This Rosendaal station struck me as being about the cleanest, shiniest place, for a railway station, at which I had ever changed cars. Not a speck of soot or dust was visible to the naked eye, and it is possible that one of old Zacharias Jansen’s microscopes wouldn’t be able to find any either, although a certain few, larger and more grotesque than their fellows, might be brought to notice under the lens of an instrument of later model. Every doorway was guarded by a pair of little boxwood or bay tree sentries, and flowers filled the boxes under the windows. The leather tables and chairs in the waiting-rooms and restaurant all but suggested a Spanish Renaissance influence, and their great brass-topped tacks glittered as if they had never known what it was to be tainted with stain or smirch—and this in a railway station.
But then, a Dutch locomotive is not nearly so offensive, I might say, as one of the American breed; and if the proper legislation is forthcoming we shall be sending experts to Holland soon to take notes on how they do it. All railway locomotives in Holland are under the supervision of an arm of the government service, and although the most of them bear the shop-plate of Glasgow or Manchester, they must be equipped with an apparatus, not only for consuming the smoke but for the prevention of the emission of sparks and other combustible matter. Descriptions and drawings showing the details and workings of these contrivances must be submitted to the Supervising Board of Railways before each new type of locomotive is purchased. Upon its delivery every newly purchased locomotive must undergo a thorough test and be approved by the inspector of the Board before it may be placed in service.
The same regulations apply to stationary engines burning bituminous coal, which would otherwise emit great clouds of black smoke, gases, and soot. Restrictions, in some localities, are even placed upon the particular kind of fuel locomotives may burn. The province of Zuid-Holland, for example, has issued the eikon that only coke may be used upon the locomotives that traverse its railway lines.
A few miles before you come to Dortrecht the railway crosses a long bridge that spans an arm of the North Sea known as the Hollandsch Diep. The actual breadth of the Diep is a mile and five-eighths, but its projecting stone piers cut the length of the bridge down to slightly less than a mile. This, the longest bridge in Holland, was completed in November, 1871, after being more than three years in the building, and its fourteen arches, with a span of 110 yards each, rest upon stone buttresses, the foundations of some of which are sunk fifty or sixty feet below low water mark. From the center of the structure you may look out over the Hollandsch Diep on the left and, on the right, the eastern end of the Biesbosch, or “reed forest”—a great, watery district more than forty square miles in area and lately reclaimed. It was formed in 1421, at the same time and under the same conditions as the Hollandsch Diep, by a terrific overflow of the sea that blotted out seventy-two towns and villages and the lives of 100,000 people.
Dortrecht, called Dordt by the Dutch, is practically a survivor of that calamity. The town was founded away back in 1008 and, four hundred years later, made an island by the obstreperous Merwede—the name given to a short part of the river formed by the confluence of the Maas and the Waal, which, beyond Dortrecht, is called De Noord and, by the time it approaches Rotterdam, known as the Maas again.
By reason of a special privilege called The Staple—pure and simple “graft,” plainly speaking—Dortrecht in the Middle Ages was the most prosperous town in Holland, for the workings of The Staple were far-reaching and marvelous. The Staple allowed Dortrecht, by royal warrant, be it remembered, to act in the capacity of a kind of clearing house for all goods, whether wines, grains, metals, or fabrics, that entered the domains of Holland by way of the Rhine. Now the territory punctured by these hundred and one apparently different and distinct rivers that so muddle the geography of the southern part of Holland for the tourist, is nothing more nor less than the wide-spreading estuary of the one river, Rhine. As every cargo that came down the river had necessarily to be unloaded at Dortrecht, municipal and private money chests burst their stout iron hoops in their efforts to contain the duties and taxes imposed. And in this kind of business buccaneering the place reveled for centuries, until Rotterdam, overcome with jealousy in 1618, stopped the procedure at the point of the bayonet.
A picturesque corner of Dortrecht, called Dordt by the Dutch. In the Middle Ages it was the most prosperous town in Holland
If Wilmington, Delaware, although just twice as large in point of population, could boast of a windmill or two and a few odoriferous canals, bordered with numerous sixteenth century façades that slanted out over them as if in imminent danger of toppling into them; and if she had a narrow street of rather serpentine proclivities, like the Wynstraat, down which the rolling stock of the local traction company, in the shape and vintage of an ancient horse car, clanged its weary way, she might be taken, dot and tittle, for Dortrecht. Since the forced abolition of The Staple, the most of Dortrecht’s 40,000 inhabitants have gone into the more legitimate business of shipbuilding. But Wilmington, to achieve this, would also have to level off her hills to a certain depth below the sea, which might then necessitate the diking of the Delaware. It would be a mighty task and, after all is said and done, she would gain little but history.