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Show from P,rto Llmon, Costa Rca to ' cnrltal city. San Jose bogun hn ' , RlS Ploneered the b lldlng of railroads In several other Central American repubSS These were epics of achievement nn early demonstration of the Good Neighbor" policy, in which American railroad pioneers pushed push-ed back jungles and overcame mountains, to contribute their share to the promotion of a genuine genu-ine spirit of inter-American co-operation. KHOWYOUR I vjy NEIGHBOR vkVK K VU.KOAl) builders V IN LATIN AMERICA . fl,w weoks ago freight trains. ' , aCross the newly completed "'fltloiml railroad bridge span-' span-' the Siichiate river, uniting n"lf -o and Guatemala by rail and lfNK.i,,1, railroad connections (Xt tit United States deep into (rom i"c . Ltral Amenca. The erection of this bridge, mak-. mak-. ' noible the transportation to f united States of the products , . vast tropical region, recalls Jh story of railroad building Lu'hout Latin America, and the Trine feats, courageous persever-d persever-d and technical skill which en-engineers en-engineers to conquer mounts, moun-ts, rivers, jungles and deserts. v'"Ul Americans were leaders in Jany of these undertakings. Prominent among them was Wil-,:,, Wil-,:,, Wheelwright, who was born Newburvport, Mass., in 1798. fffceelwrlght early took to the In 1826 he was shipwrecked f?ar Quilmas, Argentina, and, impressed im-pressed with the possibilities for enterprise, decided to remain. He laid the groundwork for Argentina's Argen-tina's vast network of rails. He built the first really important line in the country, from Cordoba to Rosario, a distance of 246 miles. This far-sighted Yankee was the irst to contemplate the building of the Trans-Andean railway to connect con-nect Argentina and Chile, but death intervened in 1871. Wheelwright also built what is probably the oldest existing railroad in Latin America, from the port of Caldera to the coal mines of Copiano in Chile, completed in 1849. He started start-ed a road from Valparaiso to the capital city, Santiago, but it was left to another Yankee engineer, Henry Meiggs, to finish. Henry Meiggs went from his home town of Catskill, N. Y., to California in the gold rush of '49 and later shipped south to Chile for further adventure. He got the contract con-tract for the railroad Wheelwright had begun, and carried it to completion com-pletion in less than two years. Meiggs next turned north to Peru and began work on the Central Railway in 1870. This line starts at the port of Callao, and in a distance dis-tance of 106 miles reaches an elevation ele-vation of 15,865 feet, the greatest height reached by any standard-gauge standard-gauge railroad in the world. Chile has erected monuments to Wheelwright and Meiggs, Peru to Meiggs, and Argentina to Wheelwright. Wheel-wright. Time was the essence when' the world was beating a path to California Cali-fornia in 1849. Each day might mean millions. Panama was the favored route, and in 1849 a group of North Americans, John L. Stephens, Ste-phens, John C. Trautwine, and others, succeeded in geting a contract con-tract to build a line from the Atlantic At-lantic to the Pacific. It runs through dense tropical jungles, which in some places form an almost al-most impenetrable green wall of vegetation. Malaria felled workers the hundreds. The 50-mile stretch was finished in 1855 at a cost of $140,000 a mile, making it the first transcontinental railroad Is the Americas. Rivaling these achievements in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Panama, Pana-ma, were the construction of the Hadeira-Mamore railroad in the heart of South America, also under tte direction of the North American Ameri-can engineers; the building of the Guayaquil-Quito Railroad in Ecuador; Ecua-dor; the construction of the line |