to Barbacoas, twenty-three miles out. Men and material were also shipped around Cape Horn, and work was begun at the Panama end. At Barbacoas a great bridge had to be constructed over the Chagres, a river at that point about 300 feet wide, running through a deep and rocky channel, and subject to a rise of forty feet of water in a single night. About this time the first president of the railroad company, John L. Stephens, died, and his successor let the building of the bridge and of the remainder of the line by contract. The bridge was nearly completed when a sudden flood swept it away. After a whole year had been wasted and the contractors were on the verge of bankruptcy, the company released them, and, under a third president, set out itself to complete, as it had begun, the work. Laborers had again become scarce, and again operations had to be temporarily suspended for want of them. Agents were then sent in haste to Hindostan, to China, to Ireland, and to all the countries of continental Europe, and a force of several thousand men was gathered together and taken to the Isthmus. Of these a thousand were Chinese coolies, of whom great things were expected, but some few of their number having died of fever, the rest were seized with nostalgic melancholia and developed a suicidal mania, and scores of them took their own lives. In the end scarcely 200 Chinese left the Isthmus alive. The other workers also fell victims to sickness, and many of them had to be reshipped to the points whence they came. Despite all difficulties, however, a massive timber bridge was eventually thrown successfully across the river at Barbacoas. By January, 1855, the crest of the divide at Culebra, a distance of thirty-seven miles from Colon, was reached. Here the workers rested, and awaited the coming of their collaborators from Panama, who were pushing their eleven-mile section up the valley of the Rio Grande. On that side the engineering difficulties had not been so great, the route did not lie through swamps, and the workmen were less liable to fatal sicknesses. At midnight on January 27, 1855, in the midst of a torrent of rain, the last rail was laid, and the two ends of the road were connected. The next day a locomotive passed from sea to sea. It was a great engineering triumph and a great testimony to the push, energy, and faith of its originators. The summit grade was 258 feet above the sea-level. The entire length of the road was forty-seven and threequarter miles, and it had required the construction of 170 bridges and culverts, one of the bridges being more than 600 feet in length. Although the railroad was open, the company's work was by no means completed. For the great traffic expected, preparations had to be made, including additional tracks at each terminus, needed side-tracks at different points, and passenger and freight depots. Owing to the haste to get the road constructed through to Panama, much of the work had been temporary in character, especially bridges, culverts, and trestles. The trestles were converted into solid embankments; the wooden bridges were replaced with iron; the ties of native wood, which were already rapidly decaying, were removed and replaced with ties of lignumvitae brought from Cartagena. This wood was so hard that it had to be bored before the spikes could be driven in, and so durable that, when taken up in 1910, because of the relocation of the line, the ties were found to be still unrotted. In addition to all this work, both of the new and the replacement order, additional engines and cars had to be provided. To gain breathing space by checking traffic until the company was prepared to handle it in full volume, the superintendent recommended the charging of a prohibitive UNITED STATES ACQUIRES THE ROAD Railroad Company became one of the greatest dividend-earners in the world, the stockholders receiving at one time as much as twenty-four per cent. per annum on their investment. The construction accounts were closed in January, 1859, and showed that, instead of $1,000,000, it had in reality cost $8,000,000 to build this railroad of less than fifty miles. But it had already earned $2,000,000 before the communication was open from sea to sea in 1855; by 1859 it had earned more than half enough to pay the entire cost of construction; and by January, 1865, its total profits were $11,340,000. These figures will not be so surprising when we remember that the rates were exceptionally high, and that the company had a monopoly of the Atlantic trade of the entire west coast of North, Central, and South America. It was a frequent occurrence to transport over the line in a single half day 1,500 passengers, all the United States mail, and the freight of three steamships. The railroad was thus beyond question a source of wonderful profit to its fortunate owners; but the government of New Granada had by contract the right to purchase, in 1875, for $5,000,000, this property which it had cost $8,000,000 to establish, and which was paying twenty-four per cent. dividend on that amount. Some new arrangement was manifestly necessary. Accordingly in 1867 Colonel Totten went to Bogotá, and, in consideration of $1,000,ooo in gold, cash down, of $250,000 a year, of promising to carry the New Granadan mails free, and of guaranteeing to extend the road to certain islands in the Bay of Panama, he obtained for the company a new franchise for ninety-nine years with additional large grants of public lands. In 1869, on the completion of the Union Pacific Railroad, the Panama Railroad lost its Californian trade, but still retained its trade with South and Central America, which was borne to it almost exclusively by the ships of the Pacific Steam Navigation Company. This haulage, too, the railroad subsequently lost when, in conse 91 quence of a dispute, the Navigation Company was cbliged to give up its shops and dockyards on the Island of Taboga, in the Bay of Panama, and send its ships by way of the straits of Magellan direct to England. The affairs of the railroad were for some years thereafter in a languishing condition and its stock was greatly depressed, until in 1879 it sold out both its stock and its rights to the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique for $18,000,000. The railroad passed with the other assets of the Compagnie Universelle to the New Panama Canal Company in 1894, and from it to the United States in 1904, the valuation set upon it in the latter transaction being $7,000,000, the par value of outstanding stock. Since then the railroad, re-located and modernized at an expense of $9,000,000, has been profitably worked by the United States government. Today the United States owns at Panama one of the finest railroads in the tropical world. It parallels the canal, and connects the principal cities of the Republic of Panama. It is a modern, single tracked, fivefoot-gauge road, built on high ground in a low country. It has embankments as high as 78 feet, which settled from twenty-five to sixty feet on the soft subsoil. One At places the engineers had to make the foundations of the embankments twice as wide as engineering practice demands, because of the immense weight of the fills. There are 167 embankments in the forty-seven-mile road, and 160 cuts. of the embankments is three miles long. The whole road required about 16,000,000 cubic yards of material for filling, or enough to make one fill all the way across the isthmus 9 feet high and 12 feet wide. The reconstruction cost the United States nearly $9,000,000, or approximately $170,ooo a mile. And yet, the road earned its way in returns, to say nothing of the powerful support it gave to the work of digging the Panama Canal. During the years between the acquisition of the road and the completion of the canal, it brought into the coffers of the United States a net revenue of upward of $15,000,000-enough to pay for the old road and to build a new one. When the United States bought the road it was worse even than the proverbial two streaks of rust and a right of way. The rails were the old fashioned hollowed out Belgian type, and the rolling stock was a nightmare of rust and ruin to the practiced railroad man. Built at a time when circumstances demanded that it follow the lines of least resistance, it was a road that led through marshes and over hills with little attention to grading. When the United States took over the road and the Canal Zone there was an attempt made to maintain the canal work and the operation of the railroad as separate and distinct enterprises, with the railroad lending what aid it could to the work of building the canal. But it was soon found that this was unwise, as it gave rise to conflict between the railroad management and the canal commission. It took a long time and the unwinding of much red tape to get matters through; and if there was not friction between the two enterprises, there at least was a lack of the spirit of "all things subsidiary to the building of the canal." How to overcome the trouble and still to preserve the separate corporate existence of the Panama Railroad Company was a problem. Separation was necessary because of the terms of the concessions under which the railroad was operated, and because, also, of the fact that a railroad could not very well be operated under a law which required all of its passenger and freight receipts to be turned into the federal treasury instead of into its own treasury. At last the plan was hit upon of making the chairman and chief engineer of the canal president of the railroad, and the members of the commission its directors. This arrangement worked admirably, since it complied with all the terms of the concession, retained for the railroad the advantages of a separate corporate existence, and yet made it as much a part of the canal con struction organization as though it had no trace of a separate existence. The situation of the Panama Railroad was an anomalous one. Here was a transcontinental line owned by the United States Government, operating under a concession of the Republic of Colombia, connecting the principal cities of the Republic of Panama, and doing business under a charter of the State of New York. Still further to add to the peculiarities of the situation, the government of Colombia claimed that when the concession of the railroad should expire its property would revert to Colombia. If that were so, then, since the railroad owned the land on which the city of Colon is built, Columbia would reacquire the property rights of one of the cities that had thrown off the yoke of her dominion. As matters stand today the United States owns the railroad and will continue to operate it. Its operation will be more fully a part of the canal organization than heretofore. The treaty with the Republic of Panama gives to the United States the right to take over the road and expressly provides that whenever the concession ceases from any cause the United States is to enjoy all the rights that Colombia would have enjoyed had Panama not revolted. Under this treaty the United States will be the fee simple owner of the Panama Railroad when its concession ceases. This will be ninety-nine years from the time the road was opened. As noted, the operation of the railroad during the period of the construction of the canal was very profitable. During that period it carried some twenty million passengers and many millions of tons of freight, with a new operating revenue of some fifteen million dollars. In a single year it carried three million passengers and over a million tons of freight. In addition to this it handled over its tracks about 40,000,000 tons of spoil a year, which served to make it the busiest line of railroad in the world. Although the road was orly forty-seven miles long it had several hun |