference. Could they get competent engineers? Would beetles attack the wooden sleepers? Would track be washed away in the monsoon? The list of obstacles seemed so long that it must have come as a pleasant surprise to Stephenson that the East India Company ended up offering anything at all. In the end, however, it offered to pay for a survey.
The first running of a train on the Bombay to Thana line
In 1845 F.W. Simms set out for India to begin the work. He turned out to be just the man the Company did not want for the job: instead of confirming their wholly negative views, he proved an enthusiast capable of out-enthusing Stephenson himself. After covering the ground with two military engineers as companions, he declared that there was no reason at all why railways could not be built in India and furthermore young Indians could be trained to run them. He wholly approved Stephenson’s 900-mile proposed route and put up a case for the whole line being built and operated by a single company. The Under Secretary for the government was only one of many in India who had doubts about funding.
Is it possible that England will send to India the enormous sums which may be required? Other countries have effected works of great magnitude out of their own wealth, but India must look to England for the necessary capital. She must ask back a portion of the tribute which for years past she has paid to England.
This pessimism was not unwarranted. Company and government could not agree on how railways were to be built, where they were to be built or how they were to be paid for. Meanwhile other schemes were coming forward.
In 1844, the Bombay Great Eastern Railway was formed with the intention of building a 53½-mile route from Bombay to the Western Ghats, the line of cliffs over 300 miles long that rises up over a thousand feet from the coastal plain of western India – presenting just the sort of barrier that had faced the engineers working in South America. It looked on paper to be a thoroughly sound venture backed by an array of worthies, ranging from Sir Bartle Frere, Private Secretary to the Governor, to minor government officials, British traders and merchants, and leaders of the Indian mercantile community. The promoters had taken advice from a friend of Frere’s, the engineer George T. Clark who had come to India in 1842. The government committee set up to study the prospectus was not, however, greatly impressed. The costs were, they declared, pure guesswork since there had been no survey and the route had not been studied ‘by any party whose evidence, written or verbal, we had the opportunity of obtaining’. If the scrutinisers were dubious about the costs, that was as nothing compared with the scorn with which they treated the estimates of revenue. The promoters had boldly prophesied a return of 22½ per cent; the committee came up with a figure of one eighth of one per cent – though they conceded that with an improved plan, a modest 4¾ per cent might just be attainable. This was all very discouraging, but now a new contender appeared on the field with an even more ambitious scheme. John Chapman was an engineer
recently arrived from England, but he identified a genuine need that only a railway could meet. His Great Indian Railway would unite the cotton fields of the interior with the Port of Bombay. His idea could hardly have come at a better time. In 1846 the cotton crop of America failed and the mills of Lancashire were starved of raw material. They looked to India to fill the gap.
So it was that in the mid-1840s, two railway systems were being promoted, each of which promised tangible advantages to British interests. In the east, a railway could bring coal to the port of Calcutta, a vast advantage to the burgeoning steamship lines. In the west, the other route would feed the seemingly insatiable demands of the cotton mills. Real progress seemed possible, but still the East India Company dithered and wavered. However clear the matters might seem to engineers like Simms who had surveyed the land or to the merchants on the spot who understood the needs of local markets, the men in London who had ultimate control were not convinced. But there was leverage that could be applied. The East India Company charter was shortly coming up for renewal, and although the British government was not directly involved in the railway question, it was very much in control of that charter. Impassioned pleas came out of India. An anonymous pamphlet addressed to Lord John Russell was a patchwork of purple prose:
England, the Lilliputian island, rich and selfish as a pampered glutton, has indulged to excess in the luxury of Railways. Let her now resign herself to repose and the needful process of digestion, while her slave, the giant continent of India, feeble from inanition and sick at heart from hope deferred, is permitted to break her fast upon the superfluity of her master’s abundance.
The East India Company gave way under the pressure, and agreed first to a 3 per cent and then – when that was shown to be too meagre to attract much in the way of funds – a more generous 5 per cent guarantee. The East Indian Railway Company and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway were given the green light – or perhaps more accurately the amber. Each was authorized to build a comparatively short length of track: from Calcutta to Raneegunge, 120 miles of the originally planned 900 miles in the former case; and Bombay to Kalyan, just 30 miles, in the latter. The agreements contained some clauses which were incredibly generous to the infant railway companies. If the railways made a loss, the East India Company would take them over and repay all the money that had been spent. Having ceded so much, the East India Company tried to protect their investment by exercising control over just about everything. The arrangements read like a recipe for chaos. There were to be two engineers in charge, one appointed by the railway company, one by the government. The railway engineer would create a design or a plan which was then passed to the consulting engineer for approval. If the latter agreed, all well and good. If not the matter was referred to the Indian government, and any arguments there were sent to the government in London for final arbitration. No one, it seems, thought it remotely odd that, for example, the siting of a signal box on the dusty plains of India should ultimately be decided by a solemn conference of Members of Parliament, whose previous experience of railways had been limited to journeys on the London to Brighton line.
Fortunately there were saner voices to be heard in the land. If there was more than a touch of the ludicrous in the deliberation of the supposedly practical men who devised the system of railway construction in India, there is an equally absurd touch to the fact that these good commercial men had to be rescued by Sir James Andrew Brown Ramsey, first Marquess and tenth Earl of Dalhousie, who was appointed Governor General of India in 1847 at the age of thirty-five. He was, at least, aware of the problems presented by a rapidly expanding rail system for he had been Vice-President of the Board of Trade in the Peel administration during the boom years of the 1840s. He was a short, stocky man who managed to combine aristocratic hauteur with bustling energy and a fierce temper. He was an aristocrat by temperament, a man who never for a moment doubted his right as well as his ability to lay down the law for others. He did not suffer fools gladly – nor indeed did he suffer them at all. A splendid example of Dalhousie at work came when he was asked to arbitrate on the experimental line from Calcutta. Around £1 million had been allocated to the East Indian Railway to build a double track to the mines of Raneegunge. For that sum Simms, the company engineer, had calculated that he could either build a single track all the way or a double track that would come to a halt in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles from the mines that were to supply the traffic. The answer might seem obvious, but voices were raised demanding the letter of the law be adhered to and double track must be laid. Dalhousie demolished that argument:
Bombay would eventually get the grand Victoria terminus: now the Chhaptrapa Shivaji, Mumbai.
If the experimental section be constructed in literal conformity with the orders of the Court, of a double line and only so as not to compromise the Government in the slightest degree … I conceive that this section, commercially, must be a total failure. If the object … is to prove the practicability of forming a railway as a public work, the fact could be proved on a quarter of the distance and at a quarter of the expenses. If, as I have assumed, the object in view is to prove the profitableness as well as the practicability of a railway in India, I regard this proposal as totally useless. The Government might as well contract a railway from the Gaol to the General Hospital.
The line was built single track, with space left for a second line to be added at a later date.
Dalhousie’s main achievement was to bring rationality and order to railway planning. He had seen at first hand the problems caused in England where Stephenson’s standard 4 ft. 8½ inch gauge clashed with Brunel’s 7 ft. broad gauge. India was starting with a clean slate: there were no other railways with which connections had to be made, so that a rational decision could be taken and an ‘ideal’ gauge settled on. Dalhousie put his own views on gauge differences in typically forthright terms: ‘The Government of India has in its power, and no doubt will carefully provide that, however widely the railway system may be extended in this Empire in the time to come these great evils should be averted.’ So they were, but in less than two decades the pattern was broken. Economy became the new criterion, and the gauge shrank from Dalhousie’s proud broad gauge, down past the Stephenson standard, to just one metre. Later these would be joined by an assortment of narrow gauge routes tackling the difficulties of the mountains. But, for a time at least, rationality ruled. Dalhousie’s other great contribution was to appoint a Consulting Engineer for Railways in 1850 who was able to take an overall view and lay down sensible rules for development.
Colonel J.P. Kennedy, that fierce denouncer of the piecemeal development of lines in England, established criteria for route selection which never lost sight of the main aim of providing a network of railways that would meet the needs of the whole country. Under Kennedy’s guidelines, no one railway was ever considered in isolation but always as part of a greater whole. He made sure that absurd quarrels like that over the East Indian Railway should not recur by laying down that although lines could be built as single track, all earthworks, bridges, tunnels and so forth should be capable of taking a double track. He also set down that the maximum cost per mile of single track should be set at £5000. This was, to say the least, somewhat optimistic. In Britain, up to 1858, the average cost was nearly £35,000 a mile, ranging from £38,000 in England to £115,000 in Ireland. It was estimated that a quarter of that was taken up with the expenses of obtaining an Act and buying land, neither of which was applicable in India, and taking those out of the equation reduces the cost to roughly £26,000. Then again some two thirds of the mileage was double track but even if one makes the very dubious assumption that double track costs twice as much as single, that still produces a figure in excess of £15,000 a mile, or three times Kennedy’s allowance. In the event, Kennedy’s figure was never achieved, though the Madras Railway did manage to build much of its track at a cost of only £7000 per mile. But the importance of Kennedy’s work lay in the fact that standards were
set: railway builders knew how matters stood, and on what basis they were expected to operate. Work on the two experimental lines went ahead.
In 1853 an event occurred which the Overland Telegraph and Carrier described as ‘a triumph, to which in comparison all our victories in the east seem tame and commonplace’. It would, the anonymous enthusiast wrote, ‘be remembered by the natives of India when the battlefields of Plassey, Assaye, Meanee and Goojerat have been forgotten’. This was the fact that twenty miles of the Great Indian Railway were opened from Bombay to Thana. Not everyone seemed equally aware of the historic nature of the occasion. It was the habit of the British at the approach of summer to leave the sticky heat of the plain for the comparative cool of the hills. They were not about to change their habits for anything as mundane as the opening of India’s first railway. The Governor of Bombay, the Commander-in-Chief and the Bishop of Bombay left for the hills just hours before the ceremony. Was it a deliberate snub? It seems unlikely that it could have been a mere coincidence. The official absence did nothing to dampen the celebrations, as 400 passengers left the Bori Bunde station in Bombay to the accompaniment of a 21-gun salute, the sounding brass of the Governor’s band and the cheers of the crowd.
Progress on the eastern line inevitably took longer, and there were some unexpected delays. There was a political row with the French, who still ruled a small parcel of land which they claimed lay directly across the line. For their part the British declared the route was nowhere near any French territory. This was little more than an irritation: the French were in no position to push any claims in India. By 1853 the line had reached Pundooah, 38 miles from Calcutta. All that was needed for a grand inauguration ceremony was a train: unfortunately, a train was just what they did not have. ‘Pattern carriages’ had been sent over from England, but the ship carrying them sank in the mouth of the Hooghly River. John Hodgson, the Locomotive Chief Engineer, was not unduly concerned. He designed his own carriages and had them manufactured locally. The first locomotives were ordered from Kitson Thompson and Hewitson of Leeds. They were handsome 2-2-2 Well Tank locomotives, with shiny high domes and tall chimneys: one of the class, the Fairy Queen of 1855, has pride of place in the New Delhi railway museum. The first engines, however, were delayed, partly because they were shipped out on a bizarrely long route via Australia. As a result the first train only ran in June 1854. The great opening ceremony, in the presence of Dalhousie, took place in 1855 when the whole line was open to Raneegunge. It was not strictly true to say that the line ran from Calcutta. Howrah station, a makeshift affair of huts and sheds, stood across the wide Hooghly river, and passengers from Calcutta had to take a ferry to reach it. Many years were to pass before the river was bridged and the lines reached the city itself.