Rambles on Railways

by Sir Cusack P. Roney

The first portion of this great connection is a most important section of 109 miles in length, crossing the rivers Bahrun and Mulleer, and through the Karatolla Hills to Kotree on the Indus, opposite Hyderabad. It has since its opening in May, 1861, developed a considerable trade in cotton, which had not been previously seen on the Indus, as well as Indigo, grain, wool, and other products.

Usually, the violence of the monsoons does not extend on the western side of India, so far to the north as Scinde, but, in August, 1866, it was not less destructive to the works of the Scinde Railway than to those of the Bombay and Baroda. In two days, forty inches of rain fell, and the floods produced by this sudden down-pour were such that they as completely swept away a viaduct as if it had never existed. Iron girders, sixty tons in weight, were hurled along for a distance of half-a-mile, and rails were carried away 300 feet from the line. The traffic was, in consequence, interrupted for several weeks. As in the case of the Bombay and Baroda Line, the cost of repairing the damage will, in consideration of the exceptional circumstances which caused it, be allowed as a charge against capital. In 1865, the gross receipts of the Scinde Railway were £82,493, and the net, £3,507; in 1866, although the gross receipts had fallen to £53,166, the net earnings were £10,083. The train miles in 1866 were 283,062.

The second portion of the system connected with the Scinde Railway as it now exists, is for the navigation of the Indus from Kootree to Moultan, eventually to be superseded by what is designated the Indus Valley Railway. The Indus Steam Flotilla consists of thirteen steamers, three tugs, and twenty-six barges. The vessels which formed the early portion of the company’s fleet did not turn out satisfactorily, but now the service is efficiently carried on. The gross receipts of the company for the year ending the 30th of June, 1865, were £73,958, and the net, £16,400; for the year ending the 30th of June, 1866, they were respectively, £80,640, and £22,283.

As regards the Indus Valley Railway, the object of its projection is to unite by means of a line that would be about 500 miles long, the existing Scinde and Punjaub Railways, and thus to provide a continuous line of railway communication, about 2,200 miles long, from the Port of Kurrachee to Calcutta, viâ Hyderabad, Moultan, Lahore, Delhi, and Allahabad.

The project is indeed a grand one, and its effect would be (assuming that the line be made between Baroda and Delhi) to give a third line of communication between the western coast of India and Calcutta, and also three lines of communication between that coast and the North-Western Provinces, of which two (one, however, circuitous) would be from Bombay, and one from Kurrachee.

When we have, as we shall undoubtedly have, sooner or later, the Euphrates Valley Railway,[91] it will, in the first instance, be carried from the ancient Port of Seleucia, on the Mediterranean, to Ja’bar-Castle, on the Euphrates, below which point there is water communication by the Euphrates and Tigris to the Persian Gulf.[92] Kurrachee[93] will then be the port of call between Europe and India. At whatever time these eighty miles shall be constructed, and proper lines of steamers established in connection with them, there will be a gain of fully four, if not five days over the existing Red Sea Route.

But will progress in shortening time between England and India stop at the construction of only eighty more miles of railway?[94] It would be out of reason to suppose that such will be the fact. It may therefore be taken for granted that continuation of the whole 800 miles of Euphrates Valley line will be accomplished somehow or other. Whenever that time comes,—and every day is accelerating its advent,—the gain will be at least two days, possibly even a little more on the homeward journey. Then, India—the India of England—will, at its nearest point, be under fourteen days from England. Then the postal communication between the two empires will not be as it is now, forty-eight times a year; it will not be the two and fifty, so long proposed, so long and so miserably resisted by Post Office narrow sight and want of appreciation of imperial grandeur and importance.[95] No! It requires no great foresight, or fore-reading of events to feel conviction that the service will be daily, and that despatch will succeed despatch on each of the working days of the year, as well from west to east, as from east to westward. Even now, the postal service of England with the east is the grandest combined land and ocean communication of the world.[96] No other maritime service approaches it. It is five times as great as that of the Cunard Company. It is more than double that of the two great routes of the Royal West India Mail Company. Notwithstanding that its ramifications extend thousands of miles, the component parts of it fit in so harmoniously, and work together in such complete and accurate accordance, the one with the other, that whether we take the outward journeys with their divergent fragments, or the homeward journeys, continuously aggregating and increasing as they approach completion—the mails arrive almost with the rarely failing fidelity of clockwork—punctuality the rule, absence of it the rare exception.

But shall we always be satisfied, even when we have achieved communication by railway from the Mediterranean to the head of the Persian Gulf, and thence by water to English India? There can be but one answer to the question—It would be contrary to all human progress if we were to be so. Only in the summer of the present year, France and England were each honoured with a visit from the Sultan, and it is said there was nothing which struck His Majesty during his short residence in Western Europe as of more importance to the well-being of a state than the construction of railways. It is therefore not surprising that he has already given the subject attention for his own country, and that concessions have been granted for several important lines. Even now the break which separates the railways that extend continuously from Calais to Basiach, on the Danube, 419 miles to the south-east of Vienna (accomplished by the express train in seventeen hours), are only separated from Rustuch by less than 300 miles, and, as the railway—138 miles long—from Rustuch to Varna is open, there is in fact only the Basiach-Rustuch break in a complete railway communication from Calais to the Black Sea. Before ten years from this time, not only will this gap be filled up, but the City of the Golden Horn will be equally put into connection with the whole of the European system of railways. The Queen’s messenger, and the mails now go from London to Constantinople,[97] viâ Marseilles, in about eleven days. When the Brindisi route is established, the time will be diminished some three days, and on the completion of the railways to Constantinople, the interval in time between it and London will not exceed five days.

So far with regard to a railway journey, the accomplishment of which, within ten years, is certain. Nothing, except the coming of chaos, can prevent it.