Railway Empire by Burton Anthony; & Anthony Burton

Author:Burton, Anthony; & Anthony Burton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRANSPORTATION / Railroads / General
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books Limited
Published: 2018-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

The first task they faced was surveying, and headquarters was established at the entrance to the pass of Maltrata. This time they were given real protection in the form of a troop of cavalry and a company of infantry. By 1865 work was under way with thousands of South American Indian workers. They arrived with their entire families and looked after their own food and lodgings. On the line, the women and children filled baskets with earth, which the men then carried away. Each Friday night they all left for home and each Monday morning they were back again. At the height of the working period there were around ten thousand of them and Lloyd declared that ‘a score of British workmen would have given him more difficulty to control’. There were problems, however. Each month around £25,000 had to be brought as far as 300 miles through bandit country to pay the workers, and the railway company had no option but to set up their own private army to protect it. Compared with this, building a railway might have seemed easy. In fact the route was far from simple, with a descent from the mountains to 4000 feet at 212 feet per mile. He pushed on until 140 out of the 300-mile route was completed and another hundred miles was ready for track laying. Then politics and a financial crisis brought everything to a halt and Lloyd left Mexico, just in time to miss the revolution that swept away the French. He was probably disappointed, for his undimmed sense of adventure spurred him on to further work in South America.

He surveyed routes in Argentina and Brazil, the latter proving just as exciting as his escapades in Mexico. This time, however, the problems were rather more natural than man-made. He surveyed a vast amount of ground including a section along the River Iraby. It was fearsome country with jungle reaching to the water’s edge and no settlements for 260 miles. Previously two corps of engineers had been sent out but had achieved nothing. No food had got through to them; the jungle was too dense for hunting, and they were terrified of the native Indians. Lloyd sorted that out. He had stout canoes built and hacked regular portage tracks round the rapids so that a supply route could be maintained. The engineers welcomed the food supplies, but they would much rather have been told to go home. The river was never safe. A tropical storm turned it into a torrent, and at one time Lloyd had to abandon his hut even though it was built 30 feet above the waterline. Other surveyors had equally strenuous tasks, on the Matto Grosso and up the River Parana, which in places was six miles across. For two years they lived under canvas in a hostile environment, but the task was eventually completed. William Lloyd was only one of a number of engineers working in the Americas in equally appalling conditions – we know his story simply because he lived to a comfortable retirement during which he wrote his memoirs.

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