The country through which the line was laid was timberless, if not, also, practically waterless. Wells had to be sunk for the water wanted for the locomotives and the working-parties.
The heat was excessive. The temperature at times was 180 degrees Fahr. in the sun. English navvies could not have made the line at all.
The two piers where the incoming vessels could alone be unloaded got so congested with traffic that it was only with the greatest trouble railway material could be landed.
Use began to be made of the line as soon as any of it was ready, and the traffic at the shore end at once became so heavy that it was difficult to get materials and supplies through to the construction parties at the other end. Officers, also, who should have been superintending the construction had to devote a good deal of time, instead, to details of operation, or to looking after the repairs of rolling stock.
In all these circumstances one cannot be surprised at the slow rate of progress made. One may, rather, wonder that the line got built at all. As it was, four months were spent on eleven miles of railway, or a total of twelve miles including sidings. There remained still another mile or so to be built when, at the end of April, news arrived that the object of the expedition had been attained, and that Magdala had fallen. It was then decided not to complete the line, but to devote all energies to preparing for the heavy traffic to be dealt with in the conveyance of troops, baggage and stores on the return journey.
From the middle of May to the middle of June the resources of the line were severely taxed; but a great improvement had been made in the working arrangements, and a railway which had involved so much trouble in the making was eventually found to be of great practical service. Lieutenant Willans says of it:—
The Abyssinian railway was a great success, if one may gauge it by the amount of assistance it gave to the expedition, by the celerity and dispatch with which, by its aid, stores were landed and brought up to the store sheds, and by the rapidity and ease with which the troops and their baggage were brought back and re-embarked at once....
As an auxiliary to the expedition, and as an additional means of transport, no one who had anything to do in connection with it can have doubted its extreme utility.
Faulty, therefore, as had been the conditions under which the line was constructed, the results nevertheless established definitely the principle that, in such campaigns as the one in Abyssinia, military railways might serve an extremely useful purpose in facilitating the transport of troops and supplies.
The Abyssinian experiences did, however, further show the desirability of any country likely to find itself in a position requiring the construction of military railways—as an aid to wars small or great—creating in advance an organisation designed to enable it, as far as possible, to meet promptly whatever emergency might arise, without the risk of having to deal with defective material, unsatisfactory labour, and administrative mismanagement.
The same lesson was to be enforced by other expeditions in which England has taken part, and, down to the period when improvements in our system—or lack of system—began to be effected, there was much scope for criticism as to the way in which military railways, designed to facilitate operations undertaken in countries having a lack of communications, had been either constructed or worked. Writing, in 1882, in the "Professional Papers" of the Royal Engineers (Chatham) on "Railways for Military Communication in the Field," Col. J. P. Maquay, R.E., observed in regard to what had been the experiences to that date:—