The Railway Conquest of the World

by Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot

The road is excellently built, and the engineer displayed his ingenuity in coping with the problem of carrying the line through the Nankow Pass. This pass guards the entrance of the main road through the Great Wall, and to overcome the obstruction a gradient of 1 in 30 had to be introduced for a distance of 13 miles. At the foot of the pass three Mallet locomotives of British construction are maintained, and they crawl to the summit of the pass, at an altitude of about 1,500 feet, in two hours—a speed of about 6½ miles an hour.

The alignment of the railway up this pass is noteworthy. The road clings for the most part to the side of the mountains, crossing deep rifts and wide clefts, as well as cutting through spurs and humps and compassing massive crags. Four tunnels were found to be unavoidable, one, 3,580 feet in length, burrowing 200 feet beneath the Great Wall. When the summit is gained, the railway enters a flat plateau, the only difficulty here, as on the flats around Pekin, being the preservation of the road from the attacks of floods. That this is no slight factor is proved from the fact that in the vicinity of Pekin a wash-out which overwhelmed the line cost no less than, £32,000, or $160,000, to repair. The completion of the work, however, offers convincing testimony that the Chinese, under competent supervision, are perfectly capable of building railways without the aid of foreigners, and that no fault can be found with their work so far as solidity and durability are concerned.

For centuries the Chinese have been famed for their prowess in matters pertaining to civil engineering. At times this skill pursues a quaint course, but probably the most extraordinary illustration was in connection with the Shanghai-Nangchow-Ningpo railway. By an imperial edict a Chinese official was appointed as engineer-in-chief.

At one point it was necessary to throw a bridge across a river. How it was to be accomplished passed the comprehension of the engineer. But he evolved a solution which, to say the least, would be difficult to equal in originality. He built the bridge on dry land, on one bank of the river. When this was completed satisfactorily, he diverted the waterway, so that the river ran beneath the bridge through a new, specially-built channel, and the old one was filled up! In another instance, where a similar situation presented itself, a pier in the centre of the waterway became necessary. The river ran swiftly and the water was deep. The engineer knew nothing about coffer-dams, caissons, or other methods which the foreign engineer would have adopted. As the men could not work on dry land to build the bridge, he proceeded to provide them with this requisition. Hundreds of tons of spoil were dumped into the river at the point where the pier was to be erected until an island was formed, and on this the necessary constructional work was carried out.

Possibly the greatest and one of the most important lines, however, is the Pekin-Hankow railway, which is 760 miles in length, and which eventually will be an important link in the great road that is under construction, whereby through communication will be provided from Kowloon via Canton, Hankow, Pekin, Mukden and Harbin to the Trans-Siberian railway. This line was carried out with Belgian and French money for the most part, and £5,000,000, or $25,000,000, was sunk in the enterprise. The undertaking was commenced in 1900, but the Boxer Rebellion interfered seriously with its progress. The insurrectionists expended their full fury upon the railway, and inflicted damage to the value of nearly £1,000,000, or $5,000,000, which, however, was paid over by the Government as compensation. It has been built cheaply, and does not compare, in point of solidity, with the English-built lines. At the same time, however, there are some outstanding engineering achievements. The most important is the bridge across the Yellow River, which consists of 102 spans, giving a total length of nearly 2 miles. It proved a particularly trying structure to erect, owing to the treacherous character of the river-bed, while the scouring action of the water, which is particularly severe, demanded elaborate protective works around the bottom of the piers. After various schemes were tried and had proved futile, large mattresses of brushwood interwoven with rushes were fashioned, and laid around the feet of the piers, hundreds of tons of heavy pieces of stone being dumped on these to keep them in position. This has been found more or less successful to prevent the soft silt from being washed away, and to protect the supports to the bridge from being undermined. The structure, however, is scarcely strong enough for heavy traffic, and consequently trains upon arrival at the ends of the bridge have the large locomotives uncoupled, and are drawn across the river by special light engines retained for the purpose.

One of the most important lines from the commercial point of view, however, is the Canton-Kowloon railway stretching from Kowloon, in British territory, to the busy centre of Canton, and thence continued northward to Hankow to provide connection with the other great systems of the country, and also with Europe by means of the Trans-Siberian railway. This project has passed through many vicissitudes. The British & Chinese Corporation received official sanction to build a road between Canton and Kowloon as far back as 1898, but the project became shelved. An American syndicate, which had secured the concession to connect Canton with Hankow, asserted that they had secured rights to carry the line from the former point to the coast. Such action would have dealt a serious blow to British commercial supremacy, and the money was subscribed to buy out the American concession, which in the meantime had been sold to a Belgian syndicate, and regained.

The section between Kowloon and Canton, 100 miles in length, was divided. The Hong-Kong Government was held responsible for the 23 miles through British territory, while the balance of the line through Chinese territory was carried out by the Chinese Government.

The English section proved tremendously difficult. The country traversed was exceedingly rough and mountainous. The difficulties encountered proved so abnormal that the cost of the undertaking has exceeded the original estimates by nearly 150 per cent. Some idea of the arduous character of the work may be gathered from the fact that nearly 2½ out of the 23 miles in British territory are represented by tunnels. The most arduous enterprise of this class was the Beacon Hill tunnel, 7000 feet in length, driven through the heart of the mountain ridge that rises up 3 miles from the coast. The tunnel is perfectly straight, and ranks as the largest work of its type in the Chinese Empire.

It is driven through a depth of disintegrated granite on either approach, where heavy timbering became necessary until the solid rock was gained. Water was encountered and gave considerable trouble. At first labour was a serious problem, as the natives could not be induced to toil underground, and coolies had to be imported from India. After the work was well started, Chinese labourers, who had been working on the South African gold-fields and had returned home, were available, and proved highly useful workmen, especially when the wrestle commenced with the hard, solid rock.

The tunnelling task, however, was equalled by the work in the cuts and on the fills. Some of the cuttings are of enormous depth, and the engineers have had to guard against the danger of heavy landslides, which, with wash-outs, are two of the greatest menaces to the railway in China. Heavy earthworks were required, because the line follows roughly the coast-line, which is serrated, and to preserve alignment it was necessary to strike straight across these indentations where the water in many places proved to be very deep. The treacherous character of the sea-bed, which for the most part is a silt, demanded the provision of massive foundations upon which to raise the grade, and months were expended while a huge fleet of junks dumped hundreds of tons of rock into the water. Occasionally the work as completed was washed out by heavy rains, while now and again the typhoon left evidences of its wrath. A noticeable feature in the grading was the amount of work performed by women, who had recourse to their native basket slung on a pole for the conveyance of excavated earth to the fills.