The Elk County advocate. [volume] (Ridgway, Pa.) 1868-1883, 1871-10-26
The Engineering Feats of the Time.

1t is amusing (says the London Spec
tator) to witness the cheerful slacrity
with which engineers are ever propos-
ing grand schemes to bridge over the
distance on our globe, and the willing
ness with which the public give ear to
them. Whether it be to tunnel through
the Alps, or under the Straits of Dover,
or cut canals through the Isthmuses
which connect the northern and south
ern halves of the Old and New World,
or lay telegraph cables under the Allan
tic and Pacific, there is apparently no
limit to the fertility of the engineering
mind, or the mingled awe and delight
with which the majority of the people
read of the successive schemes which are
ventilated. At the present moment the
run is upon railroads to India, for
which the fullness of time seems to have
come.
The cutting of the Suez Canal lately
stirred the popular imagination on the
subject of Eastern communications, and
now the opening of the Mont Gents tun-
mel has not only had a similar influence,
but it has actually completed in the
most effective manner a through rail-
way communication with an extreme
southeastern point in Europe, on the
direct road to India. tits natural, there
fore, that engineers and the public
should be alike provoked by the long
interval interposed between Western
Europe and the East by the scantily-
peopled regions of the Turkish and Per-
sian empires, which misgovernment and
incapacity of race have prevented from
being filled up. The missing link is
perhaps greater than that which was
lately filled up between the Missouri
and the Pacific but the result, as these
matters are judged, with all the East on
one side, and all Europe on the other,
will be proportionally greater, and ac-
cordingly the schemes produced are in
unexampled abundance.
To begin with, there are the old pro-
posals for Euphrates Valley Railway,
to connect the Mediterranean and the
Persian Gulf, and shorten by a week the
present overland journey between Lon
don and India. But these are the most
moderate proposals. Constantinople in
year or two will be connected with
the European system, and there are
about half dozen schemes to join Con-
stantinople with India, some OF them to
make Euphrates Valley line section
of the highway to India, and others to
run through the north of Asia Minor and
Persia, passing through the Persian cap
ital of Teheran, and through Herat and
Candahar, on the line by which we have
been taught to expect the future inva-
sion of India by Russia, in which so
many people believe. There is even a
third class of schemes by which India is
to be reached through Russia, the Rus
SLAMS pushing branch from their south
ern railways across the Caucasus, and so
giving us road to Teheran by which
we may get to India as already des-
cribed.
And as if all these were not enough,
we have grand scheme for a railway
starting eastward from Trieste, skirting
the Turkish coast of the Adriatic, and
finally crossing the Salonica, from which
there would be short sea passage across
the Levant, and then railway to India
on the route of the Euphrates Valley
line, to be continued along the coast to
Kurrachee. Mrs. Burton has also come
forward with proposal this week, to
vary the ordinary routes suggested for
the Euphrates Valley line by devia-
ton which would "develop Syria, and
restore Baalbek and Palmyra to their
old Importance"
Such is a meagre list of the competing
projects which are offered, the very
cheapest to cost between eight and ten
millions, the most ambitious, forty mil
lions, and the average, which are strictly
limited to the construction of complete
railway between Constantinople and In
dia, between twenty and thirty millions.