MAKING TRACKS
From the Ghan to the Trans-Siberian, the world’s greatest railways were huge undertakings, writes Michael Kerr
We all love a good train journey, especially when it involves passing through dramatic scenery affording striking views of mountains, lakes, shimmering oceans, or deserts for that matter. Think of the Transcontinental in America, the TransSiberian, the Ghan in Australia, the Rocky Mountaineer in Canada. But how did these lines — many of which were laid in the 19th century — come into being? What were the costs in terms of human endeavour and sacrifice? Who were the unsung heroes and heroines? Here are a few stories of the world’s greatest railroads. May they enhance the journeys ahead ...
THE GHAN, AUSTRALIA
The first Ghan train ran from Adelaide on Sunday August 4 1929 — but it went only as far as Stuart (Alice Springs). Work on the northern stretch to Darwin didn’t begin until 2000. Darwin, with all the hi-tech tools of the 21st century, was finally reached in 2003. Over the decades, according to Ian Grady’s book The Ghan, the greatest obstacle to completion was neither terrain nor climate — it was the apathy of the public and the capriciousness of politicians, who would champion the line when it suited them, then drop it as quickly as possible.
The Ghan (shortened from The Afghan Express) gets its name and its symbol from the Asian cameleers who opened up trade and transport routes in Central and Northern Australia from the mid-1860s.
Camels carried fencing wire, roofing iron and food to the cattle and sheep stations, and
drew water from wells and pulled shovels to scoop out dams and railway cuttings. The navvies, working in the heat and dust with hand tools, would offload rails from the backs of camels and lay them, too, by hand, banging them on to fishplates and sleepers with sledgehammers.
There had been no such thing as tourism in Central Australia. Even then, most arrivals by train came second-class, prompting one publican to grumble: “Tourists come here with 10 pounds in their pockets and one shirt on their backs and change neither.”
Having made the line possible, the cameleers became redundant. So if you’re planning to ride the Ghan in this anniversary year, spare a thought for those who made it.
journeybeyondrail.com.au
THE TRANS-SIBERIAN, RUSSIA
“Of all men engaged in monumental undertakings, few ever stood in greater need of supernatural aid than the builders of the Trans-Siberian Railway.” So wrote the American Harmon Tupper in To the Great Ocean, his account of the biggest railway project ever undertaken.
Tsar Alexander III, mindful of what had been achieved in the US and fearful of the intentions of China, had ordered “a continuous line ... to unite the rich Siberian provinces with the railway system of the Interior”. He had his son, the Grand Duke Nicholas, lay the first stone in Vladivostok in 1891. Then he told his underlings to get on with the rest of it, as cheaply as possible. That entailed negotiating major rivers, steep mountains, dense forest and the world’s deepest lake (Baikal), and building by hand 9,656km of track, tunnels and bridges — all in some of the most inhospitable country on Earth.
Surveying was hasty and builders had to improvise on the ground, so there were often
sharp changes in direction. At the height of the project, more than 89,000 men — prisoners, political exiles and battalions of soldiers — were at work, eastwards from Chelyabinsk, westwards from Vladivostok.
In central Siberia, land was frozen until mid-July, and when it melted navvies were in half a metre of water. In Transbaikalia, where the permafrost had to be broken with dynamite, floods were frequent, and a 321km stretch, with 125 bridges, was swept away.
The line was finished in 13 years — though not as robustly as it is today. In the words of th railway commentator Christian Wolmar, it had “been built to a deficient standard in virtually every way”. That was made plain when the locomotive hauling the inaugural train between Maiinsk and Actinsk fell into a river below the tracks.
seat61.com/trans-siberian
THE CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY
Canada wouldn’t be Canada had it not been for the Canadian Pacific Railway. A transcontinental link was the dream of
John A Macdonald, who would become the country’s first prime minister, but what made it reality was an ultimatum from the people of British Columbia: start work within 10 years, or we’ll join the US rather than you.
The line was built between 1881 and 1885,
stretching 4,345km from Ontario to the Pacific Coast at Vancouver. Its route crossed land controlled by the Blackfoot, whose chief, Crowfoot, persuaded that the railway was inevitable, was granted a lifetime pass to ride its trains.
The winner of the contract was a wily wheeler-dealing Scot, George Stephen, who had a workforce of 15,000, many of whom were Chinese. Though initial westward sections were quite flat, they then had to blast through the granite of the Canadian Shield and, after the prairies, cross the Rockies and the Selkirk Mountains. Thirty-eight surveyors died seeking a route through a high pass.
In all, about 800 men were killed — some because of penny-pinching on safety. Yet still costs rose in stretches to $500,000 a mile, and near the end Stephen’s company went bust. It was bailed out by the federal government, which had already seen the value of the new line after troops had been sent on it to quell a revolt in Manitoba.
The CPR did more than any other single railway to create new settlements. In the words of the Canadian writer Pierre Berton, it “dictated both the shape and the location of the cities of the new Canada”, giving rise to 800 towns and cities in the Prairie Provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
A train called “the Canadian”, run by VIA Rail between Toronto and Vancouver, now crosses the country on the more northerly Canadian National route — via Edmonton and Jasper — completed in 1917. viarail.ca/en ●
THE GUAYAQUIL & QUITO RAILWAY, ECUADOR
As the condor flies, Guayaquil and Quito are only 270km apart. But Guayaquil is at sea level and Quito, the second-highest capital in the world, is at 2,850m. In between are raging rivers, deep ravines, dense cloud-forests
and lofty Andean peaks.
When the American Archer Harman first travelled to Ecuador in 1897, it cost more to send a ton of wheat from Quito to the coast than from Australia to Europe. Harman, recruited by the president, Eloy Alfaro, was planning a railway.
Harman and his brother, John, who oversaw the project, chose a long, steep route. Most challenging was El Nariz del Diablo (the Devil’s Nose), where curving switchbacks had to be carved into the face of a mountain. These allow a train to ascend or descend for more than 800m by shunting backwards and forwards.
Work started in 1897. Few locals took jobs, so 4,000 Jamaicans were brought in. About
500 workers died of smallpox and other diseases. The line finally reached Quito on June 17 1908, reducing the journey time from five days to two.
This was a slapdash railway, with timber ties and wooden bridges rather than iron. Roadbeds crumbled and mudslides buried track. Harman denied the government its fair share of proceeds and, according to one account, put down as “railway operating expenses” everything from his yacht to household decorations.
Virtually destroyed by floods and landslides, the line reopened after a $245m reconstruction in 2013. A tourist train, the Tren Crucero, now travels it, hauled on some stretches by a steam engine. trenecuador.com/en/cruise-train ●
THE TRANSCONTINENTAL, UNITED STATES
It is impossible to underestimate the significance of the coming of the Transcontinental Railroad. It took almost six years to complete, cost more than $60m and employed a workforce of Scandinavian, Irish, Chinese, Mormons, and newly freed slaves from the southern states.
Completed 150 years ago this year, the construction was undertaken by two competing teams — one coming from the eastern city of Omaha under the banner of the Union Pacific Railroad and the other from Sacramento, California, flying the flag of the Central Pacific. Between them the teams laid 2,858km of track, finally meeting in May 1869 at Promontory Summit in Utah about 144km north of Salt Lake City.
In one fell swoop the cities on the eastern, Atlantic side of the country were connected by rail to those on the Pacific in the west, and the journey between New York and San Francisco and the gold-rich state of California, previously a perilous affair taking several months by oxdrawn wagon or ship around Cape Horn, had been cut to less than a week.
The railroad across the continent signalled the end of what had been known as the Frontier lands and sparked a massive influx into the hitherto uncharted territories of the “Wild West”. It united a nation sorely bruised by civil war and gave a much-needed shot of can-do confidence. It provided the stuff of legends and inspiration and brought trade, prosperity and opportunity to thousands — though not the Native American tribes, for whom the “Iron Horse” spelt the end of an ageold way of life. — Adrian Bridge
amtrak.com ●