Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  Lahore station looks like a medieval fortress and was indeed designed with defence in mind

  The experimental railways were an undoubted success and confounded the experts by at once attracting a busy passenger trade. One other line was begun in Madras in Southern India, which opened its first section with equal success in 1856. Railway building, however, was overshadowed and temporarily obliterated by events. The forceful Dalhousie left India in 1856 and his place was taken by the more thoughtful and deliberate Lord Canning, son of a more famous father. Within a year there was a general uprising through most of northern India against British rule, which Indian historians refer to as the War of Independence and which the British of the time gave the equally untrue title of the Mutiny. It was unquestionably a major conflict, which caught up a number of hapless railway builders in its violence.

  The opening of a new line in India was always a grand event: the garlanded locomotive is on the Ulwar’ Rajputana State Railway, the country’s first metre gauge line

  Those sections of railway that had been built, notably the steadily expanding East India line, the route between Agra and Delhi and that between Allahabad and Cawnpore, were used by troops, but elsewhere construction sites were attacked and half-completed lines ripped up. The civilian engineers were inevitably drawn into the conflict: some died and those who survived usually joined one of the volunteer forces. The engineers working in small groups far from home base were most at risk: one group only escaped with their lives by hiding out in a newly completed water tower. Some of the most dramatic events occurred in the little town of Arrah between Allahabad and Patna. This was a section of the East India line, but isolated from the railhead which was still stuck at Raneegunge. The engineer in charge, Richard Vicars Boyle, had earlier had a number of skirmishes with local tribesmen, and the tensions that were to build up to the great explosion of the Mutiny itself were already being felt. A small group of engineering staff and their families lived in a European enclave, and long before serious trouble broke out, Boyle arranged for all the wives and children to be sent to the comparative safety of Dinapore, nearly 30 miles away down the line. At the same time he asked for armed protection and the District Magistrate sent a detachment of fifty Sikh police to Arrah.

  Boyle was meanwhile making his own arrangements for defence. A small building in the garden, surrounded by a colonnade, was used in more peaceful times as a billiard room. Now Boyle bricked in the arches to create a miniature fort which was ready by mid-July 1857 when the 2500 sepoys at Dinapore rose up and joined the Mutiny. Within two days they descended on Arrah, where they broke into the gaol and raided the treasury before turning their attention to Boyle and his tiny force. They had a small amount of artillery in the form of two light guns, one of which was hauled up to the roof of Boyle’s house from where they began firing at the little fortress in the garden. They kept up the bombardment for seven days, during which a relief force was ambushed and routed with heavy casualties. A second relief column under Major Eyre was more circumspect, rounded the flank of the mutineers and scattered them. Boyle and his men survived, and only one of the Sikhs had serious injuries. The incident had no affect on Boyle’s career: he stayed on in India building railways until 1864.

  The Mutiny was bloody but short. There was one lasting effect: it marked the end of rule by the East India Company. The change of government had no marked affect on everyday affairs and life, including railway building, gradually went back to normal. There was, however, a new impetus given to construction: if the Mutiny did nothing else it proved the importance of good communications in a vast country. There were also more lasting memorials. New stations became potential fortresses. They all but enclosed the tracks, so that trains could be protected inside. The face these stations presented to the outside world was grim: high walls, rounded corners that would deflect shot, battlemented towers and firing slits. The grander stations, such as Lahore, looked more like medieval castles than places to purchase tickets. But the station-fortresses were not needed. Railway engineers found themselves facing different enemies: a fierce landscape, extremes of weather and the ravages of disease. Contractors also faced their own special problem: prices that had been negotiated before the Mutiny began to look distinctly less appealing afterwards. Among those who came to India was Thomas Brassey who formed a new partnership of Brassey and Wythes for the occasion, and ended up losing money. There was hence an understandable nervousness among European staff in the aftermath of war.

  In 1856 John Brunton was appointed chief engineer for the Scinde Railway that was planned to join Karachi to the East Indian Railway at Delhi. The only advice he was given as he left England was to drink soda instead of the local water. It was not a comfortable journey: first by boat to Alexandria, then by camel train to the Red Sea, and on by boat again. The book which he wrote, he said, to amuse his grandchildren, contains accounts of such merry events along the way as the chasing of a giant rat which he killed with his bare hands – of such stuff were Empire Builders made. He arrived at Karachi just as the Mutiny was ending and set about organizing a trip to view the proposed route, or to be more precise he got his Goan butler to organize the trip, since at this stage of his career Brunton had no local languages. He and his staff set off on camels, camping along the way with the aid of twelve tent-pitchers. It was the tent pitchers who set the pace, for they travelled on foot carrying all the gear. Progress was a modest ten miles a day. Brunton armed himself with a brace of pistols and a sword, but they were only needed once, not against rebellious Indians but against a rabid wolf that attacked a village where they were resting. Five days out, there was an alarming report that the mutiny had broken out again in Karachi. Brunton had left his wife there, and he at once grabbed a camel and galloped through the night on the 56-mile journey back. The rumour was false, Karachi was calm. He returned to the survey party at a more sedate pace.

  Confidence grew that the peace would last, though there was no shortage of problems to keep Brunton busy. On the whole work proceeded smoothly, with the line divided into sections, each under the control of an assistant engineer. Actual construction was limited to the winter months: in the heat of summer they caught up on drawing plans and sections. It was still received wisdom that work should be let to British contractors, even if those contractors chose to use native labour. One contractor named Bray aroused suspicion from the start. ‘I and my staff, wrote Brunton, ‘had much to do in watching these proceedings and trying to keep Bray right.’ They were not vigilant enough: Bray absconded taking his funds with him, and leaving the men unpaid. They were ‘a very rough lot’ from Central Asia and rioting broke out, not surprisingly since the men were half-starved. Brunton seized all the plant and equipment, persuaded the government to pay the wages bill and decided that in future he could do without the services of a contractor. They worked a piece-rate or a day-rate system and gave no more trouble.

  Health was a perpetual problem for most Europeans in India. One particular spot, Darbaji, had been chosen as a site for a station, but no one seemed able to work there for any length of time without falling ill. Brunton asked a native to show him where the drinking water came from: ‘He took me about ½ a mile into the Jungle and showed me a small pond of water, covered with green slime and filth – for the Buffaloes & other animals grazing in the Jungles came here to drink.’ He carried out a simple geological survey, sank a well and the problem was solved.

  His later career was certainly varied. After the Scinde line was completed a new one was proposed along the Indus valley, to complete the link from Karachi to Multan and the Punjab and Delhi Railway. To some extent, his work was much like that of other engineers surveying in India. He set off with a retinue of thirty-five servants and tent-pitchers, and an escort of fifty cavalry and fifty infantry. One problem Brunton faced was finding suitable stone for ballast, but he had heard of the great ruined city of Brahminabad in the Scinde desert and set out to hunt for it. He found it – surrounded by walls 20 fee
t thick and 14 feet high: all the ballast an engineer could want provided he had no thoughts for archaeology. During this period, in order to make life more tolerable in Karachi, he ordered 800 tons of ice from the Wenham Lake Ice Company – who sent it to Bombay by mistake. So Brunton bought refrigeration equipment and made his own. Encouraged by this success he then began manufacturing soda water!

  Fairy Queen, built by Kitson in 1855 for the East Indian Railway, is now preserved in the railway museum in Delhi.

  When the survey was completed he was called back to England to give evidence in the case of Bray, the absconding contractor – a case that was to drag on for two years. Brunton did not wait for the result but returned to the Indus. In an account which he wrote for the Institution of Civil Engineers, Brunton expressed his opinion of Bray with a dry humour:

  Without entering into a statement of the causes of Messrs. Bray’s relinquishing the works, which at present form a subject of legal reference, it will suffice to say, that when the Company’s Engineers took possession of them, they had to encounter difficulties which were not due entirely to the peculiarities of the country.

  As work progressed, the company decided to provide an alternative form of transport, and Brunton found himself with a new job in charge of steamship operations between Kotri, near Hyderabad, and Multan. The steamer was sent out in sections and assembled on the spot, but had difficulty coping with the swift Indus current. It struggled upstream to make the 700-mile journey in thirty-four days; then turned round and shot downstream in a week.

  Engineers working overseas were expected to show versatility. John Brunton’s spell in charge of river traffic must have been a success, for he was asked to serve for a time as traffic manager on the Indus Valley Railway. His notes on the experience speak volumes on his attitude towards the people amongst whom he lived and worked:

  It was at first thought that it would be difficult to get the natives to travel together in the same carriages on account of caste prejudices, but this proved a delusion. An hour before the time of a train starting, crowds of natives surrounded the booking office clamouring for tickets, and at first there was no keeping them to the inside of the carriages. They clambered up on the roofs of the carriages and I have been obliged to get up on the roofs and whip them off. Females were not allowed to travel in the same carriages as the men. A special carriage was allotted for them and I assure you the noise they made in chattering or rather screaming to one another rendered the identification of their particular carriage quite easy. The men travelling, always carry a roll of bedding with them, and besides they always sat cross legged on the seats, so I took out the seats of the 3rd Class carriages and they then squatted on their bundles on the floor of the carriage and thus economized space.

  A section of the Attach Bridge being raised into place on the Northern Punjab Railway, December 1882

  The early pioneering routes had proved their worth, but their true value could only be realized when they linked up with other sections of the developing system. The East Indian Railway had the simpler task, running over level plains (an idea of the terrain can be gained from the fact that in 1338 miles there was only one tunnel built and that was a modest 300 yards). It was not, however, free of problems. The route had to cross numerous rivers that were mere trickles in the dry season but became torrents thousands of feet across in the wet. The lines were continued on past the rivers long before the viaducts were completed. Temporary lines could be laid over the dry river bed, to be replaced by a ferry service in the wet season. James Meadows Rendel, the consultant engineer, turned to a type of bridge that had only recently been tried in Britain, the Warren truss, first used at London Bridge Station in 1850. It was built up of a series of triangular components, and it was a system well adapted for manufacture and testing in England for shipment overseas. Rendel was certainly impressed:

  The principle of this bridge has much to recommend it for India. Composed wholly of wrought iron, in comparatively small parts and every part fitted in its place by machinery … the ease with which it can be fixed together and taken to pieces again without the slightest injury admits of it being proved in the workshop of the manufacturer, and of it being erected in its permanent position by the most unskilled and indifferent class of mechanics.

  The viaducts were very impressive. Four were built to the pattern first seen in Robert Stephenson’s high-level bridge at Newcastle-upon-Tyne: a double-decker construction with railway on the top deck and road traffic on the lower. The grandest of these crossed the river Soane in twenty-eight spans, each of 150 feet; the Jumma was only slightly less impressive with a total length of over 3000 feet. The individual parts were made in England, the first coming from Charles Mare’s of Blackwall.

  The most difficult river crossings were not, however, here but in the Punjab – not so much on the Punjab Railway itself which ran from Amritsar to Multon, but on the Punjab Northern State Railway from Lahore to Jhelum. The only real difficulty experienced on the Punjab Railway was that of getting a locomotive there in the first place. The first delivery was by boat to Ravi, up river from Karachi, and from there the journey overland was like some grand, spectacular procession: 102 bullocks were employed to pull and two elephants came behind to push. The Northern Punjab, however, had to cross three great rivers, including the Chenab. At the point where the railway was to cross, the river had already run for 300 miles, down from the mountains of Kashmir on its way to the Indus still 400 miles away. In its long journey, the river had picked up vast quantities of alluvial soil which had silted to depths of hundreds of feet, so there was no possibility of finding a solid foundation for the piers; and there had to be a great many piers for the river was crossed in sixty-four spans. The bridge was eventually constructed by sinking wells and building the piers on top of them.

  The first stage was to construct groynes to divert the river so that a small sandy island was created. A circular kerb of wood was built, with a wedge-shaped cross-section, and laid on the sand as a base for the wall. The circular wall was then built up of brick on top of the kerb, and when it reached a height of about 12 feet, workmen clambered inside and began scooping away the sand so that the brick cylinder gradually began to sink under its own weight. When only a foot of brickwork showed above the surface, another 12 feet of brickwork was built on top of the first and the whole process repeated. As more and more bricks were added and the well sank ever deeper, so friction began to slow the sinking and literally hundreds of tons of rails had to be piled on top. The great danger the workmen faced was that of hitting quicksand, which could flow up through the tube and engulf them. When the well had reached the required depth it was plugged with concrete and filled with sand. Further stability was achieved by dumping concrete blocks round the walls – some 15,000 were made in situ. This immense operation was repeated over and over again, with three wells being sunk for each pier. Then the piers had to be protected from the ravages of the river which could scour up to 50 feet of sand away in one of its frequent floods. Boulders were stacked round the foot of the piers, but unfortunately no suitable stone was available locally. It had to be brought down river on cumbersome rafts that frequently overturned in the dangerous rapids. Finally there stood a bridge twice as grand as any on the East Indian – it was a full mile and three quarters long.

  Looking west from the Attach Bridge as the railway heads off towards the mountains

  A similar technique was used on the Empress Bridge carrying the Indus Valley State Railway across the Sutlej. This was a vast project with a huge workforce. A shanty town, protected by, as it turned out, inadequate flood banks grew up, which at one time held up to 6000 inhabitants. The engineer, James Bell, noted that once again the workforce suffered appallingly from disease:

  In the worst season it was not uncommon for three men out of four to be laid up simultaneously with fever; and one year when a flood had broken into the place, one thousand workmen are believed to have died of pneumonia.

  The diff
iculties faced on the East Indian were real enough but they seemed minor compared with those confronting the engineers of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR). If it was to be extended inland then a way had to be found up the Ghats. Advice was available from the consultant engineer in England, Robert Stephenson, but the principal work of finding and building the route fell to the men on the spot, the Chief Engineer, James Berkley and the engineer who was to supervise the first line, Robert Graham. In the event there were to be two routes up the cliffs that rise to a height of 2500 feet: the first up Thul Ghat, the second up Bhore Ghat. The routes followed inclines at fierce gradients that ranged from 1 in 48 to 1 in 37, and these were no minor affairs: the Thul incline was slightly more than 9 miles long, the Bhore 154. Both involved the construction of bridges, massive embankments and tunnels, but their most distinctive feature was the zigzag route they took up the cliffs. This was achieved by including reversing stations, so that trains could crawl up the slope along the face of the cliffs to the station, then change direction and continue on, climbing in the opposite direction.