Panama Railroad

“ As a matter of fact, Government ownership of railways as applied at Panama is remarkably successful from the standpoint of the Government, and partially so to the patrons of the railroad. Probably no railroad in the United States could show net earnings per mile of line anywhere comparable with those of the Panama Railroad. ”

“ It takes nine men to operate a track shifter, and it does the work which took 500 men pursuing the old method of pulling spikes, shifting ties and rails separately and spiking the rails down again. It is estimated that by this device the government was saved several million dollars, to say nothing of an enormous amount of time. While the Panama Railroad is only 47 miles long it has laid almost 450 miles of rails, and these are continually being taken up and shifted, particularly those laid on the bed of the Canal in Culebra Cut. ”

“ You will follow the Camina Reale (Royal Road) from Cruces, which runs far to the northward of the other trail from Gorgona. But tell me, you being so lately from the United States, what is the report upon this Panama Railroad? The Americans are to build it, we hear."
"Yes, sir. A French company had the contract to cross this part of New Granada with a railroad, but they didn't do anything, and at the beginning of this year an American company got the right. The company is formed by William Henry Aspenwall, John Lloyd Stevens, and Henry Chauncy, of New York. ”

“ There is a popular fable, that will be told and believed as long as the Chagres runs to the sea, that the building of the Panama Railroad cost a life for every tie. But there were about a hundred and fifty thousand ties in the fifty miles of single track, and there have never been that many inhabitants on the Isthmus since Pedrarias the Cruel killed off the Indians. ”

“ It is understood that a considerable part of the railroad across the Isthmus of Panama has been completed, and that the mail and passengers will in future be conveyed thereon.
Whichever of the several routes between the two oceans may ultimately prove most eligible for travelers to and from the different States on the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico and our coast on the Pacific, there is little reason to doubt that all of them will be useful to the public, and will liberally reward that individual enterprise by which alone they have been or are expected to be carried into effect. ”

“ De Lesseps himself was honest, but so blinded by the memory of his past success that he could see nothing in Panama but another Suez.
Thousands of laborers and millions of dollars' worth of machinery were sent to the Isthmus, before the slightest preparation had been made to receive them. The Panama Railroad refused to carry these men and materials except as ordinary passengers and freight, at its own high rates. This soon forced the French Canal Company to buy the railroad, paying for it, including termini, $25,000,000, or more than three times what it cost to build it. ”

“ We left San Francisco near the end of July and took passage on the steamer Yankee Blade. Before reaching Panama the coal became exhausted, and we landed on a small, uninhabited island, where wood was cut and carried aboard the vessel in boats for fuel, in order to complete the voyage. We were then within two or three days sail of Panama.
In due time we reached Panama, where we landed and remained over night. At that time the Panama railroad had been completed from Aspinwall to a point about nine miles distant from the town of Panama, and near the summit of the isthmus. ”

“ With thirty million people the South American states have at present but little more than 16,000 miles of railroad, a condition which must at least in part be ascribed to the peculiar conservatism of the Latin race.
The United States of Colombia possesses less than 250 miles of road. Its first line was the Panama Railroad, from Colon to Aspinwall. It connects the Pacific with the Atlantic ocean, is 48 miles long and was constructed in 1855. This, as well as the several other roads of Colombia, is the property of private companies. A number of new roads have recently been surveyed. ”

“ RAILWAY STATION AT GATUN
The Panama Railroad is being equipped with stations and rolling stock of the first-class
Of course when a man has “made good” everybody is quick to discern in him the qualities which compel success. But Roosevelt must have been able to discover them in the still untested Goethals, for when the Stevens resignation reached Washington the President at once turned to him with the remark, “I’ve tried two civilians in the Canal and they’ve both quit. We can’t build the canal with a new chief engineer every year. ”

“ But perhaps the comparison that will best illustrate the immensity of the task of digging the ditch is that of the big Lidgerwood dirt car, on which so much of the spoil has been hauled away. Each car holds about 20 cubic yards of dirt, and 21 cars make a train. The material removed from the canal would fill a string of these cars reaching about three and a half times around the earth, and it would take a string of Panama Railroad engines reaching almost from New York to Honolulu to move them. ”

“ On the Atlantic coast, New Orleans plans to combine the traffic through the Canal with a great revival of the Mississippi River trade, while every port from Boston to Galveston claims to be in the most direct path to Panama and to have the best railroad facilities behind it. Over a hundred million dollars is being spent on each coast in dredging channels, building docks, and otherwise getting ready for Panama. The effects should be felt, in lower freight rates and prices, in the farthest inland parts of the United States. ”

“ It has installed along the Central and South American coasts a wireless telegraph service of the highest power and efficiency. It has constructed hundreds of miles of public roads, maintains public schools, and in other ways renders at its own expense the services which are presumed to fall on governments. The American financiers associated with it are now pushing to completion the Pan-American railroad which soon will connect New York with Panama by an all-rail route, and thus realize what once was esteemed an impractical dream. ”

“ Ten cents per pound continued to be the freight charge for years. The road made vast profits, and by a combination of rates with the steamship companies maintained a monopoly of travel. A few years after the completion of the railroad the pack-train men and outlaws, deprived of their plunder by the road, became very active as brigands, and on one occasion perpetrated a riot that cost sixteen Americans their lives and brought the United States and Colombia to the verge of open rupture. ”

“ Goethals reckons that there will be for the Canal alone about 2700. If the Panama Railroad organization should be kept up to its present strength there will be in all about 7700 men employed. This is altogether unlikely however. The railroad will no longer have the construction work and débris of the Canal to carry, and the ships will take much of its [354] commercial business away. During the construction period the wages paid were as follows:
The minimum wage of a gold employee is $75 a month ”

“ Operating in conjunction with the purchasing department in the United States, the Quartermaster’s Department secures all supplies needed for construction and other purposes, and makes purchases of material on the Isthmus when required.
The common labor force of the Commission and Panama Railroad is more than 25,000 men, and consists of about 6,000 Spaniards, with a few Italians, the remainder being from the West Indies. The Spaniard is the best worker, although he objects to working in water. The total number on the pay rolls will average more than 30,000. ”

“ Hitherto the railways have had to compete with only three alternative routes: (1) the all-sea route round Cape Horn for sailers, and through Magellan Straits for steamers; (2) the route via Panama, with railroad transit over the isthmus; (3) the route via Tehuantepec, with railroad transit over that isthmus from Puerto Mexico on the Gulf to Salina Cruz on the Pacific. The new canal will be a much more formidable competitor. ”

“ Part of the spoil aided in the rebuilding of the Panama Railroad; the27 rock from Empire and Bas Obispo went to Gatun for the dam, and some material was hauled to Balboa on the Pacific and was there used in reclaiming ground and in building a breakwater in Panama Bay to cut off silt-bearing currents which were filling up the excavated channel. It has been built out about 2 miles by dumping from a trestle built for the purpose. One mile more remains to be built. ”

“ The Republic of Panama grants to the United States in perpetuity a monopoly for the construction, maintenance and operation of any system of communication by means of canal or railroad across its territory between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific ocean. ”

“ The railroad line of development will be from Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic slope to David on the Pacific coast. Bocas del Toro will reach the Canal Zone by a railway through the banana-producing lands, and David in time may be connected with Panama.
In the general sense the prosperity of the Isthmus for many years depends more on the excavation work and on the international commerce than on its internal resources. It is this which will swell the trade of $2,000,000 or $2,500,000 annually to greater figures. Yet the waterway is the sure harbinger of the exploitation of the productive founts. ”

“ The transit charges, by the Nicaragua route, are fifteen cents per pound; this is invariably extra, even if one has a transit passage-ticket, which are issued at a charge of about $25. A limited amount of baggage is taken down the Atlantic and up the Pacific free, but not across. Passengers taking the Panama route, are now landed at Aspinwall (Navy Bay) , thence by railroad to Miller’s Station, saving thirty miles of river travel; thence in a row-boat to Gorgona, where mules are stationed in abundance to transport to Panama, twenty-five miles distant. ”

“ Except for a rough overland trail to Costa Rica, the Canal Zone is virtually an island, surrounded on two sides by water and on the other two by the jungle. Proposals have been made for a railroad to run from Panama City to David, the capital of the Province of Chiriqui, and for another through the San Blas country to South America, but there is small probability of their being built in the immediate future. Any railroad crossing the Canal will have to build an expensive bridge between Gold Hill and Contractor's Hill, high enough to clear the masts of the tallest ships. ”

“ The government which runs this railroad and steamship line doesn’t confine its activity to big things. It will wash a shirt for one of its Canal employees at about half the price that John Chinaman doing business nearby would charge, press his clothing, or it will send a man into your home—if you live in the Zone—to chloroform any stray mosquitoes lurking there and convey them away in a bottle. It will house in an electric-lighted, wire-screened tenement, a Jamaica negro who at home lived in a basket-work shack, plastered with mud and thatched with palmetto leaves. ”

“ April 25.—Beef Trust sends papers and books wanted by the Chicago Grand Jury to Canada.
Secretary Taft announces that the Government’s acquisition of the Panama Railway was not for the purpose of affecting railroad or ocean rates, but for the purpose of acquiring an instrument with which to construct the canal.
Eight thousand men are now employed on the Panama Canal, and this force is being added to at the rate of 800 to 1,000 per month.
The Attorney-General holds that the agreement between the Government and certain railroads for rebates is valid. ”

“ The Gulf of Panama and the ocean for a great distance to the westward from its mouth are notorious for their freedom from all breezes; the gulf lies, indeed, in the equatorial belt of calms, and sailing-vessels can never make much use of the port of Panama. Aspinwall or Colon, on the Atlantic side, has no true port whatever. As long, however, as the question is merely one of railroad and steamship traffic, Panama may hold its own against the other isthmus cities; but when the canal is cut, the selected spot must be one that shall be beyond the reach of calms—in Nicaragua or Mexico. ”

“ They have one train, which they run over and back daily, and a few cars, the daily operating expense footing up to $39, and one day’s income that I was down there, for freight and passengers, was $9,000. It beats any railroad on the globe for profit, according to its equipment and trackage.” The inference is that about $9,000 was earned daily with a daily outlay of about $39 and an original investment of almost nothing. If the word Panama means good fishing, this story is appropriately told about Panama. Nevertheless the railroad stock must be good, and Uncle Sam owns the stock. ”

“ Panama Canal. In June, 1904, Chief Engineer Wallace, Col. W. C. Gorgas, and others sailed to the Isthmus to pursue the great work which had been transferred to the United States, May 4, by the French. Digging in the Culebra Cut was continued, but the chief labor for two years and a half was to remedy the unsanitary conditions, to provide accommodations for the employees, to perfect the organization, to reconstruct and double-track the railroad, and to improve the terminal facilities: necessary preparations for the colossal task. ”