seven miles away. The argonauts didn’t care. They drew money from their pockets. The railroad people said that they were not equipped yet to handle passengers; they had no coaches, only flatcars. So the miners-to-be scrambled aboard the flatcars, and in a teeming rain they were driven through the jungle as far as Gatun, where they could hire bongos and bongo paddlers. The line had made its first money.
The word got out, and skippers, as a matter of course, took to putting in at Limón rather than the chancier Chagres. Even seven miles of that highly uncomfortable river trip were something to save—and worth paying for. Moreover, new miles were being added.
In Wall Street—such a sensitive area!—it became much easier to move Panama Railroad Company stock.
The engineers in the field learned that they could charge just about anything they pleased—and get it. So they did.
The line was pushed on, mile after tortured mile, until it reached the Chagres River at Barbacoas, about halfway across the isthmus. Little bridges had been built before, but the Chagres at this point was about 300 feet wide, and the railroad called in a subcontractor.
The Chagres is a wily river, a river no man should turn his back upon, if he can help it, for in the time it can take him to snooze, and with no warning whatsoever, the Chagres can cease to be an amiable, lazy stream, another Meander, and become a raging torrent. It did this at Barbacoas; but it waited until the bridge had been finished, and then dramatically it removed that bridge.
The whole job had to be done over. The subcontractor quit. The railroad Company itself began to build the new bridge.
At long last the line was finished. There were many shorings-up to be done, bridges to be strengthened, sidings to be enlarged, but at least the two steel bands met one another—at a point near Panama City. There had been no ceremony at the start of the work, and there was virtually none to mark its completion. Everybody involved stayed on the job, and it was midnight of January 7, 1855, when the last section of rail was laid—in a pouring rain.
The Culebra Cut, for a time the terminus of the Panama Railroad
Americans often are twitted about their fondness for superlatives, but the Panama Railroad undoubtedly could claim a record collections of “most’s.”
It was the first railroad to unite two oceans.
It was the shortest major railroad in history—47.57 miles.
It charged the highest rates, both for freight and passengers. (The Standard regular fare—there were extras—was $25 one way. This came to more than 50^ a mile, another record.)
It was the most expensive railroad ever to be built. It had cost almost $8,000,000, which came to $168,000 a mile; yet because of the impatience of the gold seekers and the exorbitant rates that the railroad charged, it had taken in $2,000,000 even before it was finished; and when it was sold to French interests in 1880, a controlling share—not the whole line—fetched more than $18,000,000.
It had paid more and bigger dividends than any other railroad.
It had carried more treasure than any other railroad. Until the first real transcontinental line was finished in Utah with the driving of a golden spike, in 1869, the Panama Railroad carried by far the greatest part of the gold bullion shipped east from California. In the short period of its glory it carried more than $750,000,000 of this, and without losing a dollar.
Moreover, it had settled an ages-long dispute. The Pacific, men had always said, is higher than the Atlantic; but no two engineers or no two scientists could agree on how much higher. “Colonel” George M. Totten, the chief engineer of the Panama Railroad, in his final report in 1855 said that he had found the mean level of the Pacific to be between 0.14 and 0.75 feet higher than the mean level of the Atlantic. However, he attributed this to local, temporary conditions. Actually the two oceans are the same level.
The Route of the Panama Railroad
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