Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  About 7 a.m. the two engineers accompanied by about twenty-five Sinhalese as chainmen, axemen, &c, left their camp, and after walking for about an hour and a half commenced work and continued at it till noon; they then returned to camp and plotted the work done that morning, so as to see how it would fit into that to be done the next day, a system which was found to be indispensable. For long distances the route lay through heavy jungle, where not more than 10 chains of line could be cut or levelled per day; in fact the progress made by each party did not exceed 1 mile per week. This slow rate of progress was owing to the unusual ruggedness of the country, the tropical and unhealthy climate, the excessive rainfall, varying from 150 to 180 inches per annum, the inexperience of the Sinhalese chain-men, and the difficulty of working through an interpreter. About four years were occupied in making the surveys and preparing plans and estimates for 112 miles of railway.

  This magnificent 2-8-4 was built by Kitson of Hunslet, Leeds.

  Locomotive 1338 from the Vulcan Foundry marked the end of British locomotive construction for India.

  The actual work of construction was simple by comparison: the surveyors had laid down the line and cleared the way. The contract went to Thomas Newell & Co. who took on the job at the comparatively modest cost of £15,000 per mile. In time the island developed a spider’s web of lines, wriggling and jinking their way from Jaffna in the north to Matara in the south.

  Far smaller islands than Ceylon were deemed ripe for railway development in the nineteenth century. Mosse was also to be involved in construction on Mauritius out in the Indian Ocean. As it is no more than 36 miles long and 28 miles wide it might not seem a candidate for a railway at all: in fact it got two, the Midland and the Northern. Both were narrow gauge, and both served the sugar plantations. The first survey was authorized in 1858 by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, but attempts to raise private capital failed lamentably. There was nothing like enough money in Mauritius itself, and British investors were none too keen to invest in a dot on the map somewhere east of Madagascar. Eventually the lines were paid for by issuing a million pounds of colonial development bonds. That paid for an impressive team: Hawkshaw was the consultant engineer in England and Brassey and Wythes the contractors. The Midland was the more dramatic of the two lines. Starting at Port Louis in the west it climbed for 16 miles to the summit at a height of 1817 feet then plunged down for 19 miles to Makebourg in the east. Curves were tight and the fiercest gradient was 1 in 27.

  Platelayers and engine drivers were hired in England on three-year contracts, with free passage, except for those who were sent home for misconduct. Platelayers got £150 per annum, free accommodation and a £25 bonus if they got a certificate of good conduct. Other workers – carpenters, masons and the ‘coolies’ who took on most of the hard labour – were employed locally. Mosse was not impressed: ‘Slow and not over industrious.’ The engine drivers probably had the most interesting time. The first locomotives were 0-6-OTs from Sharp Stewart, but they were not powerful enough to cope with the hills, so replacements were sent out, 0-6-0 STs with bigger cylinders. One gets some idea of the difficulties faced on the line by the fact that each engine had four sand boxes, filled with sand specially imported from the Cape. Even then they still slipped. The early morning run, when the rails were still wet with dew, had a quarter of an hour added on to the usual time: that meant they were scheduled to complete their journey up to the summit at a spanking 8 m.p.h. Once over the top, they rushed down the other side at a theoretical speed of 15 m.p.h. but this was often more like 25 m.p.h. and involved a good deal of braking in carriages and wagons to avoid the engine overheating. There may not have been very much to the Mauritius railway system, but it certainly never lacked interest. It was also opened many years before either of the two Asian giants, China and Japan, joined the railway world.

  A Sharp, Stewart 5ft 6in gauge locomotive built by Sharp, Stewart & Co for the Oudh and Rohilkund Railway, now preserved in the railway museum in Delhi.

  Lion Rock before it was blasted away to make room for the Kandy to Colombo Railway in Sri Lanka in the 1860s.

  This position is scarcely surprising. The Europeans who advanced into Asia as empire builders, traders or military leaders found themselves confronted in the Far East with massive, wealthy and united countries in China and Japan. In this respect the similarities between China and Japan far outweighed the differences. The Japanese, in particular, looked at the men of the West and what they had to offer and, like a housewife faced with an over-persistent doorstep salesman, slammed the door. In the 1630s Japan became a sakoku or closed country. It remained locked in fuedalism until the middle of the nineteenth century. The county was run by the military caste of the samurai with their leader the shogun as absolute feudal ruler. It was inevitable that such a closed world could not last forever. China and Japan were mighty forces in the seventeenth century, but they remained set in that time while the rest of the world moved on through the convolutions of the Industrial Revolution. The differences wrought by time were given a dramatic demonstration in one of the most infamous chapters in imperial history, the Opium Wars of the 1840s. China had refused to accept opium from India, and Britain in the holy name of ‘Free Trade’ forced the unholy drug upon them. The supremacy of western armament was there for all to see, and China had no choice: Hong Kong was ceded to Britain and Chinese ports were open to British and European trade. Japan could not remain immune to the changes convulsing her close neighbour. By the 1850s there were strong forces at work in Japan demanding new contacts with the outside world and threatening the despotic powers of the shogun. By the late 1850s, the most important man in Japan was Ii Naosuke who became regent following the death of the childless shogun. He was anti-reform and violently anti-foreigner, but he could not prevent the reverberations of the Opium Wars being felt in Japan. When the Western powers demanded trading rights, he had no option but to grant them. The only alternative was a war that quite clearly he could not win. It was a terrible blow to samurai pride and in 1860 he paid the price when he was cut down by samurai warriors outside Edo castle.

  Paradoxically it was the death of Ii Naosuke that brought about exactly what the old brigade most feared. With his death, the forces that had upheld the power of the shogun were fatally weakened. There was a period of conflict and civil war which ended with the establishment of a new ruler, the young emperor Meiji. The new ruler began a process of change that was to convert Japan from a feudal, rural society into a major industrial military power in an astonishingly short time. The facts of the new Japan were dramatically affirmed in 1905. Just as Western supremacy in arms technology had brought about victory in the Opium Wars, now the Japanese fleet was to annihilate that of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. It had taken no more than four decades to work the transformation.

  The elegant ironwork for Colombo Station, was actually cast in Britain and shipped to Sri Lanka.

  When a new station was built at Colombo the old terminus was turned into a railway museum

  The Meiji dynasty promoted change and railway construction was high on the list of priorities. It was not an easy matter to arrange. There was still a deep-seated distrust of foreigners, yet foreign expertise was clearly needed. First, plans were laid in 1870 for a trunk route to connect the old capital Kyoto to the new capital of Edo, now renamed Tokyo. This was an ambitious first project, so it was early decided to break it down into more manageable portions, beginning with the sections Tokyo to Yokohama and Kobe to Osaka. In all public pronouncements the role of the Japanese was played up and that of their European advisers either played down or ignored altogether. This was notably true in the case of locomotives. The list of early suppliers contains all the familiar names of British companies – Beyer Peacock, Sharp Stewart, Kitson, Vulcan, Manning Wardle and more. The time eventually came when the Japanese would want to build their own locomotives and they turned to the locomotive superintendent of the western section of the mainline, Richard F. Trevithick
.

  It is one of the those extraordinary turns of events that the first Richard Trevithick seldom received his due as designer of Britain’s first steam locomotive. Now his grandson was to suffer a similar fate in Japan. He not only designed the country’s first home-built engine, but he also built the first compound to be seen in Japan. It was wheeled out for its trials in April 1893 and proved an immense success, but as Francis Trevithick sourly noted,

  History repeats itself, as Richard Trevithick senior was branded with folly and madness by the late James Watt for bringing into use the high pressure engine, and even not known to the general public as the builder and inventor of the first locomotive; so will Richard Trevithick of Kobe never be known in Japan by the Japanese as the designer and builder of the first locomotive, the credit already given to a Japanese who has very little mechanical knowledge.

  The Trevithicks were, however, to stay on in Japan and continued to play an active role in railway development.

  Lack of recognition, an air of suspicion among associates and a lack of understanding of Western technology in the early years were to create problems for many British engineers. An engineer who worked in Japan explained the system they adopted:

  The Government undertook, with that self-reliance for which the Japanese were celebrated, to carry out the works themselves, instead of employing skilled contractors as had first been intended. They engaged a staff of competent English engineers, and set to work to make their own railways. They dictated their own terms; they stipulated where everyone should go; and the engineers had to lay out the line and to advance the works in the best way they could with such labourers as the country afforded. The duties of the engineers were beset by many difficulties, arising from the jealousy of the natives towards foreigners, their ignorance of the language, and the incompetence of the subordinate native staff, through whom alone their directions could be given to the artisans and labourers, none of whom had had any training on public works, and therefore the engineers had to teach them everything that required to be done.

  There is some doubt as to the very first railway to be built in Japan. A Scots merchant Thomas B. Glover is said to have built a short line along the waterfront at Nagasaki, but it was at best a very limited affair. His other claim to fame is that at the end of the shogun period, he helped to smuggle a group of progressive-minded young samurai out of the country to study engineering in London. If that did nothing else it did at least provide a nucleus of pro-Western engineers. But the real beginning was marked by the arrival of Edmund Morel to take over the job of chief engineer for the Tokyo to Kyoto line. He faced a daunting task, as Francis Trevithick pointed out in 1894:

  The country is hardly suitable for an extended railway system. It is volcanic and hilly, the centre being occupied by ridges whose peaks attain heights of from 7,000 to 10,000 feet and whose spurs extend to the coast. The celebrated mountain of Fuji, an extinct, or dormant, volcano, is a cone of 12,365 feet high, in an almost isolated position near the coast. Rivers are numerous but not of great length. They are generally subject to violent floods, either in early Summer from the melting of snow on the mountains, or in Autumn from general heavy rains. In many places the beds of the rivers are above the level of the surrounding country, and the breaking of the banks in flood-time occasions great destruction of property and ruin of agricultural land by deposit of sand and gravel.

  The first modest locomotive sent from Britain to China

  Morel, however, had just come from railway building in the equally difficult terrain of New Zealand. His first decision, when faced with Japanese scenery, was to decide on a narrow gauge of 3ft. 6 inches, which would help in the building by allowing tighter curves and steeper gradients. Morel was also very particular about giving encouragement to his young Japanese assistants. Sadly, he died in 1871 at the early age of thirty, just before the first section from Yedo to Yokohama was officially opened by the Mikado in 1872. This did not go quite as planned. The Mikado made a speech thanking Counts Ito, Okuma and Sangi: ‘We express our great satisfaction for the undeviating obedience to our will for the introduction of railways, and the overcoming of all opposition and difficulties.’ But the elaborate ceremony was still very much under way when Thomas Hart, anxious not to be late, turned up at the regulator of a brand new 2-4-OT from the Vulcan works. The distinguished guests approached the train much as they would if invited anywhere else: at the door they stopped and took their shoes off before getting into the carriages. They were more than a trifle upset to find no shoes awaiting them at the other end.

  These early years were largely dominated by British engineers: 94 out of the 104 jobs given to foreigners went to them, largely it was said as belated ‘thank you’ for those who had started their career in the group smuggled out to study in London. Among them was Edward Holtham who arrived in November 1873 and was to spend eight years working in Japan. He spent three weeks inspecting the Tokyo to Yokohama Railway which turned out to be such a wretched affair that it all had to be rebuilt, a job Holtham was to tackle in 1878. He then went on to Kobe to take over the line to Osaka. ‘Engineering in Japan,’ he decided, ‘is not as it is elsewhere.’ Among other absurdities he discovered that where the first tunnel he inspected had been correctly built to take a double track, the next only allowed for single. This he was told was due to ‘communication error’. However, he was soon at work himself and experiencing the difficulties of coping with Japan at first hand. He set off from a base in a village on the shore of Lake Biwa to survey a route through the hills. The going was tough, involving a good deal of tree-felling for sight lines and winter work was impeded by frequent and heavy snow falls. This may all have been acceptable if life at the base had been more pleasant. Some problems were an unavoidable result of national differences: Holtham once sat on a chair which promptly collapsed under him. It was not intended to bear his 200 pounds weight. Others showed a meanness of spirit: a decree from the company forbade field officers from ordering ‘luxuries’, a term which seemed to apply to all the stores ordered in Kobe. There was also a decree forbidding Westerners from using firearms, which did not stop them shooting game birds. On one occasion a young boy was hit by a stray shot and there was an uproar against the assassins. The accusation of murder was somewhat damaged by the presence of the victim vociferously demanding damage. Most irritating of all were the spies sent by the government to report on the ‘private conduct and personal failings of the foreign staff. One engineer had to face the ludicrous charge of selling braces to the local people.

  Holtham managed to keep his mind on the main task of railway building in difficult country. The River Toda ran in summer down a channel 400 feet wide, but when swollen by the melting snows of spring opened out to flood banks 3000 feet apart. Floods were a constant preoccupation. In 1878 water roared over the tracks at Kawasaki and Holtham turned up in person, stripping off his coat to direct the workers who were feverishly pouring ballast under the sleepers. And when he could not see what was needed, he plunged his arms into the swirling waters to feel for the gaps to plug. This did not enhance his reputation in Japanese eyes. The local engineers wore white cotton gloves which were never, under any circumstances, to be so much as spotted with dirt. Holtham’s status was thus deeply compromised. Other engineers faced equally difficult problems. William Furniss Potter surveyed the line around Lake Biwa and soon discovered that steamboat travel had its own peculiar dangers: the engineers were in the habit of tying down the safety valve on the grounds that otherwise steam would escape! His main job was supervising bridge building. He was not impressed by local building techniques:

  Brickwork is little used by the Japanese and their masonry is inferior, owing to the absence of bond. This is probably caused by their system of quarrying stone, which is to split large round boulders into two pieces, the result being a stone shaped like half a walnut. Of course, the large face is put on the outside of the work, and the inside is filled up anyhow, without bonding stones. As might be expec
ted, their masonry works, such as piers and retaining walls, are not durable, though when first completed they look neat, and have the appearance of great strength.

  Girder bridges were built using standardized sections sent out from Britain. As in India, the foundations were created by sinking wells. The girders, 100 feet long, were riveted together as much as 6 miles away from the site. They were then brought in by truck and laid on a temporary staging of sleepers from where they could be jacked into place. Potter reckoned to be able to complete his bridges at the rate of one girder per day. Japanese rivers, in any case, presented their own unique difficulties which Potter had to overcome.

  It is a curious feature of the rivers that their beds are nearly all higher than the land through, or rather over, which they pass. The inhabitants have constructed banks to confine the water and prevent its overflowing the country: and as the beds of the rivers are gradually silted up, these banks have to be raised, so that they not unfrequently become formidable works, requiring constant care and watching to prevent their bursting. Such a catastrophe is not uncommon, and is attended sometimes with disastrous results to life and property. As the levels of the rivers vary from a few feet to 40 feet or more above the surrounding country, it is frequently a question for anxious consideration whether it is better to bridge over or tunnel under them. It will readily be seen that the country intervening between the rivers is liable, if any of the banks give way, to serious floods. On the Osako-Kioto line, especially near Kioto, this was notably the case; but it was thought desirable in this instance to keep the formation level of the railway at such a height above the ground as to be above all possible floods. This entailed lofty embankments and numerous flood openings, and greatly increased the cost of the line.