"The engineering difficulties here are greater than on either of the routes I have mentioned, and greater than anything we have seen in the European Alps. The Oroya line is certainly one of the railway wonders of the world, and every visitor to Lima should make a point of seeing this enormous work. It is doubtful if the government will ever find it profitable, owing to the great cost of construction and the expense of running the trains.
"Here are a few figures about this railway. I take some of them from Professor Orton's book,'The Andes and Amazon,' and others have been given me by the conductor who accompanies us.
"Eighty-seven miles of the road had been finished when the war between Chili and Peru caused a suspension of work. There are sixty-three tunnels, with an aggregate length of twenty-one thousand feet, and there are thirty bridges of iron or stone. Some of the bridges are of French or English manufacture, and others, considered the best, were made in America. The Verrugas bridge spans a chasm five hundred and eighty feet wide, and rests on three piers of hollow columns of wrought iron. It was made at Phenixville, Pennsylvania, at a cost of $63,000; the middle pier is two hundred and fifty-two feet high and fifty feet square at its base, and the deflection of the bridge is five-eighths of an inch.
"The sharpest curve of the road is 395 feet radius, and the maximum grade is four per cent. While the work was going on they used two hundred and fifty tons of powder every month for blasting the rock! The tunnel to carry the line through the Andes is at an elevation of 15,645 feet above the sea, the highest railway tunnel in the world, and some say the highest point where a piston-rod is moved by steam.
AMONG THE FOOT-HILLS.
"To describe our ride would be to give a long succession of exclamations of wonder, admiration, and enthusiasm, with an occasional sigh of relief when dangerous points were passed without accident. It is quite possible that our cheeks may have paled at times and flushed at others, but of course we could not admit anything of the sort. We were glad when the terminus was reached, and the sensation of the journey was over.
"We crawled slowly upward on our eastward way and found it exciting enough; what shall I say of the return ride, when we had the downward grade to take us along, and the only use of the steam in the locomotive was to hold us back? The brakes were screwed tightly down, and so great is the pressure upon them that their shoes must be renewed at the end of every second round trip from Callao and back again. In four hours from the terminus we were on the shores of the Pacific, and at the end of a journey we shall long remember."
Two weeks from the time our friends landed at Callao they embarked on the southern-bound steamer from that port, having taken their tickets for Mollendo.