The Railway Conquest of the World

by Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot

While Europe offers the most graphic illustrations of the engineer’s skill and ingenuity in overcoming rugged mountains by tunnelling through their bases, one must go to South America to discover the extraordinary methods he has adopted to negotiate similar obstructions by traversing their lofty crests. It seems somewhat strange, at first sight, that the “land of to-morrow” should have been the scene of such demonstrations of genius, but when the incalculable mineral wealth buried in the Andes is recalled, much of this surprise disappears.

The majority of the great mountain chains of the world appear puny in comparison with the mighty serrated backbone of the southern half of the American continent, which runs from the equator southwards to tumble abruptly into the sea at Cape Horn. Mont Blanc and other famous hoary European monarchs are insignificant beside Aconcagua and many other snow-clad peaks beetling to the skies in its vicinity. The Cordilleras present a compressed phalanx of pinnacles running in a fairly straight, even, and narrow line. As the equator is approached the needle points taper to bluntly rounded and rolling heads, but the general conformation is the same. The result is that the slopes are very steep, and to carry a railway through the mass entails tortuous winding among the cones, with steep gradients and tunnels through massive obstructions of rock. The cliffs of the Andes are probably unequalled in mountain topography for steepness and height, the flanks in places dropping down plumb for several thousand feet.

There is another peculiar characteristic which severely taxes the skill of the engineer. The range thrusts itself skywards very closely to the Pacific seaboard, so that the climb commences directly the coast is left, and the maximum heights have to be gained within comparatively short distances. For instance, in the case of the Oroya line, which is the railway wonder of the world, the traveller landing at Callao, in order to reach Oroya, 138 miles inland, has to toil 15,865 feet towards the clouds in the course of 107 miles—one of the highest points at which the piston of a railway engine throbs.

This South American line is not an ordinary mountain railway: it is an audacious marvel of engineering science. Nor does it merely offer facilities for sight-seeing among the impressive Cordilleras, but acts as a traffic highway between the coast and the mines on the high inland plateau.

As might be supposed, the difficulties which the engineers had to break down were numerous and stupendous. Moreover, the work was extremely costly. In the case of the Oroya road it averaged about £60,000, or $300,000, per mile, and altogether £8,500,000 ($42,500,000) were sunk in the enterprise—more than the total cost of the St. Gotthard railway, with its famous tunnel and 172 miles of track.

The first attempt to subjugate this range by the iron road was made in the ’sixties by a daring Philadelphia engineer, Henry Meiggs. His idea was ambitious in the extreme. He proposed to start from Callao, lift the metals over the crests of the mountains, drop down the other side on to the highlands, and to push across the plateau until he gained a point on the mighty Amazon which could be reached by steamer from the Atlantic. By this means the Pacific seaports of South America would be brought into closer touch with the markets of the Old World, avoiding the protracted and hazardous journey round Cape Horn. That the idea was never carried to success was one of the sorry tricks of Fate. Internecine strife and wars with neighbouring states sapped the financial strength of Peru to such an extent that there was not enough money to complete this grand scheme. Possibly some day the steel thread will be picked up again at Oroya and forced to its original objective.

For the first 107 miles this railway makes a continual ascent; there is not a single foot of downhill in the whole distance. Work was commenced in 1870, and was pushed forward so energetically that in the course of twelve months Meiggs had completed 20 miles of the line, and had the earthworks well advanced as far as Chosica, some 33 miles out of Callao. In order to ease his task as much as possible, the engineer decided to follow the Rimac River into the mountains. But as the innermost recesses of the Cordilleras are gained, the river narrows considerably, until it plunges merely through a slender defile, the walls of the peaks dropping down precipitously into the water. The result was that the engineer found it very difficult to find a natural lane for his metals, so he had to hew and blast galleries, to swing first from one bank to the other, in order to seize the slightest foothold.

He had plunged 47 miles into the mountains and had gained an altitude of about one mile, when he was brought to a dead stop. The mountain along which he had crawled laboriously broke off abruptly. Further advance was impossible. To have cut a tunnel would have been a herculean task, and as the mountain wall dropped straight down below, and towered to a dizzy height above him, he found himself in a quandary. A few feet immediately above him, however, he espied a ledge running parallel with that on which he had laid his track. He resolved to gain that upper gallery, but the crucial question was, How?

Then he hit upon a brilliant idea. It was something new and untried in railway engineering, but as he had already tested all existing methods to gain the point at which he now stood, there was no alternative but to devise new ways and means of overcoming perplexing situations as they arose, despite the apparent novelty of the solutions. He resolved to lift the track from the lower to the upper ledge by a “V-switch.”