CHAPTER XVIII
THE BOLIVIA RAILWAY AND TIAHUANACO
In order to attend the Scientific Congress, I had been obliged to interrupt my journey from Buenos Aires to Lima and had left my saddles and impedimenta at Oruro. It was now necessary to return thither and pick up the overland trail.
Leaving La Paz early one morning by the electric train for the Alto, we took the Guaqui train as far as Viacha, the northern terminus of the Bolivia Railway.
This railway was built to order for the Bolivian Government by an American syndicate, and we found it equipped with American-made locomotives and cars, and operated by American railroad men. Most of them had had some experience in Mexico and were familiar with the difficulties of handling Indian laborers, and also with the use (and abuse) of the Spanish language. None of them seemed to be particularly enthusiastic over the prospects of the country, and all were looking forward with pleasure to the time of their vacation when, according to the terms of their contract, they would be sent back to the States.
The construction of this road over the plateau offered no great engineering difficulties such as are met with by the roads that cross the Cordillera. The heaviest grade is not over ten per cent, and there are no tunnels. To offset this advantage, however, rock ballast is difficult to procure, and the earth that has been dug up on each side of the track to form the roadbed seems to lack cohesion. The gauge is one metre. The ties are of California redwood and Oregon pine. Owing to the high cost of rails and ties and the distance which they had to be brought, the railroad has been an expensive one to build. There is only a difference of eight hundred and sixteen feet between the highest and lowest portion of the line, yet the hundred and twenty-five miles have cost two million dollars and a quarter, or eighteen thousand dollars per mile.
The Bolivia Railway is remarkable for the promptness with which it was constructed after the signing of the contract. The National City Bank of New York and Speyer & Co. agreed, on the 22nd of May, 1906, to build the line from Viachi to Oruro. Work was commenced seven months later, and the line was opened for traffic in less than two years. Everything considered, the prompt completion of the work is a great credit to the American engineers who had the line in charge.
There is another side to the story, however. Owing to the fact that the opening of the road had to be rushed in order to please President Montes of Bolivia, trains began to run before the road was really finished, and it has been necessary to continue the service in order to avoid criticism. The South American is not as patient as the North American and is ever ready to enter vehement and furious protests against anything short of perfection in railway management. Not content with actual progress, and not having had any practical experience in the difficulties of railroad construction and maintenance, he imagines that all accidents and all shortcomings on the railway are due to gross carelessness on the part of the chief officials. Every time a train is late, he blames the management and accuses it of bad faith, although he knows many of his friends and neighbors would miss any train that started on time. The necessity of catering to the desires of the politicians has made it extremely difficult to get the roadbed into good shape. At the time of my visit six hundred Indian laborers, conscripts, were still employed in getting the track properly ballasted. Their wages average a trifle over fifty cents a day.
I had heard that accidents occurred “every trip,” but thought it only one of those extravagant criticisms that are so common, until I asked the conductor. He admitted that some of the wheels generally left the rails at least once a day. For an hour or so nothing happened, and in my interest in the landscape, dotted here and there with mud-colored villages and ancient tombs, I was beginning to forget the delightful sense of approaching danger, when suddenly, with a rattle and a bang, we came to a sharp stop. One of the forward cars had left the rails and plowed its way across the ties for some distance. The train crew, well experienced in such matters, soon had the refractory car back on the rails again and, nothing the worse for our accident, we proceeded merrily southward for another half hour until brought up with a sudden jerk by a repetition of the rattle and bang. This time it proved to be the tender whose wheels had found a weak spot in the roadbed. Upon further examination, it looked as though we were going to be delayed for at least four or five hours. The tender had lost its balance and was lying over partly on one side, kept from a complete upset by the weight of the engine and the strength of the couplings. In ten or fifteen minutes, however, the crew, well trained by daily practice, had the port wheels back on the track, but the starboard wheels continued to remain in the air five or six inches above the rails. As the water tank had recently been filled, the centre of gravity was too high to allow the tender to assume its normal position, and the added weight of several men failed to bring it down. The engineer suggested that a bend in the track less than a quarter of a mile away would “do the business,” and so he was allowed to pull down to the curve. It looked like an extraordinarily clever acrobatic performance to see this refractory tender going merrily along on a single rail. True to the engineer’s expectations, as soon as the wheels felt the changed angle of the track, down came the tender with a lurch that almost capsized it on the other side. In less than twenty minutes we were again on our way, thankful that we had experienced wreckers instead of the ordinary train crew of the eastern United States, whom I have seen take several hours to perform what these men did in a few minutes.