Of all the great discoveries of the Industrial Revolution, the railway was undoubtedly the most important. In a world without it, travelling even short distances has always been a feat. Until the early 19th century, people lived all their lives within the confines of their city or countryside, wherever they were born. Travelling outside these borders was too complicated and too expensive, at least for the vast majority of the population. Immobility thus became one of the main obstacles to economic and social development. The lack of rapid transport meant that people could starve to death, even though food was plentiful a few hundred kilometres away. Letters already travelled for weeks or months. News in the newspapers was published with terrible delay and events such as wars or other disasters were long out of date by the time they reached readers.
With the arrival of the railways, however, thinking and ideas about distances and time were turned upside down. The last vestiges of feudalism began to fall away, as people were now no longer tied to the land alone and could work far from home for a more or less regular wage. Thus the development of capitalism went hand in hand with the development of the railways.
The way we wage war has also changed. Armies could move faster because food and ammunition were delivered by rail, and battles could be fought somewhere far away if there was a railway to get there.
But the story of the railway is not just a story of technology and locomotives, because railways were often built in places where no one would think of building a railway today. They have been built in deserts and jungles, laying tracks over mountains, drilling tunnels under the sea. But those were different times, and they belong to history, and we can learn from it.
There are some railway lines that still inspire admiration or head-nodding, others that still exist and function today. Today, there are few countries that have not been touched by the railways in one way or another.
Because of sugar cane
Cuba was the first country in Latin America to have its own railway, although it was used for different purposes than in Europe or North America. In fact, when the price of sugar started to rise in the late 18th century, the Cuban economy was mainly based on sugar.
Transporting the sugar cane to the mills was expensive, as the Cuban roads were very bad and in the rainy season, from May to October, they were muddy and almost impassable. The sugar cane was to be transported quickly and cheaply by rail from the plantations to the mills and from there to the coast, where it would be loaded onto ships bound for Europe.
Although Cuba was a backward and poor country, in 1837, when the first train ran on its tracks, only six other countries in the world had their own railway. Plantation owners provided the funds for construction, and in 1834 the first 26-kilometre stretch between Havana on the coast and the inland town of Guines was built.
It was a brave feat, as it was a steep climb of 98 metres. Several bridges were built, the largest of which, crossing the Almendares River, required 200 support columns. The railway company used its own slaves for the construction, as well as Irish immigrants from America and labour from the Canary Islands.
Poorly fed and even worse housed, workers, unaccustomed to the tropical climate, were falling ill and dying en masse. When foreign Irish workers’ contracts expired and the railway administration refused to organise their return home, despite promises, they wandered the streets of Havana, drinking, fighting and causing disorder.
When the builders ran out of money, new investors stepped in and brought locomotives and drivers from England. The line was double-tracked and trains ran twice a day in both directions. The success of the railway convinced the investors to extend the line to Cardenas in 1840, and the railway network was then extended across the island. By 1852, 565 kilometres of railway had been built.
But unlike in Europe and America, where a bustling city sprang up around every railway crossing, this was not the case in Cuba. The railway was only used to transport sugar cane. “The ‘sugar barons’ were flush with money and, in order to put it to good use, they built more and more rail links. In 1868, Cuba boasted 1 288 kilometres of railway lines and had the densest railway network in the world in terms of population.
By the end of the 19th century, it already had an incredible 8000 kilometres of railway lines. Many of them were narrow, ineptly laid and poorly maintained, running only from the plantation to the first major railway crossing. It was dependence on the sugar cane trade that was responsible for their decline. Later, other means of transport appeared, sugar prices fell and most of the lines were closed.
From East to West
To many, Theodore Judah was a dreamer, a madman, but by no means a normal person. But it was he who dared to realise the dream of the American people that the West and the East should be linked together. Others had thought about it before him, but no one had taken it seriously.
Whatever the case, Judah managed to persuade the US Congress to pass a bill to build a railway line to connect the existing rail lines in the east of the country with California. In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act, the Pacific Railway Act, at a time when the country was already in civil war. This was a very courageous act given the uncertain outcome.
The companies that built the line have received financial support and also own a 16-kilometre strip of land along the line. Judah immediately went to California to see how the line would work through the Sierra Nevada, where peaks are over 4000 metres high in some places.
Of course, there was never enough money for the line, so Judah met potential investors in Sacramento. A group of the most astute and ultimately lucky men – all small tradesmen with ambition – decided to back what many considered a crazy project. Four of them formed the Central Pacific Railroad, which won the contract to build the line from California to the east of the country.
Like most brave men, Judas failed to see the fruits of his labour. He had a falling out with the four founders, who wanted to pocket as much money from the project as possible, including through fraud. On his way home to the East, he fell ill with a fever and died aged 37.
Meanwhile, the construction of the Central Pacific Railroad has encountered problems. Bad weather, snowdrifts and a lack of money have complicated matters. Gold prospecting and mining were much more profitable than laying track, so there was always a shortage of workers. Thousands of Chinese workers were imported because of the shortage of labour, and progress was slow, but in 1867 the most difficult part of the railway was completed, the railway across the Sierra Nevada at 2160 metres at Donner Pass.
Progress on the flat part of the course was much faster. When the Civil War ended in 1865, the Union Pacific Railroad won a concession for a second eastern section of the line, starting at Council Bluffs, Iowa, and construction progressed rapidly.
Like the Central Pacific, the Union Pacific has been a hotbed of scandal and corruption that has allowed its investors to enrich themselves unhindered. The management of both railway companies had one aim: to extract as much money as possible from the public purse by inflating prices and setting up straw companies. The directors and managers were usually the owners of the construction companies that built the line and charged inflated prices.
But building the line in the sparsely populated western areas was a very difficult task. They had to organise the work extremely well to cope with 10,000 workers working in near-desert conditions. They lived in camps which were moved forward in line with the construction of the line. These dwellings were spartanly furnished, but their only entertainment was the infamous ‘saloons’ and the piles of prostitutes. Fights, killings and mass murders and attacks on Indians were therefore the order of the day.
Railway workers responded to Indian attacks with force, ruthlessly exterminating Sioux and Cheyenne tribes in a veritable genocidal march. Where the Western and Eastern railways would meet to connect the two parts of the country was nowhere to be determined, leaving everything to the competitive zeal of the railway companies.
The two parts of the line met on 10 May 1868 in Utah, at Promontory Summit. The news instantly spread throughout the United States and caused mass excitement. Whereas it had previously taken months, or even half a year in bad weather, to travel between New York and San Francisco, risking one’s life in the process, it could now be done in a matter of days.
Despite corruption and complications, the line was completed in six years. Soon after, other railway lines were built across the continent. The next two lines were already operational in 1883; the Southern Pacific, which ran from Los Angeles, and the Northern Pacific, which terminated in Seattle. Then Canada took heart and built a line from Vancouver to Montreal.
Beds on wheels
When we hear the name George Pullman, we immediately think of sleeping cars that get us safely to our destination at night. In America, Pullman was called “the genius of beds on wheels”. It was almost inevitable that sleepers of one kind or another should first appear in America, where distances were greatest.
Various train companies have previously tried to offer overnight accommodation to their passengers on night journeys. Trains would stop at dusk at the nearest station, passengers would alight and spend the night in local hotels or inns, before continuing their journey by train in the morning. This, of course, increased the journey time considerably.
Around 1850, things started to improve and passengers were able to sleep on trains on simple beds made of planks, without bedding or privacy, all together in one carriage.
Only Pullman brought a radical change to night travel. Pullman’s upper bunk was attached to the ceiling of the carriage with ropes and hooks. When passengers got up in the morning, they simply pulled this bed up to the ceiling of the carriage, thus increasing their living space – unlike other manufacturers’ models where the beds were firmly fixed and got in the way when passengers were no longer asleep.
In the beginning, there were no private compartments at Pullman, but all 20 beds were in a single carriage. Candles provided light, a stove in the middle of the carriage provided modest warmth, and curtains offered some privacy. It was not until 1863 that Pullman decided to add the luxury of sleeping compartments with coupés to attract the rich and famous to travel at night. His team sold tickets for these beds themselves, which were 50 cents more expensive than ordinary beds.
In 1867, Pullman also offered the market a combination of a sleeper and a dining corner in the corner of the carriage. This later evolved into the stand-alone Pullman Restoration wagon.
Across Siberia
When Princess Maria of Volkon left Moscow to join her husband in exile, who was involved in an attempted coup in December 1825, it took her 23 days to see the church in Irkutsk. For those days, this journey was extremely fast, as she travelled day and night, and in winter. In summer, the roads were practically impassable because of mud and floods, and the journey to Irkutsk could take up to nine months.
There were always many ideas about how to build a line to Vladivostok, 9,250 kilometres away on the Pacific Ocean, and thus secure control over a vast territory, but it was only the Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte who convinced Tsar Alexander III of the necessity of this link. He sent his son, the later Tsar Nicholas II, to Vladivostok, where on 31 May 1891 he planted a shovel in the ground and filled the first wheelbarrow with earth for the embankment, which was later called the Usuri line.
And the difficulties faced by the builders of the Trans-Siberian line could not have been greater. There were no great mountains on the route, no American deserts, but the sheer length, the extreme weather conditions and the shortage of workers posed a major challenge. Some of the track had already been laid in Europe, but there were still 7240 kilometres of new track to be laid.
The impenetrable steppe also lacked the right building materials to consolidate the track and everything had to be brought in from very far away, often by river. Even timber had to be imported from western Russia, as the local timber was not suitable for construction. They also needed a very large number of steel supports to cross the wide Siberian rivers.
Lake Baikal also posed a major problem due to the steep cliffs on the southern shore, as it would have been too much of a detour to run the line along the northern shore of the lake. The line itself was divided into three parts for structural reasons; the western part, the Central Siberian part and the eastern part.
Work started in the west near Chelyabinsk, where the line had already been built. It was estimated that around 80,000 workers would be needed to build the first two sections, so workers were recruited not only from western Russia, but also from Persia, Turkey and even Italy. The work was hard but well paid.
The Central Siberian section of the line was started in 1893, and there was such a shortage of workers that even prisoners who had been deported to Siberia were brought in as labour. They tried to be good workers, and their prison sentences were reduced by one year for eight months of work on the line.
Around 2% of workers died on the job, mainly due to dangerous bridge construction. Thus, two sections of the line to Irkutsk were completed as early as 1899.
The eastern part proved to be the most difficult. Here Witte decided on a fateful change of plan. The route would now also run through Manchuria and no longer only through Russian territory. China agreed to build it, but it was a politically risky decision, as the Russo-Japanese War broke out shortly after the completion of this part of the line in 1904.
After the Chinese Eastern Railway was completed in 1901, only a 180-kilometre stretch along the southern shore of Lake Baikal remained unbuilt. This was the most difficult section, as the line had to be carved out of live rock. Until it was built in 1905, eastbound passengers had to change to a ferry that took them across the lake, or to a sleigh in winter.
But it took until 1916 for an additional line of the Amur Railway to be built, so that it was possible to travel from Moscow to Vladivostok exclusively on Russian territory.
Over the mountains to the south
Many of Europe’s first railways connected major cities to ports. But in the middle of the European continent, the Alpine mountains were a major obstacle to the railways. The first railway to climb over the Alps crossed the Semmering Pass, connecting the capital of the Austrian Empire with the port of Trieste. Some argued for a route across the Hungarian plain, but the Duke of Austria insisted that the railway must go through Semmering and commissioned the engineer Karl von Ghega to build it.
He didn’t wait and immediately travelled to America to learn about construction methods over hilly terrain. The Semmering Pass was a mountain pass over which travellers had been travelling on foot, on horseback and in carriages since the Middle Ages.
Although it was one of the lower Alpine passes, it still climbed to 900 metres. The project was strongly supported by the new Emperor Franz Joseph, who was aware of the need to link the different provinces of the empire together and to provide some public works to alleviate the growing unemployment during the economic recession that followed the turbulent revolutionary years.
Ghega chose a route that started at Gloggnizt and after 21 kilometres reached Mürzzuschlag. Semmering was thus overcome, but for this short distance 14 tunnels, 16 viaducts and more than 100 stone bridges had to be built. The line was very steep for those days and required special locomotives. All the work had to be done by hand, using large quantities of gunpowder.
The fact that 700 workers died during the construction of the plant shows how difficult and dangerous the work was. The first freight train ran on the line in 1853, and a passenger train a few months later. In 1857, the railway link between Vienna and Trieste via Ljubljana was completed. The construction costs were four times higher than planned.
After Semmering, other railway lines crossed the Alps, but this one underground. One such line was the Gotthard Tunnel, 15 kilometres long. Construction between 1871 and 1881 proceeded rapidly, as dynamite, a new explosive invented by Alfred Nobel in 1867, was now used instead of gunpowder for blasting.
However, the work has not been without fatalities. Around 200 workers died, from water intrusion, falling rocks and other accidents. Even the chief engineer, Louis Favre, did not live to see the completion of the tunnel, as the stress sent him to the other side of the world with a heart attack.
The Gotthard Tunnel, opened in 1881, was soon joined by other tunnels under the Alps, such as the Simplon in 1906 and the Lötschberg shortly before the outbreak of World War I.
The road to the exotic
If we can’t name all the important railway lines in Europe, everyone knows about the Orient Express. Some are disappointed to learn that no murder has taken place on it, as Agatha Christie described in her book. However, the Orient Express was the most exciting and exotic train in the world. It took passengers all over Europe to places that were almost unknown to Western Europeans.
The train service was almost a wonder of the world at the time, and the Orient Express has only one tireless person to thank for all its splendour, the Belgian Georges Nagelmackers. He was the founder of the Companie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, which offered passengers luxurious compartments to sleep and stay in, instead of sleeping cars without partitions like the early Pullman.
But Nagelmackers’ advantage was not in the coupes he offered passengers, but in the choice of routes. He wanted a “borderless” Europe that could be crossed quickly and without obstacles. He had already successfully introduced a train service from Ostend in Belgium to Brindisi in Italy, 1 600 kilometres away.
He quickly saw that the East and the Balkans were now opening up and the power of the Turkish Empire was weakening, and was convinced that a link to Istanbul would be profitable. But the route from Paris to Istanbul was 2989 kilometres long and it was clear that cooperation with the railway administrations of six foreign countries would not be easy. But he was a skilful negotiator and managed to ensure that each country through which the Orient Express would pass would have suitable locomotives, that the distance between the two lines would always be the same and that customs formalities would be simple.
When the Orient Express left the Gare de l’Orient in Paris on its maiden voyage on 4 October 1883, it was packed with celebrities and journalists who would arrive in Istanbul in three and a half days. The newspapers declared that they had never experienced such comfort on a train. The train had a smoking room, a ladies’ lounge, a library, and each compartment had a small Louis XIV-style salon.
In the evenings, the pile could be converted into a bedroom. Nagelmackers was very precise and insisted on details. Thus, on certain occasions, the employees on the train had to be dressed like Louis XIV’s lackeys, with silk trousers and shoes with large buckles.
The first train is welcomed at stations in the main cities by brass bands and local authorities. There were some inconveniences crossing the Danube at the crossing from Romania to Bulgaria, as the route over the bridge was not yet complete and the river had to be forded. The train journey ended in Varna, from where they travelled by boat to Istanbul, as the Turks had not yet built their part of the line. The Orient Express took 82 hours to reach Istanbul and was met on arrival by the Sultan himself and his entourage.
It took another six years before it was possible to travel by train as far as Istanbul. The journey now took exactly three days, from 19.30 on the first day to 17.35 on the last. The service on the train was excellent and this attracted many passengers. The Orient Express did not, of course, run during the First World War, but immediately after the end of the war a new line was opened in 1918 under the name of the Simplon-Orient Express. This is also where the murder described by Agatha Christie in her story is said to have taken place. At that time, the train ran from Paris further south, via Milan, Venice and Trieste.
World War II meant the end of the Simplon-Orient Express, although the German company Mitropa continued to run trains through the Balkans until the Partisans destroyed the line.
Although no murders were recorded on the Orient Express, the chronicles record a mysterious death when an American agent fell from the train at the height of the Cold War. Incidentally, after the war, passengers often asked the conductors to hire them prostitutes, and there was also some espionage as the Orient Express linked two opposing political blocs.
After 1962, the Orient Express only operated individual sections of the former route, and the connection to Istanbul was discontinued in 1977.
Crossing Africa’s potholes
It was the most ambitious, the most incredible and the most pointless railway project ever conceived, and it failed. There was nothing to do with a direct rail link between Cairo and the Cape of Good Nada in southern Africa. The line was supposed to connect almost all the British colonies in Africa. The idea of this rail link, whose godfather was Cecil Rhodes, was a microcosm of the various desires of the British Empire in the late Victorian era, from financial greed and military needs to private megalomania.
Whether the project is considered a failure or a partial success, it is fair to say that the hundreds of kilometres of lines built then are still important to the African economy today. The existing line connects separate railway lines from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and its by-product has been the boom of a large number of new towns and settlements along or near the line.
Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, was initially only a “lion infested area”, while Gaberone in Botswana was “a neglected waterhole at the end of the Kalahari Desert”.
The North-South Africa rail link was first proposed by the well-known explorer Stanley, but it was really taken up by the ambitious Rhodes, a political megalomaniac who made his fortune in the diamond trade.
He was convinced that the flat part of the line should be built quickly and the bridges and viaducts should be dealt with later. The first part of the line was built in southern Africa in the British Cape Colony in 1863, still as a narrow gauge line to save money, and it was only when the diamond rush broke out in Kimberley, 965 kilometres to the north, that Rhodes became more ambitious.
In 1890, he became First Minister of the Cape Colony and was already planning to be able to lay railways north of the Zambezi River and continue towards the Nile Valley. Construction of the line progressed rapidly and reached Bulawayo in 1879. But then things started to get complicated, as everyone agreed that it was risky to go ahead with the construction, as it had to cross both swamp and forest areas.
In the first two years, half of the workers died and almost all of the Indian workers, who were even less resistant to tropical diseases. But Rhodes and his chief engineer Pauling persevered, and the first train reached the Rhodesian border in early 1898. It bore the inscription ‘Soon we will be in Cairo’.
In the north of Egypt, too, construction has progressed rapidly. There, a railway line had existed since 1850, but due to financial and political problems it was not built until Sudan. Then something happened that no one expected. In 1898, British General Herbert Kitchener decided to take Khartoum in Sudan, which had been held for 15 years by fanatical Muslims, led by the religious leader Mahdi.
But to reach Sudan, Kitchener needed a railway to transport his troops from Wadi Halfa on the Nile to Sudan. Kitchener did not want to risk the dangerous navigation of a part of the Nile that would have taken him to Sudan, but was full of dangerous rapids. A railway to Abu Hamed would have cut 600 kilometres off his journey.
The new line reached the vicinity of Khartoum nine months later, Kitchener captured the city and defeated the Mahdi’s supporters at the Battle of Omdurman. The new line greatly increased the likelihood of a rail link from Cairo to Capetown. Also in the south, the line was rapidly approaching the Zambezi River, reaching it in 1904. Soon the Zambezi Express was running regular service from Capetown northwards.
The seemingly impossible task of building a 200-metre-long bridge over Victoria Falls has been taken up in England. In five months, they built the bridge to the specifications they were given, and brought it by sea, piece by piece, to the heart of Africa.
To access Northern Rhodesia, which was very rich in metals, an even longer bridge than the one that crossed Victoria Falls had to be built. This too was built in England in just five months and laid across the Kafue River in 1906. But by then Cecil Rhodes had been dead for four years.
His successor, Robert Williams, clearly lacked imperial ambition. The line northwards was built at a slower pace, and in 1909 the line even left British-controlled territory for the ore- and other resource-rich Katanga in the Belgian Congo to avoid German-controlled Tanganyika. After the end of the First World War, the idea of an imperial rail link from south to north was finally abandoned.
Always Stay Up to Date
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Quickly into the summer chill
There are many reasons to build a railway; from transporting goods and passengers to connecting cities, villages and nations, but India’s famous mountain railway was built for a completely different reason. British colonialists did not like the hot and sultry summers of India, they wanted the pleasant coolness of the foothills of the Himalayas.
The railway became an extremely important part of the Indian subcontinent as soon as it was built in 1853. It was used by both the British and the natives, albeit usually in separate carriages or trains. Summer departures to the cooler regions at the foot of the mountains had long been a custom among colonialists, but the journey there was long and arduous. For some time, therefore, a mountain railway had been planned to overcome the steep gradients, but it was necessary to wait for some technical solutions.
India’s first and still most famous mountain railway is the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, or simply the DHR, which connects Diliguri in the foothills of the Himalayas with Darjeeling, at an altitude of 2045 metres. The eighty-eight kilometre-long link was started in 1879, just a month after the railway to Diliguri was also built.
A winding railway with many sharp curves, it climbs gently at the beginning, then becomes steeper in the second half, so steep and winding that in one place it has been dubbed “the point of agony”. Surprisingly, the DHR was profitable from the start. It took passengers and tourists in one direction, who quickly discovered that the climate was more pleasant in the hills than in the sultry plains, and it took large bales of tea leaves down. Darjeeling tea is still widely recognised today.
Today, the DHR is protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and continues to carry both passengers and tourists. In good weather, Mount Everest can be seen in the distance from the train.
The other important Indian mountain railway was the Kalka-Simla Line, which was even more important to the British than the DHR. It had been in use since 1906. Simla was the summer residence of British officers, where lavish balls and receptions were held. But getting there was a painful journey without the railway, and passengers had to put up with a four-day journey from the plains of India to Simla.
In 1863, Simla also became the official summer capital of India, and the entire government, including the military high command, moved there from Calcutta. The construction of the line to Simla was very challenging, with 806 bridges to cross major and minor rivers.
Fighting the railways
The First World War showed how strategically important railways can be. At the start of hostilities, trains transported soldiers and equipment to the nearest station near the fighting, soldiers disembarked, loaded ammunition and other equipment, and then moved on, often kilometres away, to the firing tunnels. Soon, however, the fronts stabilised and commanders knew they were in for a protracted war of position.
So they thought it would make sense to build a narrow-gauge railway to the firing trenches to transport troops and equipment. Such railways were easy to build, move and repair. That is why small steam locomotives with eight wheels, ready to negotiate sharp curves, appeared on all the fronts of the First World War. These journeys were usually made at dusk or at night, and the only illumination on the train was a small hand-held torch from the driver, who kept a watchful eye on the track to see if another train with wounded men was approaching from the other side.
These small steam locomotives always had to have enough water, and the driver often found it in a water-filled hole caused by a grenade shell. The maximum weight that could be carried by such a composition of small carriages was 27 tonnes, so they sometimes had to make ten or more journeys before emptying a troop train. The record load carried by such locomotives in one night in 1915 was, according to the calculations of an English orderly, 1200 tonnes. But to do this, they had to make as many as 150 journeys in several trains.
Towards the end of the war, cannons were also loaded onto such trains. When these fired a few salvos, the train moved elsewhere to prevent the enemy from discovering its position.
In the Middle East, the situation was different. There were no major offensives, but the Ottoman Empire was worried that the Arab tribes might revolt and tear the empire apart. The need to bring troops and equipment quickly into threatened areas was again apparent.
Railways were a late arrival in the Middle East, with only a few isolated lines operating at the end of the 19th century. But strategic interests prevailed and Istanbul decided to build a railway that would reach deep into the Hedjaz desert, where Saudi Arabia is today. This line connecting Damascus to Medina was then made famous and world-famous by the exploits of Lawrence of Arabia.
Sultan Abdulhamid II was a conservative ruler who must have seen the Ottoman Empire shrink by a fifth after he took power in 1876, losing almost all its European territories. The loss of the Arabian Peninsula would have been fatal for the empire. A railway reaching deep into it would have consolidated his position as Caliph, the leader of all Muslims, and at the same time made it possible to transport pilgrims to Mecca quickly and cheaply.
The route would cover a distance of 1,600 kilometres, linking Damascus in Syria and Medina in the Arabian Peninsula. Work began in 1900 and was supervised by the German engineer Heinrich Meissner. The workers – mostly conscripts – worked in impossible conditions and often resisted. So Meissner hired workers in Belgium, France and, most of all, Germany. Christians were not allowed to work on the last part of the line, which was already approaching the holy places for Muslims, but by then there were enough trained Turkish engineers and workers.
Everyone knew that the construction of the line had to be approached with caution. First, a reconnaissance party set off into the desert on camels, accompanied by an armed company of soldiers to protect it from hostile Arab tribes. Only then were plans made for the route. The most important work on the route was carried out by a whole division of soldiers, and despite the desperate conditions, progress was made rapidly.
The biggest problem was the lack of water, so water tanks were set up in some sections. Another problem was the sand dunes on which the track was laid, as the wind was constantly blowing sand away from under the tracks and they had to be consolidated with stones and clay.
The irony of fate was the lack of fuel for the locomotive. Turkish coal was too smoky, so it was imported from Wales. What they hadn’t thought about was the oil reserves beneath the surface of the Arabian Peninsula.
Workers lived in tents that were moved as the line progressed. The lack of vegetables and fruit resulted in scurvy, and cholera outbreaks, which caused panic among workers and the abandonment of work sites, were not uncommon. The original intention to extend the line to Mecca had to be abandoned in the face of opposition from hostile Arab tribes, so that the inauguration of the line took place in Medina on 1 September 1908, but the Sultan did not attend.
The Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany’s side in 1914, and it was to be expected that the British would encourage the Arabs to resist the Turks. The most obvious target of this revolt was, of course, the railway at Hedjaz, which had been attacked for the first time in 1916. But the Arabs needed explosives and better equipment for this feat, and this is where T.E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia, came into the picture.
He did clerical work in Cairo, but managed to persuade his superiors to send him across the Suez Canal to help the rebel Arabs. He launched several attacks on the line with them, finally taking control of it and, together with Arab troops, began to move northwards towards Damascus. This meant that the Turkish troops in Medina were cut off from the rest of the Turkish forces and only surrendered in January 1919.
At the end of the war, the line was demolished in some places, but parts, such as the stretches between Damascus and Amman and Damascus and Haifa, were still in use. Today, only two sections are in use, the original one from Damascus to Amman and the newer one from the phosphate mines at Maana to the Gulf of Aqaba.
Burmese route
Existing railway lines also played an important role in World War II. New longer lines were not built in wartime conditions, except for one, the infamously named “Death Line”. In February 1942, the Japanese invaded Singapore, a major British base in South Asia, capturing some 80,000 British, Indian and Australian troops. They were sent along with other prisoners to build a railway line linking Siam and Burma, enabling the Japanese to advance rapidly towards India.
There were no proper roads, let alone rail links, between Siam and Burma, so all the troops and equipment had to be transported by sea, where they were overrun by Allied submarines and battleships. So building a 483-kilometre stretch of railway was an understandable decision.
The route of the railway crossed mountainous areas and tropical rainforest, and was built by 300,000 forced labourers, mostly locals, including 60,000 prisoners of war. Construction started simultaneously in June 1942 from both sides; the Burmese side in Thanbyuzayat and the Siamese side in Nong Pladuk.
A railway linking the two countries was dreamt of as early as the 19th century, but everyone changed their minds when they saw the territory it would have to be built on. From the plains of Siam, the landscape rises into a 1500-metre-high mountain range, with gorges, chasms and raging rivers, and then descends into a tropical forest full of tigers, cobras and scorpions, where people suffer from cholera and chills.
But the Japanese did not recognise the obstacles and the work began. There was no mechanisation, everything had to be built with hands, picks, hoes and shovels. All the bridges were made of teak wood cut in the jungle. The depletion of the human body resulted in many diseases. Most of the captives contracted malaria and were given tropical herpes, which festered and smelled desperately.
A small abrasion on a sharp bamboo, a slip on a sharp rock, and the result was a wound that often didn’t heal, spread and turned into a deep hole in a few days. In less than two weeks, the man could have been dead.
Monsoon rains flooded camps, broke down bridges, and landslides swept away everything that had been made. But the Japanese did not give up, they had to work even in the worst downpour.
In 1943, a quarter of a million locals worked on the line alongside the prisoners, and in fact they were worse off than the prisoners. They had no work habits and no discipline. All this led to a catastrophe, to cholera. Every Japanese division had a special epidemic prevention unit with water purification equipment, and the soldiers were vaccinated against cholera several times a year. That is why they had few cholera casualties during the construction of the line.
The prisoners knew that by building the line, they were helping the Japanese military plans. So sometimes they worked slowly, sometimes they put a broken bolt in the rail or sometimes the ground underneath it was poorly consolidated. But what good did it do them? The Japanese refused to hear of any deviation from the deadlines and pushed harder.
On 16 October 1943, the two parts of the Siam-Burma line merged at Konkuita. The Burma section was 152 kilometres long, the Siam section 263 kilometres. On that day, the Japanese brought many distinguished guests to the opening ceremony, including a military brass band. All along the route, trains were running with girls from brothels, stopping at camps where Japanese soldiers were already waiting with condoms in their hands.
Before the line was finished, Japanese soldiers were already on their way to the front, and trains were returning full of wounded. At least 10,000 Allied prisoners died during construction, and at least half of the local population. After the war, parts of the line were abandoned, the tracks were stolen by scoundrels and the line became overgrown. It has never been restored, so that today it is only seen by tourists who remember the film The Bridge on the River Kwai.
Get to your destination faster
In the 1960s, rail was seemingly a losing battle with cars and planes. Many were convinced that the rails were a relic of a bygone era and that soon only nostalgics and those who could not afford another way of travelling would travel by rail. Only a radical modernisation of rail travel could save the railways.
It was the Japanese who took the initiative this time and managed to set new standards for human travel with their “Shinkansen”. Japan’s geography and the way it was settled undoubtedly contributed a great deal to the idea of a high-speed train, which would stop at only a few stations and would shorten journeys considerably. Japan is made up of four main islands, but only a fifth of its surface is inhabited. This means that most of its 126 million people live close together. It was this dense population that was the real condition for the development of high-speed trains.
Japan was a late adopter of the railways, when the Meiji dynasty decided to modernise the country. The first railway, only 29 kilometres long, connected Tokyo and Yokohama in 1872, and the Japanese welcomed the innovation with enthusiasm. By 1930, the Tokaido Line was already connecting most major cities, such as Nagoya, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe, and by 1945, 26,000 kilometres of railway lines were in use.
After the war, it took Japan a few years to recover and start thinking about a faster mode of transport that could compete with both cars and planes over distances of up to 800 kilometres.
It was decided that the new high-speed line would use electricity as a means of propulsion. By today’s standards, the shinkassen was still slow to start with. The distance from Tokyo to Osaka, which had previously taken a passenger 6 hours and 40 minutes, took just 4 hours in 1964, when the Olympic Games began.
Shinkingen also had a major impact on business habits, as daily business trips between the two cities were now possible. In just three years, 100 million Japanese travelled by train.
At the beginning, there were a few problems to be solved. When the train entered the tunnel, the pressure was very hard on passengers’ ears and the airflow was lifting water in the toilets. In the end, it was decided to run the train under air pressure, which was extremely expensive but successful. Nevertheless, there was a lot of opposition when Japanese railways wanted to extend the high-speed train network. Today, the network is 3 540 kilometres long.
It took a few years for other countries to adopt this way of travelling, as some technical improvements have now made it possible to increase the speed of existing trains. But using existing railway lines, which were also used by slow trains, did not allow a significant increase in speed.
France was the first to do so, setting the standard for all subsequent high-speed trains with its high-speed train “Train a Grande Vitesse” (TGV). The French realised that the main Paris-Lyon rail link was at the end of its capacity and decided to lay a new line dedicated solely to TGV trains. Thus, TGV trains ran separately from other trains, using and sharing the existing tracks only on the city’s inbound routes.
The Paris-Lyon line was completed in 1981 and its train was then speeding towards its destination at a then unimaginable 270 km/h. More lines were subsequently opened from Paris, so that today there are 2,647 kilometres of high-speed lines in use in France.
The Frncozos were followed by the Spanish with the “Alta Velocidad Espanola” (AVE), a high-speed link between Madrid and Seville, completed for the Spanish Expo 92.
The French experience was then applied by the Germans, who used a different model, as they did not build new lines and their “Intercity Express” (ICE) ran partly on longer sections prepared for high-speed trains and partly on existing lines.
Since 2000, high-speed trains have also been running in East Asia. In South Korea, the Seoul-Busan Korea Train Express ran in 2004, and on the west coast of Taiwan, a high-speed train linked Taipei with Kaohsiung using the shinkansen technique.
There on the roof of the world
But China has the largest network of high-speed trains and they form the backbone of the country’s transport infrastructure. China’s first railway, in 1876, was just 16 kilometres long, linking Shanghai to the nearby port of Woosung. The Chinese authorities were reluctant to allow the laying of the tracks, knowing that it would deprive the thousands of residents working as porters of their livelihood. Nor had China forgotten the defeats of the Opium Wars, when foreigners began to introduce new innovations, such as the railway, into the traditional life of the people.
The line had only been in use for a year when the Chinese provincial governor ordered it to be dismantled and shipped to Taiwan. It was only after Mao Tse-tung came to power in 1949 that China started to invest in its rail network, and by the end of the 20th century most of the country was more or less covered by rail. In 2001, only Tibet was still unreached by any railway line.
This hurt the Party, which wanted to use the rail link to secure control over restive Tibet. And they set about building it. To start with, they built an 800-kilometre link to Golmund, the traditional starting point towards Tibet.
But to build the line to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, it was necessary to lay tracks through permafrost, land that had been frozen for thousands of years. This did not stop the Chinese, who sent 100 000 workers to work in the most difficult conditions. Today, the Qinghai-Tibet Line high-speed train boasts the highest pass crossed by a railway line, the Tanggula Pass, at 5 072 metres. The Tanggula railway station is the highest in the world, as is the Fenhuoshan tunnel at 4095 metres.
Up to eight passenger trains can travel the route each day in both directions, and due to the thin air in Tibet, the train has a special ventilation system and each seat is equipped with its own oxygen inhaler. The windows are protected from ultraviolet rays and passengers must show a special health certificate when boarding the train in Golmund if they are travelling to Lhasa. Of course, there is always a doctor on board just in case.
China then continued to expand its high-speed train network. Some existing lines have been upgraded and most are completely new. In October 2010, China opened its fifteenth high-speed line, bringing the total number of high-speed lines to 8000 kilometres. Today, nearly 2 billion passengers travel on China’s high-speed trains.
