The daily morning journal and courier., 1904-12-08
THE SIBERIAN. HALLWAY.

From accounts we have received from a traveller who within the last month passed over the whole of the Si- .berian railway from Mukden to Euro pean Russia, it appears that the Rus sians are at present engaged in what is uothing less than properly completing the construction of the line and bring ing it into a condition fit to carry She heavy traffic with which it now has to cope. At the time 1t was opened, al- though many fine permanent bridges were erected over the larger rivers, many of the smaller bridges and eul- verts were merely temporary struc- lures of wood, which further were placed slightly out of alignment, so that the permanent bridges, to be erec- ted afterwards, should afford a straight run. The work of putting in iron spans on concrete piers instead of these tenn porary bridges is now being vigorously pushed forward, being rendered all the more necessary by the decay which rapidly attacks the soft pine which was originally used. Another detail of the equipment to which great attention is being devoted is the erection of water towers for supplying the engines with water. Formerly this was done by
 means of pumping engines placed in chambers sunk six or seven feet below the ground in order to protect the wa. ter from freezing, and, as the tops of the engine tenders are some ten feet above the rail level, the water had sometimes to be raised through total distance of twenty feet or more. These underground pumping stations are now being replaced at about forty places between Cheliabinsk and Kharbin by brick water-towers built up to a height of fifty-f1ve feet, so that the engine tenders may be readily filled by gravi- ty, To prevent the water from freez- ing in the tanks of these towers. they are packed with oakum and protected
 by roughly shaped logs, which are again enclosed with brick wall, the funnel which carries the smoke and steam from the pumping engine below being also carried up through the tanks to assist in maintaining the temperature.
 The existing permanent way requires continual attention. The rails are Iight-fifty or sixty pounds-and ade laid upon transverse wooden sleepers in ballast, which, for the most part, consist of black soil, without stone or gravel. The result is that subsidences are frequent, notwithstanding that the sleepers are placed unusually close to- gether. Then the soft pine of which the sleepers are made quickly rots, the more so since no preservative measures are adopted, and the necessity for fre- quent renewal is shown by the heaps of rotting sleepers that lie along the line.
 Of course every effort is being made to increase the capacity of the line to it's utmost. One of the great difficult ties encountered in this respect lies in the fact that the sidings at places where two trains going in different di- rections can cross each other were originally made so short as to be una ble to hold the long trains now being run. This difficulty was mininized as much as possible by making the vest ward bound trains short enough to go into the sidings and allowing east bound trains, with as many trucks as the engines could manage to run past them on the straight; but a radical cure is now being sought by building new sidings on the opposite side of the line to the old ones, of length sufficient to accommodate a train, or even two trains of any length, These sidings are about twenty miles apart on the aver
 age, anl to facilitate their construction the points to form their functions with the existing lines are being shipped out