WHITE SUDAN TRAIN.
Nowadays, railway travelling has become much safer and also more luxurious, and our trains, with their sleeping berths and restaurant cars, would have been considered marvels by the early passengers who crowded contentedly into the jolting open trucks of 1839. One of the most interesting of modern trains is to be seen on the Sudan line. It is painted white for the sake of coolness and has wooden venetian blinds instead of windows.
MOUNTAIN RAILWAY.
At first it was considered impossible for railways to be constructed except on level ground, but difficulties were gradually overcome and for many years there have been trains running up the Rigi and other mountains. Now a line has been made to the summit of the Jung Frau, which is over thirteen thousand feet high, and by it tourists can be taken far into the region of perpetual snow.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century a new power began to be used, and we hear of locomotives driven not by steam but by electricity. Now, although steam has not been ousted from the field, there are many electric trains, and in almost every city of Europe electric trams run through the streets and often far out into the country beyond.
Another invention of the nineteenth century which made, as time went on, a new means of travel, was the bicycle, but although the first of these machines appeared more than a hundred years ago, they were very strange-looking contrivances indeed, and were considered ridiculous and useless.