All major railway projects started as dreams, and many remained in the field of fantasy. Their number and variety is a reminder that railway building was a fundamental element in the dreams of a whole century – no country, no statesman, no businessman, no political scientist, it seems, was without his own locomotive vision. So they can tell us more about the nineteenth century’s collective subconscious than more practical projects. Railways liberated the imagination.
Three of the most seemingly impractical dream railways – across the United States, Canada and Siberia – all came true. The most ballyhoo attached to the American Transcontinental: yet the Trans-Siberian was twice as long and the Canadians, by insisting on an all-Canadian route, handicapped themselves by having to tackle hundreds of miles of barren rock north of Lake Superior, terrain far more daunting than anything faced by the Americans east of the Rockies.
As we saw in Chapter III, the Canadians built the railway to complete their country, and to retain British Columbia within the federation. The Russians were anxious to use the Trans-Siberian to open up Siberia as the Americans had opened up the Prairies. But the primary impetus behind the American desire for a transcontinental railroad was to reach the Pacific and thus the Orient. Walt Whitman’s railroad ‘from sea to shining sea’ was merely a means of reaching the ultimate dream ocean. The Pacific dream merged with the more practical desire to reach California after the discovery of gold there in 1849, and with the feeling that a railroad was an essential symbol of national unity, but the ‘Pacific’ element in the idea lingered on, and it was not until the mid-1870s that a best-selling guide-book (George A. Crofutt’s Great Transcontinental Rail Guide) finally fixed the word ‘transcontinental’ in the public consciousness.
All three projects succeeded in girding their countries with hoops of iron. But the mere existence of a railway connection, however daring in conception, however exciting in construction, could not counteract underlying political, economic and social forces. In 1857, for example, the first six miles of the Western Railroad out of Buenos Aires were greeted with the cry ‘On to Chile’; and just over half a century later the dream was achieved, after a tunnel had been dug through the Andes at an altitude of 10,500 feet. But it did not generate much traffic; indeed the service was suspended for a number of years in the 1930s, when a stretch of line was washed away, and it has never been profitable. The mere existence of a railway couldn’t help fulfil the politicians’ dream of a Greater Argentina linked to, and thus dominating, Chile and Peru.
There were many other dreams of railway empire that never even achieved their physical destination. They varied, but can broadly be divided into three categories: the individual projects; the globe-girdlers; and the lines which were inherent parts of a country’s imperial dreams.
The most obvious and economically sensible individual project was a rail tunnel under the English Channel. But even this has been a century in the making* since it was first seriously promoted in the 1880s. At that point it was defeated by the objections of the British military, and even when it was finally transformed into reality a century later it has had to face the hysterical objections of sundry British citizens who have camouflaged their deeply ingrained fears of losing their island status through a fixed link with Europe behind absurd claims that the British way of life would be threatened by terrorists, rabid dogs, drug dealers and the like.
The next most obvious idea, a tunnel linking Europe and Africa under the Straits of Gibraltar, faces the problem that the Straits are too deep for a tunnel at their narrowest point. Nevertheless it has surfaced at times, and formed an essential link in the French dream of a railway from Paris to French West Africa via the Sahara. But we are now seeing the gradual realisation of a number of other longstanding dreams for tunnels or bridges, usually carrying road as well as rail traffic, like those linking Sweden with the European mainland and Japan’s northern and southern islands, Hokkaido and Honshu, with Kyushu, the mainland.
Global railways have an even longer history than more practical, more limited schemes. The first proposal for a transcontinental railway was put forward by Angus B. Reach in a Comic Bradshaw, published in 1839. His fantasy provided details of Bradshaw’s timetable a hundred years in the future. Its authenticity, he assured his readers, ‘can be entirely relied on’. There would be trains from Shoreditch in London to Pekin, via Constantinople, Jericho (‘where Babylon used to was … omnibuses meet the trains at the Jericho Terminus’) Bagdad and Canton (‘Return tickets for Pekin available for three days’). He was followed by the entirely serious Saint-Simonian, Michel Chevalier, whose ‘Mediterranean system’ envisaged a railway from the English Channel to the Persian Gulf.
It was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 which liberated the world’s imagination as to the true possibilities of modern transport systems. It was natural for Ferdinand de Lesseps, the visionary French diplomat who had guided the canal to its triumphant completion, to turn his attention to even more ambitious rail projects. ‘As early as 1873’, wrote Charles Beatty, ‘Ferdinand had sent [his son] Victor, now a foreign service officer in the family tradition, to explore the possibility of a railway joining Paris with Moscow, Pekin and Bombay. At first the Russians gave encouragement to the idea … but before he could report the scheme was dropped for political reasons. England and Russia were coming into conflict over Afghanistan and also in Northern China.’19
A largely railway route round the world moved from the realm of the ridiculous to the merely fantastic once trains were running across the United States and the Trans-Siberian was under construction. By the end of the century that eminently practical railroad magnate E. H. Harriman had a perfectly clear plan for a ‘round-the-world transportation line, under unified American control.’20 Harriman planned to secure access to the Pacific by buying the railway through Manchuria, and acquiring trackage rights over the Trans-Siberian itself. Since Harriman owned the Pacific Steamship company and controlled major networks in the United States he required only a fleet of ships ploughing across the Atlantic to achieve his goal.
Unfortunately the Japanese were unwilling to share control of the Manchurian railways they had acquired following their war with Russia, but that did not deter Harriman, although an alternative 1,200-mile line across the Gobi Desert proved too ambitious even for him. Another attempt to build a new line through Manchuria, well away from the existing tracks, was foiled by the death of the Empress of China and by the financial crash of 1907, and Harriman died before he could find alternative routes.
The Pacific dream did not die. The Americans have always hankered after a major role in the Far East, especially in China, a mission which clearly necessitated railways from the Mid-West to ports in Mexico as a more convenient route to the Pacific than through California. In this instance a novelist anticipated the promoters. Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now revolves round a projected – and clearly fraudulent – ‘South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway’. The line ‘was to run from the [sic] Salt Lake City, thus branching off from the San Francisco and Chicago line, and pass down through the fertile lands of New Mexico and Arizona, into the territory of the Mexican republic, run by the City of Mexico, and come out on the gulf at the port of Vera Cruz’.
A few years later Nature duly copied Art when a number of schemes followed Trollope’s routes. Most notably the American promoter Arthur E. Stilwell, who had already made Kansas City the hub of a railroad network with access to the Gulf of Mexico, came up with the idea of a trunk line to the little Mexican port of Topolobampo, one of the many such attempts to transform Mexico into an extension of what became the Sunbelt and to transform Topolobampo into the gateway to the Orient. Unfortunately his grandiosely-named Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railway met the same fate as Trollope’s fictional line, though, unlike Trollope’s August Melmotte, Stilwell did not commit suicide after his scheme had collapsed.
Even Stilwell’s scheme was less grandiose than the notion of a Pan-American railway extending from a convenient point on the Southern Pacific through Mexico, Central and South America. Since the time of President Monroe the Americans have believed in their civilising mission in Central and Latin America, and the mission clearly demanded a railway. This was first proposed in 1879 by an American diplomat ‘the famous abolitionist Hinton Rowan Helper … [who] published a book advocating the construction of what he termed the “New World Longitudinal Double-Track Steel Railway”.’21 This would be a conscious attempt, designed, like many other such schemes, to assure even firmer American control over the western hemisphere, not, they felt, as colonialists but as liberators, as part of what the French would call their mission civilisatrice.
Helper’s railway would have run from ‘the westerly shores of Hudson Bay to the midway margin of the Strait of Magellan: the two terminal points, measured along the line contemplated, being nearly, if not quite, eight thousand miles apart … in justice and fairness, and in conformity with the highest attributes of republican justice & fairness’ the line ‘should avoid, and thus isolate, the iniquitous dictatorship of Brazil’.
Ten years later the First International American Congress created a ‘Committee on Railway Communication’ which in turn mapped out a possible route for a Pan-American Railroad. Over the next forty years progress was spotty. The Banana King C. Minor Keith contributed to the idea through his proposed ‘International railways of Central America’, but little progress had been made before the idea was overtaken by an alternative dream, that of a Pan-American Highway.
The Americans liked to think that such schemes were not imperial. Other similar dreams were more nakedly so in spirit – and far less practicable. Every imperial power had its own pet projects. The dream which most nearly came to fruition was the German plan for a railway from Berlin to Bagdad. This was not merely an imperial dream, but also a way of unlocking the real riches in oil and agricultural produce of Mesopotamia, as well as providing a way of transporting troops to quash disaffected Bedouin tribesmen and of carrying pilgrims to Mecca, one of the few objectives actually achieved. None the less it was a dream, for it involved the resuscitation of the medieval land routes across Central Asia. The railway would ‘bring back to Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia some of the prosperity and prestige they had enjoyed before the explorations of the Portuguese and Spaniards had opened the new sea routes to the Indies’.22
In the first years of the present century the project became deeply embedded in the German psyche as a means of carrying the German language, allied to German finance, trade, industry and engineering, to the very cradle of civilisation. ‘Here was a country which had been the much-sought-after empire of the great nations of antiquity, Assyria, Chaldea, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Here had risen and fallen the great cities of Nineveh, Babylon and Hit. To these regions had turned the longing of the great conquerors, Sargon, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander, Saladin.’23
But the cultural sell concealed the line’s two eminently practical objectives: to reinforce the German military alliance with the Ottoman Empire and to capture the massive oil reserves just being uncovered in the Mesopotamian valley. The route had been surveyed by an unsung engineering genius, Wilhelm von Pressel, although he was forced to take an inland route through the Amanus mountains because the easier route along the Mediterranean would have made it vulnerable to attacks by hostile warships.
Building began a few years before 1914, and although construction continued throughout the war, the through service to Aleppo was inaugurated only in October, 1918, a month before the Armistice. Inevitably the line was sequestrated by the Allies. Afterwards an American syndicate proposed to reach Bagdad with the help of a 25-mile wide land grant along its whole length. But the fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire has prevented any real progress from that day to this.
Yet even in the 1920s, enthusiastic Syrians dreamt that the ancient entrepot of Aleppo would ‘become the crossroads of the world – a junction point for rail communication between Berlin and Bagdad, Calais and Calcutta, Bordeaux and Bombay, Constantinople and Cairo and Cape Town’.*
Rhodes the Colossus inspires the Cape-to-Cario dream.
The Berlin-to-Bagdad suffered very little domestic political interference within Germany. By contrast the British equivalent, the Cape-to-Cairo, was sabotaged by domestic politics, and was finally scuppered because it most influential supporter, Cecil Rhodes, was too practical a man to undertake himself a project of such dubious commercial viability. Despite its fame and the romantic aura which surrounds it, the Cape-to-Cairo was never a unified project, the only unifying factor was the name. As Lois Raphael wrote in The Cape-to-Cairo Dream (New York, 1936), ‘the railway followed mineral discoveries northwards’. Rhodes ‘wanted his Cape-to-Cairo railway to pay its way through Africa’. As a result the route was diverted hundreds of miles west of its most direct route to serve the coal deposits at Wankie in what is now Zimbabwe and the copper belt in Zambia.*
The idea did not lack supporters. ‘I can conceive of no more civilizing influence that could be brought to bear than the laying down of a railway throughout that great continent,’ declared a British politician. An active group of ‘Little Englanders’ was always at hand, determined to scotch such Imperial dreams but the biggest blow was struck by an Imperialist Prime Minister, the Marquess of Salisbury when he allowed the Germans sway over Tanganyika as far west as the Belgian Congo, thus interposing a foreign power directly in the path of the all-red dream.† Indeed the Germans took the idea more seriously than the British themselves. ‘The placing of British South Africa in communication with the Sudan by a railway would be equivalent to the premeditated ruin of our colonial empire in Africa,’ declared the Taglische Rundschau.
The Cape-to-Cairo dream evaporated because its supporters were too hard-headed. The French equivalent, the Trans-Saharian, though long lived and never without powerful supporters, could never be accused of excess practicality. Yet this manifestly absurd idea was taken seriously from the 1880s until 1943, when the Vichy government actually started to build it. No other project illustrates so clearly the power of the Saharan dream in French public life – although, ironically, the money lent by French investors to build that more practical dream, the Trans-Siberian, was lost just as surely as if it had been poured into the sands of the Sahara.
Although French generals proposed the idea in the middle of the century as they forged France’s African empire, the idea first entered the political arena at the end of the 1870s as part of the Freycinet plan for vastly expanding the French railway network, a plan naturally attacked as politically rather than economically motivated. The Trans-Saharan idea erupted sporadically over the next sixty-five years – first in 1898 when the French had to retreat in ignominy from Fashoda in the Sudan. Unfortunately its supporters could never decide whether it was primarily strategic, or could provide the key to unlocking the supposedly vast riches of the great plains surrounding the River Niger. A third argument employed the Trans-Saharan as part of grandiose schemes to rely on colonisation to counter the demographic advantages possessed by France’s enemies – most obviously the Germans.*
Assuming that a tunnel was built under the Straits of Gibraltar the Trans-Saharan, said its proponents, was the only line able to bring the capital of a great imperial power within a week’s journey of its rich tropical colonies, a mere third of the time required to traverse Siberia. Supporters like the economist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (Le Sahara, le Soudan et les Chemins de fer transsahariens) poured scorn on the prevailing wisdom that the Sahara could never be developed, arguing that its very real subterranean water resources provided it with considerable potential.
Opponents relied on extending the existing network of railways in French West Africa to bring tropical produce to the Atlantic, while protagonists made much of the endemic fevers, and the sandbars blocking the harbours of French West Africa. Not surprisingly successive governments temporised, afraid of accusations that they were betraying a railway so vital to France’s eternal and ubiquitous mission civilisatrice. In the late 1920s they even set up an ‘Office du Transsaharien’ to study the projected route, but the dream evaporated after the downfall of the Vichy government.
Every Imperial power, however small, felt entitled to its own dream. Leopold II of Belgium, not content with the personal ownership of the Congo, dreamt of a new Belgian-controlled Eldorado in the heart of China, Kansu province on the old Silk Road. This involved Belgian control over the railway to the China Sea, an ambition he tried to conceal by pretending that the Belgian emissaries in fact came from the ‘Independent State of the Congo’. The Chinese viceroy Li Hungchang punctured the pretence with the simple question: ‘You are supposed to represent an African state. How is it then that you are not at all black?’ In the event the Belgians did indeed build the railway to Kansu, but Leopold’s death and the First World War ended any further ambitions.
Curiously and ironically the most useful dream was a Japanese plan designed to bridge an island-studded strait over a hundred miles wide between their Southern island of Kyushu and Pusan on the southern tip of Korea, a country then (in the 1930s) part of the Japanese Empire. The crossing formed an essential element in an Axis dream to link Tokyo and Berlin via Moscow. In anticipation, the authorities bought land to enable the line to run from Tokyo to Kyushu. The dream died in 1945 but the preparations ensured that nearly a third of the land required for the New Tokkaido line, the first high-speed railway in the world, already belonged to the Japanese authorities when it was built in the early 1960s.
* This is a record, although the railway across Swaziland to the Indian Ocean, first projected in the 1880s, was finally built eighty years later.
* Earle op cit. The Aleppans were not alone in devising such a grandiose plan. Sun Yat-Sen envisaged that one of his projected lines would connect ‘with the future Indo-European line and through Bagdad, Damascus and Cairo, will link up also with the future African system’ – thus connecting Peking directly with Cape Town.
* See also Leo Weinthal, Cape to Cairo (London 1923).
† In the words of an 1887 agreement, ‘where one power occupies the coast another power may not, without consent, occupy unclaimed regions in its rear.’
* See Commandant ECV Roumens, L’Imperialisme Francais et les Chemins de fer Transafricains.