OCR Text |
Show ACROSS THE ANDES IN PALACE CAR. Tt Railroad to B Flnltnad In Thraa Gue-Kno" Qratfcaa. The rear lttW-i will probably be signal ' Ired in South America by a most inter esting event in eivil engineering and In international overland commerce. This j will be nothing less than the completion j and opening of another railroad Line from j the Atlantic to the r'aciric, and the tlrst across the couuneut of South America ! It is nineteen years since this work was I begun, and it is now conudentlT expect! I that it will be uuished by the beginning I of lSiiA. The road is to run from Duouo Ayres to Valparaiso, a distance of 71 miles. There axe now 640 miles of It finished at the Buenos Ayres end and eighty-two at the Valparaiso end. Of the ! remaining HU miles about one-third is ! practically complete, the rails being laid The passage of the Andes ia accomplished at the Cumbre pass, which is 18.015 feet above sea level The railroad, however does not reach the summit of the pass but pierces the mountains by means ot a tunnel more than throe miles long, al an elevation of lu.4o0 feet above the sea llils makes it one or the Highest, it not ; the highest, railroad in the world. There 1b nothing In Europe to compare with it The SL Gotlmrd raUroad is 8,788 feet high, and thai on the Kigi only attains an elovatiou of 8,7r3 feet. The grades ore, of course, very Bleep For a con siderable distance the rise itj more than 422 feet to the mile, or one foot in every twelve and a half. On this portion of the lino o rackrail is employed similar to those on the Harts and other mountain roads. One unfortunate feature of the road, i which will seriously impair its value, ii ' the diversity of gauges adopted. The ' different sections of the road havo been built by different companies, and each company has its own gauge. Thus there j are 640 miles from riuenos Ayres to Men-doza Men-doza of & feet (i inches gauge, the eighty-two eighty-two miles from Valparaiso to Santa Itosa ' are 4 feet Si inches gauge, and tho ro- j maining 149 miles from Mendoza to Banta Rosa are leing laid tn tho narrow gauge of one metro. Thus, even when j the road ib finished, ttwlll nut be possible : to run a train through from end to end I The seriousness of the defect is now ap- predated, however, and it is probable I that steps will be taken to make the 1 gauge uniform. The opening of the transandean roil- rood will do away with a great deal of : the navigation around Cape Horn. which has been the only means of commerce between the east and west coasts of South America, It will also, of course, prove of enormous benefit In other ways to loth Chili and the River Plate countries. Especially it will give the coal and copper cop-per and other products of the mines of Chili a splendid market iu the Argentine Republic: and it will allow tho produce of tho fertile farms in the latter country to have better access to the poorly supplied sup-plied markets of the Pacific coast. And the productiveness of the land in the valley val-ley of the River Piute seems to have no limit. The soil greatly resembles that of the richest wheat districts of South Dakota, Da-kota, and in places that of the Nile delta. There are hundreds of miles of the richest rich-est black loam, fifteen or twenty feet deep. There are thousands of acres around Montevideo and Buenos Ayres 1 that have been under constant cultiva- tion for 200 years; in all that time no artificial ar-tificial fertilizer has tecn applied to tho oil, yet there is no perceptiblo failing in Its crop producing powers. There are nearly a thousand million acres of Buch land. The climate, too, Is most favorable. There is scarcely a week in tho year in, which outdoor work cannot be done on the farms. Blizzards are unknown, and even the bitter cold of the middle Atlantic At-lantic states is not experienced here. In summer the heat is great, but does not surpass that of New England. The only I defects of the climate are the irregular!-1 ties of the raiufalL There are some- j times droughts and sometimes floods. But this evil is being steadily overcome by Bystema of Irrigation and by wholesale whole-sale tree planting on the open plains. The Chilians have properly been nicknamed nick-named the "Yankees of South America." They do, indeed, exhibit the characteristic character-istic Yankee thrift and enterprise. But the Argentine Republic has of late years also become much like the United States, especially the western states. The enormous enor-mous immigration, amounting to hundreds hun-dreds of thousands annually, gives the people the same cosmopolitan character. The vast plains, devoted to wheat growing grow-ing and to cattle raising, remind one greatly of the prairies and plains of the United States. The opening of direct railroad commerce between the east and west coasts will effect a practical commercial com-mercial and industrial union between the nations. Chili will be the Now England Eng-land of South America, the mining and manufacturing region, while the River Plate country will correspond to the Mississippi valley as the great agricultural agricul-tural country of this continent. Cor. New York Tribune. |