THE MONT CENIS ROAD AND THE FELL RAILWAY NEAR THE SUMMIT OF THE PASS, ON THE ITALIAN SIDE.
The steam is shut off and the brakes are applied a very few minutes after beginning the descent to Susa. The train might then run down for the entire distance by its own weight. In practice, it is difficult to apply the proper amount of retardation: the brakes have frequently to be whistled off, and sometimes it is necessary to steam down against them. Theoretically, this ought not of course to occur: it only happens occasionally, and ordinarily the train goes down with the steam shut off, and with the centre-rail brakes screwed up moderately. When an average train—that is, two or three carriages and a luggage-van—is running down at the maximum speed allowed (fifteen miles an hour), the brakes can pull it up dead within seventy yards. The pace is properly kept down to a low point in descending, and doing so, combined with the knowledge that the brake-power can easily lessen it, will tend to make the public look favorably on what might otherwise be considered a dangerous innovation. The engines also are provided with the centre-rail brake, on a pattern somewhat different from those on the carriages, and the flat sides which press against the rails are renewed every journey. It is highly desirable that they should be, for a single run from Lanslebourg to Susa grinds a groove into them about three-eighths of an inch in depth.
CENTRE RAIL BRAKE
Driving the trains over the summit section requires the most constant attention and no small amount of nerve, and the drivers, who are all English, have well earned their money at the end of their run. Their opinion of the line was concisely and forcibly expressed to me by one of them in last August: “Yes, mister, they told us as how the line was very steep, but they didn’t say that the engine would be on one curve, when the fourgon was on another, and the carriages was on a third. Them gradients, too, mister, they says they are one in twelve, but I think they are one in ten, at the least, and they didn’t say as how we was to come down them in that snakewise fashion. It’s worse than the G. I. P.[[4]], mister: there a fellow could jump off, but here, in them covered ways, there ain’t no place to jump to.”
[4] The Great Indian Peninsula Railway, the line with the celebrated Bhore Ghaut incline, sixteen miles long, on an average gradient of one in forty-eight, which is said to have cost £800,000, or about double the entire cost of the Mount Cenis Railway, and six times its cost mile for mile. The Fell Railway cost £8000 per mile.