SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 25, 18 June 1903, Page 2

SKETCHES OF TRAVEL

« XI.—ON THE CARS

By the Editor

An educated and patriotic Egyptian (so the story runs) was ' doing ' the sights and scenes of Great Britain. With a sense of national pride he remarked to an English fellow tourist : ' You have no wonderful hieroglyphics in your country, sir — no mysterious inscriptions, no undecipherable relics of an ancient literature- whose secrets the wise men of the world have tried for ages to discover.' ' No,' said the Briton despondingly, 'we haven't any of those things. But,' he added, brightening up as a happy thought struck him, ' we've got our " Railway Guides." ' This was, I think, practically the idea that Tennyson had of the railway time tables of his native country He regarded them as unreadable nddles Lord Salisbury is-, I understand, m the same case He frankly ' gu\s them up ' and lelies for information on Ins body-ser\ ant or the expectant porter. Much of the undoubted contusion in those melancholy publications is caused by the difficulty of distinguishing between the hours that are a.m. and those that are ]) in Some railway corporations endea\ or to surmount this difficulty by printing the ' night ' hours — fiom G pin. to 6 am — in blacker figures. This is an instalment ol mercy and justice to the puzzled tra\eller. According to Sir Boyle Roche's philosophy, 'the best way to avoid a difficulty is to meet it plump.' '1 ho Italian railway authorties met squarely the difficulty of distinguishing between the twin sets of twelve hours of day and twelve of night by an expedient of (.banning simplicity : they adopted outright tho

Twenty-four Hour Sj stem of the astronomeis. By this arrangement the only one o'clock in the time-table is that which begins, as now, next after the witching hour of midnight. The hours run on, as under the old system, to twelve o'clock, which is, as now, noontide And hero beginneth the new departure : Our one o'clock in the afternoon is thirteen o'clock in Italy ; our two j> in is fourteen o'clock with them , and so on to midnight, which is twenty-four o'clock. The convenience of the twentyfour hour system in the making- up of railway timetables is too obvious to be insisted on Belgium has adopted it So has Western Canada. So have many of the American lailroad corporations, and I understand it is being introduced into India. A \ cry little experience s\, flues to give one an easy famihaiity with the system and a waim appreciation of the complete absence of tho puzzling method ol time-table construction which sends \ou back a pa,ge or two to calculate whether the ' 4.10 ' at which jour tiam is- tuned to start spells the pleasant alternoon of to-day or a knock at your door and an early and uncomfortable rise in the wee sma' hours o! to-morrow's probably bitter winter morning.

It vma fourteen o'clock (2 p.m.) of a pleasant April day last year as I moved out in the East-bound Express from the handsome station of Vancouver. For over an hour we rolled smoothly along the southern shores of Burrard Inlet, in the pleasant companionship of transPacific fellow-passengers and of the friendly now acquaintances that one finds so helpful and informing both on and off the cars, in every part of America. Beyond the long Inlet rose the white-tipped summits of the Cascade Ranges — their vast forms and varied hues of pinu and cedar, grey rock, brown and ruddy earth, and glistening, sunlit snow-caps doubled in the smooth mirror of the deep and placid waters below. Here and there a loud humming bourdon came through the trees, and busy sawmills and their satellite villages and camps appeared in openings along the heavily wooded shores. Dingy ocean tramps and tall-masted sailing craft were ' hung up ' by their wharves, swallowing cargoes of softwood, which they disgorge in the East, in Australia, and away at the ends of the earth. Of hardwood there is none : it has to be imported from Australia and elsewhere. The pleasant odor of pine was in the air as we passed through areas of forest containing gigantic trees, some of which reached a corpulent girth of twenty to thirty feet and more, while their dark-green scalps soared (as we were informed and believe) to over two hundred feet : it seemed as if ' Their slender tops Were close against the sky.' There was forest, forest everywhere — in the level tracts of rich, valley-land, up the long, steep sweep of tho mountains, on rocky shelves and ledges, in ©very place where clustering trees could find a foothold and elbowroom, till they dwarfed and thinned out far above on the wind-swept slopes and the sides of the long gullies where tho snow lay deep. Everywhere we saw the melancholy black track of the Devastating- Fires that wreak such wholesale destruction among the forests of British Columibjia. Here it is a narrow track of scorched trees ' done brown ' by the flames ; there a binned patch that looked amidst the healthy vegetation around a disfigurement like that which a spreading lupus is on the human face ; further on we were whizzing along for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes through miles of blackened stems and forest desolation far more extensive than anything I have ever witnessed in the Australian bush. There were ages of unexhausted work for axe and saw in those noble forest-lands of British Columbia but for the fearful levy that fire makes upon the tree-life of tho province. Thirteen miles out from Vancouver we pulled up for a brief space at Port Moody. As stated in a previous sketch, this was the first western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It stands between green trees and deep water where Burrard Inlet, so to speak, knocks its head against the rock-ribbed hills and can squeeze its way no farther. There we had— for the time — our last look at the salt waters of the Pacific. Once out of Port Moody wo rumbled over a low ridpe, crossed tho broad and rolling yellow flood of the Pitt River, caught a glorious glimpse of the rugged land of mountain and lake from which it issues, went humming along through broad flats and rich ploughed lands, past gardens and orchards, and by emerald pastures where the fat kino browsed. It was the rich, open valley of Canada's g,reat salmon-river, The Fraser, and down there its flats, like its waters, are among the precious assets of British. Columbia. At Hammond, twenty-three miles from Vancouver, we touched its waters. From there the music of its quiet swish or busy hum or noisy roar was to keep time to the clinky-clank of our wheels for 130 miles of our eastward journey. Here and further along the route you see the massive, snowy, cone-headed summit of Mount Baker. It soars to a height of 14,000 feet above the level of the railway track, and, though seeming near, is in reality some sixty or seventy miles away and across the frontier in the Washington State. As we proceed we pass sawmills and ever more sawmills and shingle-factories, with their alert and active little Japanese employees. Along tho railroad track the little yellow men act as navvies and line-repairers, and right sturdily they wield pick and shovel and iron bar. In one place in the otherwise straight-line bank of the Fraser, the yellow land bulges suddenly out into the yellow water, forming, a squat peninsula that is thickly planted with willows, alders, and trailing plants such as that which—on the principle of ' lucus* a non lucendo ' —

Is named the ' blackjberry • because Its edible berries are not black. The place is known as 'The Great Slip.' In 1879 some twenty acres of bank broke loose, slid rapidly down its greasy substratum, and took a mad header into the Fraser. This mighty plunge raised a moving wall of water like an infant tidal wave or a giant ' bore ' on the Seine. It crossed with a rush to the other side, dashed far up the shore, and drowned or pounded the souls out of sundry settlers that had not time or thought to get out of its way. That was some years before a railway line or a locomotive was seen in British Columbia. Engineering skill now keeps the track by the Fraser's banks as sound t>nd safe as rock-bed. The Canadian Pacific Company's permanent way is a model of careful building and probably justifies the boast that it is ' the best new line over constructed on the American Continent.' The Swiss railway lines have always seemed to me to be models of what tracks and bridges should be in countries of torrents, landslips, snowslides, and tall mountains. In many respects the Canadian Pacific railway track surpasses those of the little tourist-ridden republic : in. ita snow-sheds, in the enormous and seemingly unnecessary strength of its bridges— solid structures of steel resting on massive masonry piers ; in the (Unusual width of its cuttings ; in the weight and closeness of its ties (sleepers, as we call them) ; and in the many appliances to secure the Safety of Passengers —the patrols through the mountains ; the elaborate nuard-rail system at all bridges ; the use of heavy steel rails, laid with angle splices of double the ordinary strength ; and (among other things) the use of a patent safety switch at all turn-outs from the main track. This ingenious contrivance automatically provents the possibility of derailment from a misplaced switch. The Canadian Pacific Company have not yet adopted the costly dust-preventing system of the London and North-Western main line to Carlisle — ballasting; with clean granite chippings instead of cinders. But their permanent way is, perhaps, at least as pood as the best that has been constructed since (as Artemus Ward puts it) ♦he iron horse was foaled. Accidents to passengers are few and very far between on the Canadian Pacific Riailway — so rare, indeed, as to justify to some extent the emphatic statement of Sir Edward Watkin, that railway travelling is about the safest of all occupations. ' I have proved,' said Sir Edward some two or three years ago, after quoting a rood of statistics, ' that railway travelling is safer than walking or driving, than going up and down stairs, than watching agricultural machinery, and even safer than eating, because it is a fact that more people choke themselves while performing that net in England alone than are killed on all the railways of the United Kingdom.' The problem of economical railroad haulage is being dealt with in the United States and Canada in two strangely opposite ways. In the east they are trying,, with apparently good results, to solve the difficulty by tho principle of small and self-contained units. — trains of one or two vehicles run by small electric motors. Elsewhere, and especially in the wide and expansive west, the tendency is towards heavier and ever heavier engines and bigger loads. A few years ago the NorthEastern Railway Company (England) adopted giant locomotives, after the American fashion, for working the heavy mineral traffic over tho heavy gradient of the Stainmore summit to the Furness and West Cumberland districts. Each locomotive may be seen hauling as many as sixty empty wagons — a train of nearly a quarter of a mile long. In the great iron-mining district of Ishpeming (Michigan) I have seen powerful engines thundering over the tracks with processions of trucks equally long drawn out. On the Canadian Pacific Railway Engines of Enormous Power are employed. They have soft, cooing whistleg that will not startle you out of sleep at night ; but, as if to compensate for this delicate attention, every locomotive in Canada (and in the United States as well) bears astride its round back a big brass bell. With the aid of a rope running into the ' cab,' the stoker sets it banging and clanging and swinging almost heels over head as the train passes over level crossings or crawls at the rate of four miles an hour when approaching or leaving the depot (or railway station, which, in the language of North America is pronounced ' dee-po*). Our express consisted of a heavy engine and ten very long cars (sometimes called ' coaches,' never ' carriages'). Each was some ninety-four tons in weight. Sir William Van Home, the controlling spirit, of the Cana-

dian Pacific Railway, was, I believe, the man who inaugurated the era of papier-mache railway wheels. But the wheels on all the rolling stock on their passenger trains are massive things of Krupp steel, forty inches in diameter. One of the eleven units of which cur train was made up was a baggage car. Our term is ' luggage van ' ; but ' luggage ' and ' van ' are terms that would be a Hebrew speech on American railroads (I may here .remark that ' railway ' is a word which, though known in Canada, seems to be never used in the United States) Another important item in our long train was the

Dining Car : a lofty and sumptuously appointed structure where elaborate and admirably served meals, including all the ■delicacies of the passing season, are provided at the extremely moderate charge of 75 cents (three shillings). The service is briskly carried on, as at sea, by welltrained stewards in blue uniforms, generously spangled over with brass buttons. Acquainted as I am with the Pleiocene methods of Australian and New Zealand dining cars, it was, and it still remains, a mystery to me how such a .refined and finished service could be provided, and at such a figure, in the restricted space of a passengertrain. In one or two places along the route we dined in the Company's handsome chalets where the mountain track was too steep for the big, grunting engine— or a pair of them— to drag the heavy extra weight ol the dining-car. Eight passenger cars completed our equipment. Most of these were sleeping cars : polished mahogany outside ; inside they are exquisitely finished with rich carvings, gilding, soft carpets, plush upholstering, silk blinds to the broad, high windows ; at night they are transformed by the movements of many hinges, levers, etc., into broad and comfortable sleeping berths, in two tiers, one over the other ; and mattresses, sheets, blankets, curtains, etc., are drawn by the attendant negro out of all sorts of compact cunning hiding places in a manner that recalls the familiar old hat-trick of the conjurer of one's youthful days. There is one negro to each ' sleeper '—that is,

Sleeping Car. He is a gentle autocrat, puts his charges early to bed — beginning to lower and arrange the berths punctually at nine p.m., finishing with his less amenable passengers at or before ten, bringing a ladder and holding it while \ou scramble into your roost (if it happens to be a top one), polishing your boots with a lordly air, and brushing your coat assiduously — with one eye on the nap and the other on j our fol> — what time you aie preparing to leave the car There were some two second-class (otherwise known as ' Colonist ') sleeping cars — an\ and wellimished, and on the general plan of the ordinary sleeping cars described abo\e. A ' tourist car ' completed the equipment It is a compromise between the ' Colonist ' and the luxurious sleeping car, is in charge of a sable porter, and provides, at a small charge, comloitable accommodation, by day and night, for a huge class of tia\ellois.

On the Canadian and Anici ican railroads theie are no ' pens ' like the stuffy compartments that aie customary on almost all our lines throughout Australasia on mojunt by tnd platforms, and all the cai s communicate by a long passage that runs thiough the middle ot each (like some of those in use on our New Zealand lines), so that the tram, whether in motion or standing still, can be

Tra\ersed f i om Knd to Fnd Raised station platforms are almost unknown in Amei ua. You mount from, and dismount to, the level oi the tails and keep your weather eve and -\ our host tar optn lotshunting engines and the clanging and the ]anghnt> ot their bells. Each car end is pioMded with fixed steps that bring you within a modest little lump of motherearth. The dusky autociat who leigns monaich ot all he surveys in the ' sleeper ' is alwa\s smilingly leadv with movable supplement.it y steps that aie kept in stock in his den for the benefit of the old, the ciippled, the rheumatic, the timid, and the podgy Two woodi-n trapdoors or flaps — usually he'd vpright by a c.vtch — can be made to fall forward on ledges and bi idee the steps at each side of the car-end When this is done t hey form a firm and continuous door with the.raiM'd poitmn of the car-platform Two plate-g'ass t'oois ( noi ma Wv held by stout catches against what I n ay teim the hack wall of the car 1 * are then i el< a .ed '\ he.\ swing out so as to form continuations ol the sides of the car, and thi's the (nd plat term becomes a sheltered alco\e, open only to the iear, and l.iigo enough for seven or eight peisons to eiiiov the slutting panorama of mountain and lake and hut as the tiam goes whirling along. At one end of each car is a sihok-

■ng room ; at each end a lavatory. In the passage close to the door that leads to each end platform, are heavy axes and other wrecking tools, first aid necessaries, and other useful provisions in case of accident Just over them is a le\er by pulline- which the conductor, the colored attendant, or any passenger can at once

Apply the Air-brakes to every flying wheel and bring the whole train in a brief space to a complete standstill 1 saw it used', and with great promptitude, just once upon our- eastward journey, uht-n cl chunk of lock came tumbling down tho steep bank of the Beaver and struck the wheels of tho car in which I sat— the hindmost one— near where one of the world's loftiest railway bridge crosses the deep gully ot Stony Creek. No harm came of the incident, and we were soon once more upon our way rejoicing. The sides of the cars are mostly window. ' Each seat has an electric bell-push. You press the button and the dark attendant is promptly by your side to minister to your wants. In each car there are hotel directories of Canada and the United States ; and time-tables, small guide books, etc., are supplied free to passengers. The cars are well lighted by massive and handsome lamps set high abio\e you in the arched top of the waggon-roof. A comfortable temperature of 62 degrees is kept up throughout the train by steam-pipes from the boiler They keep \ou warm. The inevitable nickel-plated cylindrical vessel of ice-water at each end of the car keeps you cool. Ice-water, like beer and vodka, is an acquired taste. Children in their normal state don't cry for it. And our unaccustomed southern palate prefers tho absence to the presence of ice when we take water in a raw state from the nickeled tap or indulge m the fresh luxury of a cup of cold Adam from the next purling stream.' But the Canadians and Americans are grievously addicted to douching their ' innards ' with water chilled almost to the freezing point with chunks of ice.

Day by day as we went puffing along in the merry sunshine an epitome of the world's latest news was typewritten and posted up or passed from hand to hand through the train.

A Uniformed Newsboy accompanies each train He walks nonchalantly up and down the cais and drops magazines, no^ els, papers, etc., beside you m a lordly way Five minutes later he is back again to return the unhout-ht literature to his pack and pick lip the coins for those of his wares that \ou are unwilling to relinquish Then he \anishes with his belongings into some mysterious lair m the tram that no man seems to haAe }vt disco-veied Half an hour later he emerges again— this tune with pla\ mg cards, illustrated postal cards, cigars, c marettos, and tobacco He goes beneath the surface of things rnte moie, but reappears with iresh samples from his nnsteiious hoard — fruit, candies (so ' lollies ' or sweetmeats are called all o\er Amenta's great -North), and chewing-gum — to which, however, Canadians are not so inordinately devoted as then neighbois acrots their southern border

And so \ou pass the golden hours on j our long train 'oiuncN as on sea- dining, sleeping, r eading, <_cm\ ersing ; U'.t with this world ol diffeience — \ou can enjoy lumping oil and on at every stopping depot, and the e\or-\ ar\\ ing and glonoi.s s-ccneiy through which the fl\ ing wheels wlinl \ou pre\ents the journey e\oi becoming monotonous, as a week or two of a life on the ocean wa\e is all too apt to be

(To be < ontimied )

\n ' Ex-Or.uisrernnn,' writing from Ballarat to the Melbourne ' Tribune ' in reieience to a recent meeting of Oiangemtn in that town, sa\s that 20 ,\eais ago "the combined Orange and I'iotestant Alliance Societies attempt ml to erect an (Manure h.ill m l'.alhyiat. r J hey lu'ld a w ell-.Mlv <r( lsed met ting lor the object, and real-I'-nd the magnificent sum ot ■£.'< 12s (id '\ he hall is still unbuilt ll foul epithets were guineas, the lodgemen could h,i\o built a cit\ eie this , but talk is pioverbl.illv cheap On the other hand, the decadent Catholics h.iH' (icr example) just finished a splendid hall, costing about £.7000, a new* chapel at Nazareth ITouse, costing about -LHono, and at c now ly.ulding a new piesbytery m DawsiMi street 1o cost abort £0(1(10 Hundieris of ii «^t,"st ant woil.nu-n aie employed in these buildings, owni^ to Catholic pictfii'ss actnity, and zeal for the glory ol Cod '