The Birmingham age-herald., 1907-05-19
What the French are doing to open up greatest desert on earth

In this letter l shall deal only with tba railways of northwestern Africa and of several which the French are nroiecting across the Sahara. During tba mast few months I have traVeled nearly every mile of track in the re- zion of the Atlas, and have gone over the roads which are being pushed down into the desert, l am wrltlng these notes at Biskra, in the Sahara at tbe end of a railroad which takes one almost 200 miles south of the Mediterranean sea, and I have al ready inspected the military line which goes down into the desert far below this point along the borders of Mo rocco.
 It is generally claimed that the French are not good colonizers' ana that they are allowing their vast pos sessions, scattered here and there over the world outside France, to remain as they were when they obtained them This is not so as to Africa. The fer tile parts of Algeria an Tunisia are covered with railroads. There is a line about as long as from Philadel- phia to Chicago running from west 10 east through Algeria, with branch lines to the north and south, connect ing the ports with all parts of the Tell.
 AlReT1A alone nus DpW iipAN tii"i two thousand miles of railways, and it's railway receipts are between six and seven million dollars a year. There is a heavy freight traffic, and the second and third-class passen- ger cars are always well filled. There are sleeping coaches at high rates be- tween Oran and Algers, and one can go across a great part of north Africa by sleeper.
 In Tunisia, which is almost as big as the state of Illinois, there are now something like six hundred miles of railroad. They are mainly confined to the northern part of the country al though there are some lines running down the east coast and inland to fertilizer deposits which lie there. These roads are all French, and the Tunisian government has recently au- thorized large appropriations for their extensions.
 A part of the Algerian system be- longs to the government, and another part IS in the hands of some of the French railroad companies. This is so of the road from Gran to Algiers; it belongs to the Paris, Lyons and Mediterranean corporation, and it's chief officers are in France The Sa- hara lines are largely military and they could hardly exist without gov ernment support.
 Railway Travel In Algeria.
 Railway travel in northern Africa is far different from that of the United States. In comparison with us these peo- pie are still a century or so behind the times. Express trains do not make more than fifteen or twenty miles an hour, and the railroad clocks at the stations are purposely kept five minutes behind every other time In order that passengers may not get left
 The methods of ticket selling and bag gage checking are such that one should be at the train at least a quarter of an hour before starting and he will then have to wait his turn with a crowd of Arab soldiers and others. each of whom consumes at least two minutes at the ticket office and twice that time with the baggage master. If the ticket is a return, the agent figures out a reduction of 20 per cent off the regular fare and makes a memorandum of the amount on a ledger as well as on the ticket itself The ordinary tickets are some what like ours but the ''returns'N and excursion certificates are of the size of a legal document and quite as impos- ing.
 only about seventy pounds of baggage are allowed free, and everything must be weighed There Is a tax of 2 cents for checking baggage, and the agent reg isters the weight whether 1t Is below seventy pounds or not. The checks are not made of cardboard or brass, as in our country. They are merely receipts on a thin tough paper so arranged that one half of each receipt can be given to the passenger and the other doubled up and tied with a string to the baggage.