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The Railway Conquest of the World

Chapter 2: PREFACE
By Frederick Arthur Ambrose Talbot
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About This Book

The book surveys the global spread and engineering of railways, recounting the adventurous work of surveyors and builders and the technical and logistical challenges faced in constructing major lines. It describes tunnelling and bridge-building, earthworks, and mechanized construction methods, and profiles landmark undertakings such as transcontinental routes, mountain passes, desert and polar reclamation projects, and lines across oceans and difficult terrains. Chapters examine regional developments in North and South America, Africa, Australasia, Siberia and the Far East, and explore ambitious schemes and their operational consequences, illustrated with accounts of construction camps, equipment, and the feats of civil engineering that made international railway networks possible.

PREFACE

There is the unfathomable fascination of romance connected with the construction of great railways, though little is known of the beginning and the growth of the great trunk roads of the world; of the heavy tax which their construction imposed upon the ingenuity, skill and resource of their builders. Speeding along swiftly in a luxurious Pullman car over a road-bed as smooth as an asphalt pavement conveys no impression of the perils and dangers faced or of the infinite labour expended in the making of that steel highway. To-day the earth is girdled with some 700,000 miles of railways, and there are few countries in which the locomotive has not made its appearance.

This volume has been written with the express purpose of telling in a popular manner this story of romance. It is obviously impossible to deal with every great railway undertaking in the compass of a single volume; but those described may safely be considered representative, and they are the largest and most interesting enterprises between the two poles.

In the writing of this volume I have been assisted by innumerable friends who have been identified closely with the introduction of Stephenson’s invention into fresh fields of conquest. I am indebted especially to the following gentlemen: Messrs. Norman B. Dickson, M.INST.C.E.; A. M. Cleland, the Northern Pacific Railway Company; the late J. C. Meredith, chief engineer, the Florida East Coast Railway; A. L. Lawley; R. R. Gales, M.INST.C.E.; H. E. Gwyther, chief engineer, the Leopoldina Railway Company, Ltd.; Francis B. Clarke, president of the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway; William Hood, chief engineer, the Southern Pacific Company; F. A. Miller, the Chicago, Milwaukee and Puget Sound Railway; the I. R. Austrian Railway Ministry; W. Weston, the Denver, North-western and Pacific Railway Company; the Pennsylvania Steel Company; W. T. Robson, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company; the Cleveland Bridge and Engineering Company, and Frederic Coleman of Darlington; the Swiss Federal Railways; H. R. Charlton, the Grand Trunk Railway Company of Canada; the chief engineer, the New Zealand Government Railways; the Peruvian Corporation; the chief engineers of the New South Wales, South Australia and West Australia Government Railways; the Minister of Ways of Communication of the Russian Empire; the Trans-Andine Railway Company; the chief engineer, the Imperial Japanese Government Railways; J. J. Gywn, chief engineer, and S. K. Hooper, the Denver and Rio Grande Railway; G. J. Ray, chief engineer, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad; Virgil G. Bogue, vice-president and chief engineer, the Western Pacific Railway Company; and S. J. Ellison of the Great Northern Railway, U.S.A.

Frederick A. Talbot.

Hove,
September 29, 1911.