THE INDIAN RAILWAY SYSTEM.

Globe, Volume XXI, Issue 1805, 3 December 1879, Page 3

THE INDIAN RAILWAY SYSTEM.

Now that the Indian Government finds itself face to face with a second winter campaign on the North-west Frontier, the most strenuous efforts are being made to push on the railway from Jhelum to the mouth of the Khyber. The energy which enabled our Transatlantic cousins to carry on the line which joins the Atlantic with the Pacific at the rate of a mile a day, is conspicuous by its absence in the Indian Public Works Department. Prom Jhelum to Bawul Pindi is but seventy miles, and yet we are told that six months must elapse before these two cantonments can be in direct railway communication. The country over which the rail will pass is difficult no doubt, intersected by innumerable ravines, but it presents no great engineering difficulties. Labor is cheap and plentiful, engineer officers ore to be had in abundance, and were the work divided into sections, it seems incredible that it could not bo completed in as many weeks as we are now told it will require months. The branch line to Kohat seems an unnecessary expenditure. In two months the road through the Kuram Talley to Oabul will be closed, owing to snow, and Sir P. Roberts will be compelled to fall back on the Khyber for supplies and reinforcements. The Kuram Valley can never became one of the main thoroughfares to Afghanistan, because the Shutargardan remains impassable for fully a third of a year. The garrison that will eventually remain in the valley will be merely sufficient to hold in check the predatory clans that line the heights on either side. It can never be used as a base for operations to the westward, owing to the certainty of climatic considerations necessitating a severance of all lines of communication; for the same reason it can never become a great commercial highway. The money spent on a railway to Kohat will bo money wasted. Every effort should be made to complete the line to the mouth of the Khyber, and now that the Sohan river is bridged at Bawul Pindi, there certainly is no adequate reason why trains should not be steaming into Jamrud by Christmas Day. A break must necessarily occur at Attock until the Indus is bridged, but plant could be readily ferried over the river, and the delay on this account would be trifling. Designs and estimates for this bridge have been lying pigeonholed for upwards of thirty years, so there is no reason why the work, too long delayed, should not now be immediately commenced. The question of fuel, fortunately, is of easy solution ; vast coalfields lie within easy reach of the Indus, and the scantiest encouragement from the Indian Government would induce private enterprise to develop# the inexhaustible resources of our Trans-Indus provinces, which, for three decades, have been left a virgin territory.