Rambles on Railways

by Sir Cusack P. Roney

CHAPTER XI.

PARIS TO ST. MICHEL—“ABOVE SEA-LEVEL”—THE HOLBORN VIADUCT—THE MONT CENIS RAILWAY.

If the reader will refer to page 16 ante, he will see that we left an imaginary travelling companion of ours, to refresh himself at one of the innumerable restaurants of Paris, whilst we were to employ the time in giving some account of the four greatest existing railways in Europe, and of the Pacific Union Railroad, now constructing across the continent of North America. But one thing has led to another, and descriptions which we had originally intended should only occupy some fifty or sixty pages, have grown to more than 200. We now revert to our original plan, which is, to take the reader, in the shape of an imaginary traveller, to the Mont Cenis Railway, and having given the best explanation of it in our power, to impart (apropos of the Tunnel of the Alps) the information we have recently collected about tunnels, ancient and modern, canal and railway, in Great Britain, and in other parts of the world. From the Alps, we shall proceed, by means of the existing railways, to the extreme south-eastern end of Italy, whence we shall cross over to Sicily, the most southern part of Europe to which railways extend. In this manner we propose to bring the present volume to a conclusion.

Taking place in the train of the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean Railway, at the Mazas Station, built nearly opposite to Paris’s great prison of the same name, we travel on the main line, 275 miles, as far as Lamartine’s birthplace, Macon, forty-four miles short of Lyons, and 262 short of Marseilles, which is 537 miles from Paris. We must leave the detailed description of the route to Murray’s Hand Books, of which Hand Hooks in general we have recently said, and now repeat, that an experience of upwards of thirty years’ very frequent travelling in many parts of the continent enables us to state that, for lucid description, accuracy, and impartiality, they are the only English ones that completely merit the confidence of the public. Per contra, the omissions and inaccuracies met with in other so-called “Guides” are a source of continual annoyance and disappointment to the inexperienced continental traveller. To mention only one instance, a Hand Book which we were assured, at the office of its publication, was published in June 1866 (of course there is no date of publication on the title-page), is, with a few trifling alterations, a reprint of pages in stereotype published twelve or thirteen years previously, and the routes given to reach the country which it professes to describe are those that were in use, by ordinary road and by steam-boat, until railways, opened now between six and ten years, superseded them.

At Macon we turn off from the main line of railway to the left, and pass successively Bourg and Culoz, near to which was the boundary between France and Italy, until the “rectification of frontier” in 1859 transferred the line of demarcation to the summit of the Alps, and converted Niceois and Savoyards into Frenchmen. At Culoz there is a further separation of railway—one branch turns north-east to Geneva 45 miles—the other, formerly the Victor Emanuel Railway, but lately swallowed up by the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean Company, continues direct into the Savoie Propre, and after passing Aix les Bains and Chambery, runs up the Valley of the Arq to St. Michel, at present the terminus of the lines in this direction. When the stupendous task of piercing the Alps is achieved, this line will be continued to Modane, twelve miles farther up the valley, where it will enter the great tunnel. The works on this length, as will be explained hereafter, will be exceedingly difficult and costly.

At St. Michel, the traveller at the present time has to exchange from the luxurious first-class carriage to the jolting, crowded, slow diligence. But very shortly he will only be called upon to move from the first-class carriage of the Mediterranean Company into the equally comfortable one of the Mont Cenis Railway, a specimen of which was exhibited at the recent Paris Exhibition. In this he will travel from St. Michel to Susa in less than half the time, and at a little more than half the expense of the journey en Diligence.

St. Michel is 146 English miles from Macon, 421 from Paris, 717 from London. The traveller who leaves London any morning of the week, at twenty-five minutes past seven, will (with a break of two hours in Paris) find himself at St. Michel at noon the following day, notwithstanding the fact, that the railway from Macon onwards is far from being a first-class one; its gradients are steep, its curves numerous and abrupt. Between Calais and St. Michel, including various ups and downs (for railways are subject to the fluctuations physically that man experiences bodily), the traveller has risen 2,493 English feet, but principally in the seventy-two miles and a-half from Culoz onwards. He has, in fact, completed more than a third of the total elevation he has to conquer, in order to be at the summit of the Mont Cenis Pass. This summit is 6,658 feet above the sea level at Calais and elsewhere.

“Above sea level!” What does this mean? We shall endeavour to illustrate; we shall therefore ask our reader to be so good as, in the first instance, to place himself, either in imagination or reality, exactly parallel with those at-one-time-considered impregnable fortresses at Albert Gate Knightsbridge, Malta, and Gibraltar, so called, because, for a long time, no one could be found to take them. The ice, however, was broken as regards one of them, Malta, by a monarch of former days—for the most part wrongly accused and unfairly deposed—the Railway King. He sold it to our “natural enemy;” it has, therefore, for many years, been in possession of France, as the residence of the French ambassador, and let us en passant express a fervent hope—long may it continue to be so. Gibraltar, less dignified, has, probably, not been less useful; it fell, however, through the fatal influence of gold; it has long been a tributary or branch of one of our leading joint stock banking establishments.

So much for our starting point, and now for the ground to be got over. It has just been stated that the summit of the Mont Cenis Pass is 6,658 feet above sea level.[114] Converted into terms which we can more readily appreciate for such lengths, it means one mile and a quarter with fifty-eight feet over for good measurement. Placing this distance on the flat instead of the perpendicular it represents the whole of the ground that intervenes between the whilom fortresses and the corner of Coventry Street and the Haymarket; that is, a person wanting to walk 6,658 feet on or nearly the level, must go over ground equal to that which we have named as between these two points of measurement. But when we come to ascend a height, be it great or small, only a few feet or a mountain, we know by a universal law that we cannot mount exactly perpendicularly. Even in the nearest approach to the upright straight rise—the ladder—we are obliged to have some slope in it. We therefore, in all ascents by steps must mount gradually, so gradually in fact that the place for placing the human foot is usually greater than the rise made at each step it takes forward. In ordinarily built houses of the usual proportions, the rise of a step in a staircase is seven inches, but what the foot steps on is eleven inches wide; consequently, for every seven inches that we rise we must go forward eleven inches. But this is not all: at every twelve or fourteen feet we must have breaks in the ascent—landings; therefore, for any height above twenty feet or so, the proportion between elevation and step forward is, as near as can be, one to three. Taken by this standard, a person wanting to rise 6,658 feet by means of staircases or steps, must be continually ascending for a length that measures not only from Albert Gate to the Haymarket; but a farther distance represented by Leicester Square, Cranbourne Street, Long Acre, Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Holborn, Newgate Street, Cheapside, and to the Bank of England.