Building the bridge vs. laying the track

Rating: Null/10 (14 July 2009)

My big problem with this movie is simply this: when building a railroad why would you have two separate sets of engineers working independently (one to clear the jungle and lay the track and one to build the bridge to span a river)? And further, assuming that you do have two sets of engineers, should they not be in direct communication with each other so one can inform the other about any difficulties they are having? This would seem to be necessary if in the event that changes have to be made by the bridge builders then the track layers can adjust their calculations and vice versa.(Also, why wasn't the river bed checked for soundness BEFORE the first track was laid?) The entire premise of the movie rests on the idea that the train tracks on both sides of the river are being laid to converge at a very precise point (which is where the bridge has to be) and on a very precise (not too distant) date. When the British CO informs the Japanese CO that the location of the bridge needs to changed the Japanese CO should have complained about the massive delays this would cause in re-routing the track yet he does not. In fact, there is nothing to indicate that the track-layers know about the change in bridge location. Are we to assume the track-layers continued blithely laying track along the old route and yet still connected with the bridge at the new location? Ah, how marvelous is this movie magic!