The Railway Conquest of the World

by Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot

Such a task demands a man of illimitable resource and infinite ingenuity, conversant with every phase of civil engineering. At the same time he must possess the happy faculty of being able to organise great armies of men of all nationalities, and in such a manner that he can get the utmost out of them. This is a searching difficulty. The camp of to-day upon a large railway undertaking is a heterogeneous mass of humanity; the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel could not have been more embarrassing. I have lived among the camps of Canada and the United States, and among a hundred men it has been no uncommon circumstance to find representatives of a dozen different tongues. The control of such men is rendered all the more complex for the reason that in the majority of cases they have little or no knowledge of any language but their own. It is not until they have been in one another’s company for several weeks that inter-conversation becomes possible. In addition to this drawback there are always the peculiar troubles incidental to racial and religious prejudices confronting the commander-in-chief, and at times he is hard pressed to preserve order and authority.

This trouble is not experienced to any great degree in connection with railway building operations in Great Britain, but abroad the initial difficulties of this character are exasperating to a superlative degree, more especially where reliance has to be made upon native labour. The workmen have to be educated into the use of labour- and time-saving implements. This is no easy matter. The native entertains strong opinions concerning his own ability, and the conversion from the primitive to the up-to-date scientific has to be effected gradually and unconsciously, a task which demands considerable tact and patience. A great amount of time must be expended necessarily in the early days to drill such raw material, but perseverance and an equable temper are the only virtues. In Mexico the railway pioneers found it almost hopeless to impress upon the pæons, as the navvies are called, that to carry ballast in a basket slung upon the back was not to be compared in speed and efficiency with conveyance by small trucks pushed along a tramroad. It was only by carrying out the work themselves in this more modern manner that the engineers could teach them the superior advantage of this method, with its sparing of effort and fatigue. In fact, the only way one can convert the raw native to ideas entirely foreign to his own custom is to show him how he can save himself trouble. Then he will adopt the idea with alacrity.

Now and again, however, the white man, despite his ingenuity in the devising of time-and labour-saving appliances, has to bow to the inevitable. For instance, in India the Hindoos toil at such a low daily wage that in many phases of work the wonders of mechanical invention cannot compare with their crude efforts in cheapness. It comes as a heavy blow to the engineer’s pride to realise that he must abandon his elaborate plant and that the native holds the balance between failure and success.

Again, in the South Americas the laissez-faire attitude of the inhabitants galls him to the quick. In the southern part of the New World the policy is “Never do to-day what can be done to-morrow,” and the native acts up to the very letter of the aphorism. Religious festivals, each of which is regarded as a holiday, occur with the most tantalizing frequency. It is no uncommon circumstance for two or three such orgies—they scarcely can be described as anything else—to occur in a week, and the labourer is a commendable zealot in the observance of the religious feasts. The engineer may fret and fume at the delay, but unless he is in a position to recruit outside labour he must tolerate the frequent interruptions in the work with the best grace he can muster. In the mountainous regions of South America the native knows only too well that he holds an unassailable advantage, for he is accustomed to the rarefied atmosphere encountered in the extreme altitudes, whereas it plays sad havoc with the strongest constitutions of Europeans.

Strange to say, one of the most conscientious workmen in railway building, as in other fields of industrial endeavour, is the Chinaman. From a cursory point of view this appears inexplicable, but it must be borne in mind that a Celestial’s word is his bond. Johnny will haggle and argue for hours over a bargain, but when he finally accepts the terms he will fulfil the contract to the letter, even should he ascertain before he has completed the task that it involves him in a personal loss. I have seen these men pick up their tools as the clock struck the hour for commencing the daily task, plod along quietly and continually until the hour of cessation, and give an indisputably good return for their daily wage. Can the same be said of the workmen of any other nationality? I am afraid not. In fact, the steadiness of the Chinaman has become so famous and has proved so reliable that it is safe to say that many of the biggest railways of the day never would have been completed but for his aid. It enabled the first trans-continental line to be carried across the United States to link New York with San Francisco; through Oriental labour the Canadian Pacific was consummated, and many another great undertaking of a like nature could tell a similar story.

The same spirit prevails when the scene of activity is removed to China itself. The Celestial may entertain quaint ideas concerning the iron road and its scope of utility. He may slave hard to-day laying the track, merely to pull it up again on the morrow on the plea that it is disturbing the spirits of his ancestors. But nevertheless he completes his part of the bargain in the first instance. Strikes are unknown and disputes never arise unless the employer declines to stand by his side of the contract. China is permeated through and through with secret societies or Guilds—Trade Unions, if you like—to one or other of which every Celestial belongs. The white engineer when he first arrives in the country finds it very difficult to make headway, but in reality he is on probation in the eyes of the Orientals. They are watching closely his methods, fathoming his code of honour, his capacity for handling men—in fact, are investigating him just as closely as if he were under a microscope. Once he has established his reputation and has inspired confidence, he need entertain no further apprehensions concerning trouble.

Yet the Celestials have their own peculiar and effective way of settling disputes among themselves. The engineer in need of a few thousand men negotiates for brawn and muscle through a middle-man or labour contractor. The engineer concludes his bargain with this worthy, and the latter makes his own terms with the men. He recruits the navvies at a certain wage, which he takes care to leave him a wide margin of profit. Occasionally he will be too grasping and will resort to sweating tactics. When the labourers find this out trouble looms ahead. The men report the matter to their Guilds, who take the avaricious middle-man in hand and make him disgorge some of his ill-gotten gains. If he refuses, well, one day the contractor is missing, and never is seen again by the engineer. No questions are asked and no explanations for his disappearance are offered. He has settled his account with the Guilds to his own personal disadvantage. The engineer, however, knows nothing about the dissatisfaction until he observes the absence of the contractor, for the work meantime continues its daily round undisturbed.

Although labour is a vital consideration, it is but one cog in the complex machine by means of which the iron road is driven forward through a new country. Without tools the efforts of the navvy would count for naught, and as time has rolled by inventive effort and engineering skill have contrived more and more wonderful devices to enable the epoch-making work to be fulfilled in the shortest space of time. There is the steam shovel, which will remove two and a half cubic yards of miscellaneous rubble with every swing of its ponderous arm; the grader, whereby the soil is ploughed up and displaced by an endless chain of buckets into capacious wagons for removal; the drag shovel, a huge scoop attached to the end of a chain which is pulled along the ground from a stationary point by steam power, becoming charged with material in its progress, and thus fashioning the cutting; the monitor, whereby tons of gravel are washed down the mountain-side under the disintegrating force of a powerful jet of water similar to a fireman’s hose; and a host of other wonderful implements, all devised for the express purpose of expediting the work in hand. Gunpowder and dynamite are invaluable handmaids, and to-day are used with an astonishing prodigality. Indeed, when the advance is through rock their services are indispensable. Crags, cliffs and even whole hills are blown away bodily by their agency, and the cost often runs into thousands of pounds, miniature volcanoes being produced by the upheavals.

A RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION CAMP AMONG THE MOUNTAINS