TWO
BUILDING FOR INDIA
THE DIFFICULTIES FACED by Faviell in Bombay and his counterparts on the East Indian Railway would be repeated on other pioneering railways, though gradually the British engineers and their Indian workforces would learn from errors on the inaugural lines. Some of the other early lines, however, faced obstacles that were far greater than those encountered by the initial two railways in terms of the topography, as mountain ranges had to be crossed and huge rivers forded.
The decision to continue with Dalhousie’s vision of creating a nationwide network was effectively made by default. The ‘experimental lines’ had, despite their name, been a way of getting the process of building a network started, given that railway construction was taking off in so many other countries of the world. First, though, the contracts had to be allocated and signed. It was initially unclear whether the generous arrangements of the guarantee by the government of a 5 per cent return for investors would become the norm. However, Dalhousie was aware that the Government of India did not have the resources to build railways and that the guarantee was necessary in order to attract investors from the UK. Influenced by the fact that the railways in France were being built under a similar guarantee system, and were, in fact, paying out a better rate of return to investors than their British counterparts, Dalhousie had recommended in his second minute that the guarantee system should be applied to all future railways at the rate of 4.5 or 5 per cent, depending on the prevailing bank rate.
It was in fact a very modern and successful arrangement which would be known today as a Public–Private Partnership. The Government of India provided the land (for free) while the companies supplied capital and labour. This arrangement was in sharp contrast to the process of railway construction in the UK at the time, whereby the private companies had total control of their railways other than having to conform to basic safety rules and provide a cheap daily train on every route. In India, the private companies built the lines and ran them, but were closely supervised at every stage by the Indian government, which was able to intervene in virtually every aspect apart from selection of staff. Each company had a government-appointed director on its board who was able to veto any decisions that ran counter to the Government of India’s policy. Consequently, as J. N. Westwood, the author of a short history of Indian railways, summarizes it, ‘the Government approved or specified the routes, set standards of construction … approved the amount and type of rolling stock, approved passenger and freight tariffs, determined train services, supervised expenditure and maintenance standards, and checked the accounts …’1
That is quite a list. The railways were, in effect, controlled by government while the railway companies, which had ninety-nine-year leases (with possible break points at twenty-five or fifty years), were more like the franchisees in the current British system than genuine independent organizations. One illustration of the intertwined relationship between government and the companies was that in years when the companies made profits greater than the 5 per cent rate of return, the surplus was shared equally between the two parties. Therefore, right from the beginning, in contrast to the situation back in the UK, ‘the detailed involvement of government was one of the distinctive features of railway building and railway operation in India’.2 Moreover, as the railways expanded and the need for them became more apparent, the Government of India exercised ever greater control over all aspects of railway activity. Since the government itself was at times a mere conduit for London’s requirements, there ‘were few opportunities for the ruled to influence the formulation and execution of railway policy’.3 In short, London determined railway policy. Inevitably an extensive, and indeed expensive, bureaucracy grew up to service and police the arrangements needed to manage such huge contracts. The British government was involved at every level in great detail: ‘Decisions made in London or Calcutta affected the conduct of work at a given construction site from the number of people employed to the tools used or to the degree of danger involved.’4
The growth of the railways coincided with the takeover by the Crown, in 1858, of the administration of the subcontinent from the East India Company and of the expansion of the civil service and its bureaucracy, which grew up largely as a way of extracting tax from the Indian people. Now, the railways gave it another important function, overseeing the expenditure of millions of pounds of investors’ money that was backed by government guarantee. The railways, in other words, can claim responsibility for creating a large part of the infamous Indian bureaucratic system.
Once the arrangements for the guaranteed rate of return were in place, there was no shortage of investors and something of a mini-construction boom soon took hold across the subcontinent. The first railway in the south was soon under way. The Madras Railway Company had been formed in London as early as July 1845 with the idea of building a line from Madras to Arcot. After much delay over contracts and financing, construction began in June 1853 and the first sixty-four miles of line, built on easy terrain, opened in 1856 and stretched from coast to coast five years later. By then, work was also well underway on the first tracks laid by the Great Southern Railway between the east-coast port of Negapatam and the prosperous inland centre of Trichinopoly. The seventy-eight-mile line opened in 1862 and would later connect with the Madras Railway.
Other large companies emerged to build the lines set out in Dalhousie’s plan in the Punjab (the Sind, Punjab & Delhi Railway, which emerged from four separate undertakings) and northwards from Bombay (the Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway). As we saw in the last chapter, the line to Thana was extended to Kalyan, and then work started on extending it to Poona.
Overall, eight companies, all created by UK investors, built lines in this first period of Indian railway construction and all benefited from the guarantee system which gave investors a generous rate of return. Their first task on any project was to find contractors. While some, such as the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, chose big British contractors, others, like the Madras Railway, effectively did the work in-house by employing their own engineers. There were problems with both systems. The big British firms tended to charge excessively and make too much use of unsuitable labour from the UK, while the local contractors tended to be undercapitalized. Big British contractors like Thomas Brassey’s company, the most celebrated in the business, which had worked extensively in European countries as far apart as Spain and Norway, were courted but were not always willing to undertake the work in such unfamiliar surroundings. Brassey had refused the contract to build the initial section of the East Indian Railway but later won several others, such as the 112 miles between Calcutta and Kushtia (now in Bangladesh) for the East Bengal Railway and parts of the Delhi and East Indian railways. Despite having three illustrious partners for the Kushtia line contract, including Sir Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition, Brassey lost money on the contract because it was a fixed-price deal and costs, notably for labour, proved to be higher than expected.
In contrast, rather than allocating the work to a single big contractor, the East Indian Railway divided up its route into short sections and granted them to small local and British contractors. However, most got into difficulties because the sheer scale of the task was beyond them, given that they were undercapitalized and the company refused to help them out. They were hampered, too, by external events such as the slow delivery of material from England, labour shortages and the failure of the government to obtain the land quickly enough for them to begin work on time.
The most challenging of these early contracts was undoubtedly the extension towards Poona by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. The railway’s promoters had always envisaged extending the line eastwards but this involved the challenge of crossing the Western Ghats, the mountain range running inland parallel to much of India’s west coast. Scaling these mountains with a railway had long been seen as a major, possibly insuperable, barrier in connecting Bombay with the Deccan plateau and the rest of India. The concerns about the difficulty were not misplaced and, indeed, scaling the ghats was, according to Ian J. Kerr, ‘among the greatest feats of 19th century engineering’,5 quite an accolade given the fact that around 500,000 miles of track were built worldwide in the 1800s.
The assumption had always been for the railway to go over both the Thal and Bhor Ghats, but in 1854 a suggestion was made to Dalhousie that going through the Taptee valley would be easier. Dalhousie instructed the railway company to investigate the options and Berkley undertook an enquiry on the government’s behalf. He found that taking the valley route would require around 150 miles of extra railway, which would mean journeys would be at least five hours longer for passengers. Going through the ghats, therefore, would not only permit a faster journey time, but would be cheaper to build, despite the difficulties. Berkley, ever the optimist, was confident that he had found a route through the Bhor Ghat which was shorter and involved less-steep gradients than previous suggestions. He and his team produced some 3,000 drawings and sketches for their survey that would form the basis of the eventual route.
There was much debate over the alignment, with the government initially rejecting Berkley’s route in favour of an alternative called ‘the cork screw line’, which had the advantage of only requiring a gradient of 1 in 60 rather than 1 in 37, a major difference for the rather underpowered locomotives of the period. However, this alternative line would have required far more tunnelling, tighter curves and three extra miles of railway, and consequently was opposed by the railway company. Eventually the matter was referred to Robert Stephenson back in London and he adjudicated in favour of Berkley’s alignment.
The challenge of building the railway over the ghats was on a completely different scale to anything previously encountered in India, and, with the exception of the Alpine routes, anywhere in the world. Although, at 2,000 feet, the railway reached a far more modest height than its European counterparts in the Alps, the sheer difficulty of construction was far greater given the local conditions, the heat and the problems of accessing the site. There were considerable distances to overcome, too, as the Thal Ghat required a railway of nine miles, and the climb over the Bhor was far longer at fifteen miles.
The task of crossing these mountains presented particular difficulties due to the lack of water and prevalence of disease, as well as the challenging climate. In a lecture given after the successful completion of the line, Berkley recounted how water was always short – except in the rainy season, when its very abundance caused problems: ‘The small springs [near the railway] … were not sufficient even to afford drinking water for the work people in the hot season.’6 Consequently, teams of carts hauled by bullocks – up to 1,500 were needed in the heat of the summer – were in constant use, bringing up water for the workforce. Berkley later devised a clever scheme to store water from the monsoon period by damming up one of the tunnels before the start of the rains to use as a reservoir.
The most perilous part of the construction process on both ghats was blasting the rock, with, at times, up to 6,000 explosions daily, and there were frequent accidents as a result of flying rock, often because of inadequate warnings and the carelessness of the workers. On some of the cliff faces, there were no footholds and a particularly perilous task was for a man to be lowered on ropes to drill the holes and insert the explosive. It was not uncommon for these workers to lose their foothold and tumble to their deaths in the ravine below, or for the men to fail to haul up the poor fellow dangling below in time to avoid the explosion, leading to the inevitable result. These accidents, according to a contractor’s agent, ‘had the effect of deterring his fellows altogether, from working for days’,7 but nevertheless little was done to establish even the most basic health and safety rules.
Falling rocks, slips and cave-ins were also an ever-present danger, but those worksite accidents were actually the least of the risks faced by the workforce. It was cholera and other diseases which exacted a terrible toll. The sheer size of the workforce, together with the high casualty rate, ensured the railway had an unprecedented number of deaths for such a project. As soon as work started in 1856, 10,000 people were taken on at the Bhor Ghat alone and this reached a peak of 42,000 in January 1861, more than were ever employed on, for example, the Suez Canal, constructed almost simultaneously. Kerr estimates that if numbers working on the Thal and Bhor Ghats, as well as the sections of line leading up to them, are taken into account, the total workforce may have reached a remarkable 100,000 at its peak. The difficulty of recruiting such an enormous number of workers was compounded by the fact that the great majority were sent home during the four months of the wet season when conditions made most work, other than tunnelling, impossible to undertake.
Not surprisingly, having such a vast army of temporary workers ‘bred violence and lawlessness’8 as the mix of low-caste Indians, often from very deprived backgrounds, and a bunch of rather unprepossessing and nakedly racist European overseers proved to be toxic. The few permanent inhabitants of the ghats, like residents anywhere near railway construction sites, were wary of the huge influx of temporary workers and frequently complained to the railway company about thefts and violence.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the attempts to recruit large numbers of experienced British navvies were soon abandoned as the men could not cope with the tropical climate. While a few stayed on as overseers, and experienced engineers were brought over from Britain, the number of Europeans on the railway worksites represented a tiny proportion of the total workforce. One estimate is that at the height of the 1860s boom when, typically, a quarter of a million men were building around 1,000 miles of line throughout India, a mere 500 British engineers were organizing and supervising the work.
Recruiting and mobilizing the massive workforce was in itself a considerable task, since public undertakings on this scale were virtually unknown on the subcontinent (apart from the odd palace or temple). As there was insufficient labour locally, messengers were sent out to distant towns, some travelling as far as Lucknow more than 800 miles away, to recruit workers through local gangers. Interestingly, Berkley, in his lecture, noted that ‘low caste natives who eat flesh and drink spirits’ were the best for the heavy labouring tasks, while ‘the higher castes were better at the skilled jobs such as bricklaying, carpentry or masonry’.9 The workforce was by no means only male. On the contrary, the men tended to bring along their wives and children, as any family member above the age of ten would be taken on.
The death rate from disease on the ghats project was greater than on subsequent projects because of the primitive conditions, the hostile environment of the jungle and the absence of any concern from the British about the fate of the Indian workers. Cholera was particularly rife because of the shortage of safe water due to the lack of any form of sanitation in the vast workcamps which sprang up alongside the railway (cholera is water-borne, as the British surgeon John Snow established in 1849). The insanitary conditions, with people living in cramped conditions, led to the rapid transmission of other fatal diseases such as ‘jungle fever’, which was usually malaria; as Kerr puts it, ‘when it did not kill people, it disabled them’, leading to shortages in the workforce.10 One outbreak of cholera alone in 1860 is reckoned to have killed 25 per cent of the workforce, perhaps some 7,000 people, while 25,000 deaths, the best estimate of the overall toll for the eight-year project, would, if accurate, make it the deadliest railway project ever undertaken anywhere in the world.
Disease did not discriminate between locals and the British. A particularly severe epidemic of cholera in the spring of 1860 killed a quarter of the British overseers and a notable early casualty was the British contractor Solomon Tredwell. The contract for the Bhor Ghat had initially been given to Faviell, who had built the Bombay–Thana line, but he had developed a poor reputation as a ‘conceited and obstinate man … who treated people under him as dogs or inferior beings’,11 paying his workers low wages and providing them with inadequate housing. This terrible treatment was to be his undoing. There was a complicated arrangement of contractors and sub-contractors and Faviell’s failure to pay the sub-contractors meant they, in turn, could not pay their workers. In January 1859, a series of simmering disputes over the slow payment of wages broke out into a full-scale riot and the small European force of managers went to the camps in an attempt to quell the protest and arrest the ringleaders. However, they were beaten back with sticks and stones, and one European, who had become separated from the main party, was shot dead, though the culprit was never found. This outbreak of violence was no surprise to British government officials, who had visited the site before the riot and reported that the treatment of the labourers was shameful. Following the outbreak of violence, a senior official reported: ‘It is evident that the labourers have been most grossly abused in the matter of their wages.’12
Faviell’s contract was therefore rescinded and passed on to Tredwell, who had a good reputation in the UK. However, poor Tredwell died in November 1859, a mere month after his arrival, from dysentery acquired on the site. Remarkably, his wife, Alice, took over the contract and with the help of two British engineers, who had worked on previous contracts, managed to see the project through.
The callousness of the British towards the deaths in the workforce, while not remarkable by contemporary standards, appears deeply shocking today. Berkley reported the casualty rate in a rather matter-of-fact tone, suggesting that its worst aspect was the delay caused to the project. In his lecture, he bemoaned the fact that while ‘the fine [dry] season of eight months is favourable for Indian railway operations’, it was also the time when ‘fatal epidemics, such as cholera and fever’ break out and that the labourers who ‘are generally of such feeble constitution, and so badly provided with shelter and clothing speedily succumb to those diseases and the benefits of the fine weather are, thereby, temporarily lost [my italics]’.13
This was Victorian ‘morality’ at its worst. It would have been wrong, according to the strictures of the time, to pay the labourers any more than was absolutely necessary because that would affect profitability, which was sacrosanct. Berkley justified the low wages by the fact that ‘the effective work of almost every individual labourer in India falls short of the result obtained in England’.14 The low pay and poor housing, which Berkley seems to have realized contributed to the high death rate, were the direct result of the company’s policy, but he was unable or unwilling to make this obvious connection.
Despite the parsimony exhibited towards the workforce, there was both enormous wastage due to imperial arrogance, which meant so much was supplied from Britain despite local material being available, and considerable extravagance on the part of companies because the guaranteed high rate of return was almost an incentive for them to overspend. As Anthony Burton, author of The Railway Empire, reports, ‘the belief that Europe knows best was to lead to absurdities’.15 Imperialism had its blind spots. Although there were plenty of local sources of good useable wood, not enough effort was made to exploit it. Any hardwood forests such as teak near railway sites were quickly cut down, but the lack of efficient transport meant that further supplies were difficult to obtain. Attempts to treat soft jungle timber with various chemicals proved ineffective, as did experiments with cast iron, which is too brittle, with the result that, for much of the early Indian railway construction period, sleepers were sent from the UK, a remarkably inefficient and expensive way of sourcing a cheap and heavy material. This proved to be a continuous burden on the railway companies because the humid weather meant that sleepers tended to last only seven years.
The high cost of transporting bricks, however, meant they were produced locally. Those made by locals using traditional methods were deemed unsuitable because, according to a contemporary writer, ‘a native takes any clay that happens to be at hand, digs it, wets it, kneads it with his feet for a short time and then moulds the brick on the ground’. Such bricks, he complained, ‘are badly tempered, badly shaped and are, besides, usually cracked and badly burnt’.16 The bricks made under European supervision were deemed to be of good quality, though on some worksites, notably in Bengal, there was no suitable material to hand and therefore wrought-iron girders were used to support bridges.
Similarly, despite the plentiful supply of local building materials, booking halls and engine sheds were shipped in kit form to be assembled in India and were not always constructed from the appropriate materials. Burton points out that metal was used for constructing the stations and asks, witheringly: ‘Could anyone have seriously believed that an iron building was appropriate for a waiting room in the blistering heat of an Indian summer?’17
Berkley was cannier as he realized that many Indian methods of work were more appropriate for the climate and the available skills. In particular, the insubstantial-looking bamboo scaffolding, still a feature of construction sites in Asia, proved to be cheaper than systems imported from Europe and just as safe. The ‘coolies’, as Berkley called them, who carried building materials balanced on bamboo poles, were far more adept at carrying weights than their British counterparts. The British engineers found they were not always right in imposing their methods and instead could learn from the traditions of a culture which, after all, had built the Taj Mahal, which was completed in 1653.
One amusing episode concerned the introduction of wheel-barrows. It was thought that they would speed up the building process, but attempts to replace traditional head baskets were quickly abandoned following the experience of one British engineer who ‘having exhausted his morning energy in the fond endeavour to restrain a gang of coolies from using the objectionable basket had the mortification, on making his evening tour of inspection, to find them carrying the wheelbarrows on their heads’.18 The head baskets were, in fact, often carried by women and children, and the British, finding this distasteful (though, remember, this was a period when underage chimney sweeps were still the norm in Britain), tried unsuccessfully to put a stop to it. However, given the low wages, many families needed to work as a team, with the husband breaking up the stones and the women and children carting them away on their heads, in order to make enough to pay for food and their basic shelters. It was a learning experience on both sides, as Kerr recounts: ‘The lessons the British learned from the Bhor Ghat extended well beyond civil engineering and they were applied well beyond the ghat construction.’19
The work to complete the route through the Bhor Ghat took eight years. The bare statistics of the achievement illustrate the scale of the task but fail to do justice to it. The project required twenty-five tunnels, the blasting out of 54 million square feet of rock (who counted that?), the erection of eight viaducts supported by arches and the construction of a series of embankments, some of which were sixty feet high and had side slopes that were 300 feet long. The most unusual feature of the railway through the ghats was the system devised by Berkley to build the line up the hill. Instead of constructing a continuous steep line, he carved out a reversing section at a bend near the summit. So the train had to be driven – slowly – into the dead end, whose buffer stop was the only, and wholly inadequate, shield between the tracks and the precipice. Then the guard would get out to change the points, enabling the train to continue its climb. It was slow and cumbersome, but effective, and the method survived well into the second half of the twentieth century, when additional tunnels were built allowing trains to climb up more quickly. The method was, though, later copied successfully on several railways in South America. Not only was construction costly in terms of lives, but it was also very expensive in financial terms. The cost of the line was £70,000 per mile, nearly four times the normal average in India and around one and a half times the average in Britain, where, of course, wages were far higher.
The completion of the Bhor Ghat incline was marked with a more than usually lavish ceremony at Khandala, near the crest of the incline, by the Governor of Bombay, Sir Bartle Frere, who lauded the work of the ‘English engineers’,20 while rather forgetting, until the last, that it was Indian labour that had created this almost miraculous railway. His enthusiastic speech reveals how the creation of the Indian railway system was perceived by the Victorian upper classes as a kind of massive do-gooding exercise that would transform Indian society for the better.
Frere spent several minutes praising the achievements of the various British engineers who took part in the construction and gave a special mention to Mrs Tredwell for carrying on the work of her late husband. When, finally, towards the end, Frere addressed the contribution of the ‘Indian Cooly’, he suggested that the railway and the money it brought from the UK offered an unparalleled opportunity to the Indian underclass. Previously, he said, ‘the privilege of labour was in general restricted to particular spots and nothing like the power of taking his labour to the best market practically existed’. Now, he said, thanks to the advent of the railway, ‘for the first time in history, the Indian Cooly finds that he has in his power of labour a valuable possession which … will give to him and his family something better than mere subsistence’.
He was, in effect, talking about the dawn of the age of consumerism. He explained that when the railway work finished and the labourer returned to his ‘remote Deccan or Konkan village’, he would ‘work far harder, and acquire new and more civilized wants, in proportion to the high wages he receives’, gathering ‘a new feeling of self-respect and independence’, and become a ‘better and more loyal subject’ as a result. The railway, in other words, was the catalyst for India to become a modern, civilized nation of petty capitalists and consumers.
Apart from the ghats, the greatest obstacle faced by the railways were the vast Indian rivers which took considerable expertise and huge amounts of capital and labour to bridge, and presented the greatest danger not only to construction teams but potentially also to passengers.
Bridges were the major enterprise on the railway. It took up to five years to build a large one and ‘small towns housing many thousands of workers and their families grew up close to the bridge sites’.21 There were numerous skills to be learnt in both civil engineering and water management before the bridges could be regarded with confidence. The key was laying the foundations deeply enough to withstand the scouring effect of water moving at extremely high speeds at peak flow. The foundations of the piers and abutments had to be built in holes – called wells – dug into the riverbed. The work was obviously carried out in the dry season but, even then, coffer dams were needed to keep the wells from being inundated.
The traditional method of digging out the smaller wells was remarkably primitive. A man would descend into the well and, after loosening the sand and stones at the bottom with his feet, would dive down to collect the material in a basket and hand it to his companion at the edge. The men would regularly swap roles and by using this crude technique would be able to dig out a well stretching to a maximum of fourteen feet deep. Deeper wells, however, would require more sophisticated and consequently expensive methods.
Major rivers such as the Ganga (Ganges) or the Brahmaputra would require wells of up to fifty feet in order to ensure the bridges’ safety. By the end of the century, novel techniques such as using divers – who often ruined their health as the effect of the ‘bends’, the result of rapid depressurization, was not known – connected to an air supply and steam-powered dredges, but in the early days primitive methods inevitably led to many collapses as the wells were simply not dug deep enough.
The foundations for the intermediate supports or piers had to be totally secure to protect them from the effect of scouring by the fast-flowing water. The slightest flaw in the foundation would easily be found by the water and lead to the weakening and possible collapse of the bridge support.
As Samuel Power, the engineer of the Soane Bridge (now in Bihar), the most difficult river crossing in the early stages of the East Indian Railway, lamented, ‘nothing is more trying of the patience than the passage from the sand into the clay … although the curb shoes [the outer bulwark for the protection of the piers] may appear to be touching the clay at almost every point of its circumference, the sand will force its way through some small crevices and nearly fill the well again and again’.22 It was a slow but effective learning process which eventually led to a safe network of bridges on the Indian rail system.
The Soane Bridge was particularly challenging because it had to ford a river that stretched three miles across at times of flood, and finding the best crossing point was a matter of considerable debate and controversy. Initially, the East Indian Railway considered running tracks across the river during the dry season, with a small bridge over what was essentially a stream, and then operating a ferry service in the wet season in order to avoid the massive and expensive task of building the bridge. However, the cumbersome, costly and indeed potentially dangerous nature of such an enterprise convinced the company that a fixed crossing was essential, and a site involving a bridge of just under a mile long was eventually found. After considering a brick arched viaduct, the railway decided to opt for a wrought-iron lattice-work superstructure supported on brickwork piers. The bridge required twenty-eight sections of identical 150-foot-long girders which, when assembled, had to be manhandled onto the piers. This became the preferred method of fording rivers, which was to the great benefit of British engineering companies, who invariably supplied the ironwork (and the steel that was used later). The iron was transported in kit form, with great difficulty if there was not yet a suitable railway between the port and the worksite, and assembled at the river. Hundreds of railway bridges across India were built in this way and many survive today.
The amazing engineering skills required to build these remarkable bridges eventually attracted the attention of the UK press. In 1887, Rudyard Kipling, then an unknown reporter on the Civil and Military Gazette, an Anglo-Indian newspaper, described the construction of a bridge similar to the one over the Soane, the Kaisar-i-Hind (Empress of India), across the Sutlej River at Ferozepur in the Punjab. The bridge was almost exactly the same length as the Soane, requiring twenty-seven sections of ironwork, some of which had already been fitted onto the piers by the time he arrived. In the best contemporary description of Indian railway building, Kipling recalls how he was appalled by the crowds and the noise of the scene. The road leading to the bridge ‘was filled with bullock carts and ekkas [one-horse carriages] and foot passengers all streaming riverwards to where a cloud of dust rose like the smoke of an engagement [battle]’. At the site, he found a ‘royal mess’ of various temporary railway tracks being used to transport material: ‘lines of every gauge – two-foot, metre and broad – rioted over the face of the pure, white sand, between huge dredger-buckets, stored baulks of timber, chupper-built [thatched] villages, piled heaps of warm red concrete-blocks, portable engines and circular saws’.
It was the riveters who left the greatest impression on Kipling, both because of the noise they created and the speed at which they worked. Where the spans had already been set out, he found:
a few hundred workmen hard at work riveting. The clamour is startling, even a hundred yards away from the Bridge; but standing at the mouth of the huge iron-plated tunnel, it is absolutely deafening. The flooring quivers beneath the hammer-strokes; the roof of corrugated iron nearly half an inch thick which will form the floor of the cart-road, casts back the tumult redoubled; and it bounds and rebounds against the lattice-work at the side. Riveters are paid by the job, not by time. Consequently they work like devils; and the very look of their toil, even in the bright sunshine, is devilish. Pale flames from the fires for the red hot rivets, spurt out from all parts of the black iron-work where men hang and cluster like bees; while in the darker corners the fires throw up luridly the half nude figures of the rivetters, each man a study for a painter as he bends above the fire-pot, or, crouching on the slung-supports, sends the rivet home with a jet of red sparks from under the hammer-head.23
Kipling used this experience in a work of fiction, ‘The Bridge Builders’, published a few years later. It was not the ironwork that Kipling watched being installed which tended to fail but, rather, as described above, the piers’ supports, which were eaten away by the fast-flowing water. As an example, the Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway was perhaps unfortunate in the number of incidents that the bridge crossing the Nerbudda River suffered, but its tribulations were typical of the difficulty of getting to grips with the uniquely Indian conditions. Started in 1857, the bridge was damaged by flooding twice during construction, but after opening for traffic in July 1861 it then, according to Kerr, ‘suffered from flood damage in 1864, 1865 and 1867, and lost three piers in a heavy flood in August 1868’.24 Similar damage was caused to three bridges on the Sind, Punjab and Delhi Railway in a major flood in 1871, including the collapse of a bridge over the Beas River, which resulted in a passenger train plunging into the water below.
The most spectacular early failure, the collapse of the Mhow-ke-Mullee viaduct on the Bhor Ghat on 19 July 1867, however, did not result in any casualties thanks to the alertness of a railwayman and the good fortune that two trains scheduled to cross the bridge were far enough away to be halted. The viaduct had been inspected in the early morning and a train passed safely at 6.50 a.m. when, an hour later, an Indian fireman who was on the lookout on a goods train saw the bridge had begun to collapse into the river. He warned the driver and, as the train stopped, the two men watched the rest of the bridge tumble into the water. The fireman quickly crossed the river to warn an approaching goods train of the collapse, thus averting a disaster.
The bridge had been built in brick and masonry and there were strong suspicions that the foundations had been skimped as a result of poor workmanship or corruption, or both, as well as a lack of supervision. Its replacement was another of the Meccano bridges of ironwork prefabricated in the UK, which was carrying trains by the following summer; a remarkable achievement of which the Great Indian Peninsula Railway was exceedingly proud in its reports back to shareholders.
Major collapses like the one at Mhow-ke-Mullee exposed the extent to which the standard of workmanship on these early lines was often inadequate, but that was not necessarily the responsibility of the Indians undertaking the work. In many cases, notably the larger bridges, the designs, drawn up by the British, were at fault. However, on small bridges and culverts, poor workmanship did, at times, lead to collapse and risk. A British engineer, Roger Brereton, who went out to India in 1856 to work on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, found widespread evidence of skimping on crucial details. There were stones missing in the piers designed to support small bridges and, not surprisingly, several viaducts and bridges collapsed when trains started running over them. For his pains, Brereton, finding shoddy work on another site, was felled by a blow on the head from a stick wielded by a contractor’s agent, but fortunately recovered fully and remained in India for many more years.
The extent of such ‘scamping’ and straightforward design failure attracted the interest of the Government of India because by the late 1860s, just fifteen years after the first line opened, ‘more than 2,000 bridges and other masonry structures had failed completely or partially on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway’.25 It was the government which had to foot the bill for these failures as the money came either from the company’s capital fund, which earned the guarantee, or out of its profits, which had to be topped up to reach the 5 per cent rate of return.
This sort of malpractice was not unusual in railway construction and, given the huge cost of building new lines, was a phenomenon on similar great engineering projects across the world. On some contracts, notably in the USA, millions of dollars were purloined in corrupt arrangements created precisely for that purpose by contractors or promoters.26 In India, there was no single figure found to be responsible for purloining vast amounts of cash, such as George Hudson, the Railway King, who created the Midland Railway in the 1840s, only to then cheat his shareholders in a kind of Victorian version of a Ponzi scheme. Despite lots of petty corruption, Kerr argues that ‘India’s railways had fewer major scandals, massive corruption, and speculative chicanery than railways in many other countries’.27 This was a result of the relatively tight control exercised by the Indian government, but also because of the absence, during the early days, of a white-collar criminal class able to exploit the huge amount of money pouring into the country from UK investors.
Away from the mountains and the bridges, most of India was, in fact, relatively easy to build on, as testified by the long stretches of straight, flat line on Indian railways today. The dry soil, the even terrain and, apart from snakes, the largely benign wildlife (tigers were confined largely to the hills on the East Indian Railway and most elephants showed little interest in the process) all made ideal conditions for rapid construction, even though methods were primitive and required enormous numbers of workers. The ready availability of land, too, made the process of building railways less complicated.
Nevertheless, progress in developing the network was slow during the first few years. By the time the Great Rebellion broke out in 1857, barely 300 miles of disparate lines had been completed. The railway companies blamed the intrusive supervision to which they were subject, notably the process by which expenditure of any significant amount had to be agreed by the government before payment was made and then checked again afterwards. This meant that even very small amounts of money had to be approved and this inevitably slowed down development, especially as so many supplies were imported from the UK. A Parliamentary Commission into the start of railway construction in India was established, the first of many such enquiries, and in their report, published in 1858, the Parliamentarians rebuked the Government of India for its cautious approach and over-zealous regulation. They found several reasons for the delays, such as the animosity between engineers and contractors and the long distances on awful roads over which supplies had to be transported, especially when the nearest railhead was far away. All these inherent difficulties were intensified by the bureaucratic approach of the government, which, as we have seen, exercised close control over the projects. Because the companies had their 5 per cent guarantee, the government was anxious to ensure that they were not being profligate. Sometimes even minor matters were referred back to London, a time-consuming task given that it was not until 1870 that there was an electric telegraph connecting the UK with the subcontinent. While the railway companies were quick to blame the government, much of the responsibility lay with them for failing to ensure that they commissioned the right contractors, as we shall see in the next chapter.
In order to speed up the construction of the network, the Commission recommended that work and payments would only be overseen after the event, greatly reducing the bureaucracy. The Commission had been set up in the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, known in India as the First War of Independence but probably best described (neutrally) as the Great Rebellion, because it had exposed the difficulties of moving troops quickly around the country. The Rebellion started in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, forty miles from Delhi, on 10 May 1857 when a group of sepoys (Indian soldiers) mutinied over the imprisonment of eighty-five of their fellow men. Lengthy jail sentences had been imposed on them for their refusal to use cartridges which were thought to be greased with fat from pig (taboo for Muslims) or cows (taboo for Hindus). That was the trigger for a wide variety of grievances. Trouble, both in the military and in the country at large, had, in fact, been brewing for some time over a range of issues such as low pay, land expropriation by the British and fears that missionaries were preparing mass conversions to Christianity, and consequently unrest spread rapidly, first to Delhi and then elsewhere.
The railways themselves became a target. Their arrival was not always welcomed by local people, who could be downright hostile, as they feared, with some justification, that the massive embankments required to support the railway would disturb the local water management system and affect the local agriculture. Indeed, at times the hostility was so great that embankments were wrecked by gangs of local farmers at night worried that they would no longer be able to irrigate their fields properly. However, it was not just farmers who felt this way. There was a more fundamental countrywide resentment of the Western incursion that was so neatly and forcibly expressed by tracks being laid across India.
The railways were a disruptive influence on a traditional society. To devout Hindus, ‘the very nature of the railway, demanding punctuality and exactitude, and breaking down caste, was alien’.28 They were concerned, too, about Western influence generally. In the wake of the large number of engineers who had arrived in India to help build the railways, there were evangelists intent on saving souls, rather than improving transport, whose thinking amounted to the notion that if the Indians wanted railways, they would have to live with a Christian god as well. Edward Davidson concluded his book on Indian railways, published in 1868, with the sentiment that ‘there is a hope that, combined with the prosperity, wealth and civilisation which have been created and fostered by the railways of India, the blessings also of a spiritual Christianity, based on the truth of God’s Word, may ere [before] long spread extensively over the length and breadth of that land’.29 No wonder some of the local population felt that their way of life was threatened by the railways, especially as Davidson’s views were by no means unique, with many other writers on India expressing similar ideas.
The Rebellion was partly inspired by such fears and therefore the railways were an obvious target. Worksites on the East Indian Railway were attacked and trashed, partly built bridges pulled down, and half-completed lines destroyed. European engineers working on these projects, particularly in remote areas, had to flee or be killed. Work on the Soane Bridge on the East Indian Railway was halted in the spring of 1857 and much of the preparatory work was destroyed. The delay was costly, as wages for the European engineers still had to be paid and much material had to be replaced. It was not until December 1858 that work could restart and the bridge was not completed until the end of 1862, allowing the 430-mile railway from Calcutta to Benares to be officially opened by the Governor-General, Lord Elgin, in March 1863.
There were appalling atrocities, including numerous massacres, on both sides during the Rebellion, but within a year the British were able to overcome the rebels, who, motivated by a variety of grievances, had neither a central base, nor any united demand. The British were greatly helped by the Sikhs of the Punjab – a group that remained loyal, partly out of their dislike of the Muslims who were involved in the rebellion – and by the lack of involvement of large swathes of the population of the subcontinent, particularly in the large Deccan plateau. The unrest effectively ended with the reclaiming of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh in June 1858 but its effects were to last far longer.
The Rebellion marked the end of the East India Company, which was seen as ineffective, with control of India being transferred to a system of direct rule from London, overseen by a Cabinet minister who quickly instituted a programme of financial and administrative reform. Officially, Indian opinion was supposed to be taken into greater account when making decisions. In fact, the Rebellion led to a greater isolation of the growing British community as there was the ever-present fear that the locals might turn against them. As J. N. Westwood explains, this nurtured ‘a mildly racialist attitude on the part of many British’ and resulted in ‘a more patronising, often contemptuous attitude towards Indians’.30
However, while the British realized that changes were needed, nothing shifted the opinion of the rulers that they were in India to civilize the nation, whether its people wanted that or not. Therefore, military rule had to be strengthened and the protection of British rule became a key driver in speeding up construction of the network. The Rebellion had exposed the difficulties of moving troops around quickly and consequently the vulnerability of the British hold on a nation of 280 million people. The railways were clearly the means by which rule could be established and protected. However, the railways, as we shall see, were also a cause of conflict because the races were forced to mix when using trains. Therefore, it was often on the railway network where interactions between Indians and British became, at times, troublesome. Moreover, the railways’ insatiable demand for labour meant more British people, often carrying out relatively menial jobs, came to India because the railway companies did not want to entrust various tasks to local people.
As a result, India became a much more uneasy place for the British, whose fear of the native population and concern with security had a huge impact on the design of the railways. The vulnerability of stations was recognized and new ones were designed as potential fortresses. As Burton puts it, ‘the face these stations presented to the outside world was grim: high walls, rounded corners that would deflect shot, battlemented towers and firing slits’.31 The ‘fortified main station at Lahore’32 (now in Pakistan) looked more like a medieval castle than a welcoming entrance to a key transport network. It was not just stations: the Rebellion led to ‘the concern, at times an obsession, that was to last for decades among the authorities, namely ensuring the military security of the railway lines, bridges, tunnels and stations’.33
However, railways are very much dependent on the acquiescence, if not support, of the local population. They are often the first casualties of war since blowing up a line or causing a train to crash are relatively easy acts of sabotage with widespread consequences, as demonstrated by the activities of modern terrorists who routinely attack trains and stations. The fears of the British, therefore, may have been somewhat exaggerated as most Indians either supported or were indifferent to the advent of the railways, but they were well-founded. As we shall see in Chapter 7, Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement, made great play of the role of the railways as an instrument of imperial repression and was, at times, openly hostile to them.