RAILWAY MARVELS OF THE FUTURE.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIII, Issue 116, 17 May 1902, Page 6 (Supplement)

RAILWAY MARVELS OF THE FUTURE.

JULES VERNE'S PREDICTIONS

Our one-year-old century will see things which even the boldest minds cannot anticipate. The period which now opens will particularly revel in what I would call "scientific sorcery." The annoying feature of our age has been the timid use we made of all we knew. Indeed, it is throughout history that one is struck with the timidity o£ the human race, its uncanny reluctance to break from old ways, its mistrust of what does not yet exist. Think of this, for instance. VS^e have found these two admirable contrivances, the elevator and the telephone. Yet today the home telepho-ne is available to but one person in ten thousand; and the domestic elevator is still ■ the exclusive apanage of the wealthy. Reasonably, it |is Impossible to say why. Fortunately, the generations now maturing, who will soon have totally replaced the men now in charge of the affairs of life, are being educated out of their prejudices. They do not fear. The twentieth century will be bold—'an era of vast conceptions and realisations.' All the efforts in ages of individual and ill-re-warded research are at last to give their full results. Let another brief period elapse, and the telephone and telegraph will seem foolishly* inadequate. Your railways of today will be laughed at as dangerous, noisy, desperately slow eonveyances--as pitiable beside the railways that are coming as are now in out eyes Fulton's steamboat and Stephenson's locomotive. The automobile will not eventually supplant the railroad. The two have very distinct fields of usefulness. On rails only will the greatest speed demanded in' the future (that is", 200 to 300 miles an hour) be possible. The railroad will serve for the greater arteries of traffic. The automobile lines will be as the tiny blood vessels of our body, and carry the most intense life of civilisation into the most remote rural districts. Indeed, I foresee unusual activity in railroading. First, there are the great lines to be built. Even when connection was established, not so many years ego, between the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts through the United States, nobody would admit the possibility of the Trans-Siber-ian when I launched the idea of it. Today the Trans-Siberian, is finished. Well, there are other of those great highways still needed. Within 15 years they may all be. built We may count the line from Capetown to Cairo to be as good as finished, for Cecil Rhodes and ■the Kaiser have set their minds on it. Next (or will it be first?) Alexandria will surely be connected along the northern coast with the shore of Algeria. This will soon extend on the one hand to Jerusalem, Beirout, Smyra, and Constantinople; the tunnel that must.be dug under Gibraltar, so that London and Paris will be within a few hours' ride from any point in Africa. That implies also the tunnelling of the Channel; a mere bagatelle. Why, within 20 years England will be connected by tunnel not only with France, but with Belgium and Ireland. You are young. You will see more wonderful things than those in the tunnelling business. Why, there is a man who offers to tuunel the Atlantic from New York to Brest. That man is not so insane as many people will believe. He calculated that it could be done in thirty years' time, if the necessary millions were there. Money is iiever an obstacle when something is needed, and future engineers could easily reduce the thirty years by two-thirds. In Asia two most valuable railroads are left to British or Russian enterprise—one from Bombay to Constantinople, clipping right -through Baluchistan and Persia; the other a mere link from Peshawar to Bokhara via Kabul in Afghanistan. In America, of course, there will be the great North and South Railway, through Mexico and the Isthmus. It will go to Buenos Ayres first, with one branch through the rich garden, Brazil, to Rio de Janiero, and another branch up to Venezuela. After that Peru, Ecuador, and the rest of those countries can be relied upon to build their own local spurs to get to the main road. When this is done a period of unheard-of industrial and commercial furore -will open for the United States. In South America, there is a limitless field of activity for ages to come. Personally, I know of at least three strong groups of men now studying the wr=ys and means of bringing train.3 across the Behrijig Narrows, which presently will be the only small gap between the Alaskan railways and the Trans-Siberian offshoots to the extreme point of Asia. To ferry trains across there is out of the question, because of the ice, but the Behring tunnel, too, will be built.

Note the amazing completeness of the scheme! A man from New York will be able to reach Pekin, Bombay, Constantinople, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, London, Cairo, or Capetown, go and spend the winter on the shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza, or travel to buy a lot of cowhides in Buenos Ayres—'all without a change of car—travelling throughout in the dainty comfort of palace trains by the side of which our present cramped and unpurified Pullmans will seem like cattle cars.

And thus, for the first time since creation, we poor humans will begin to see what this planet is like. Has it never struck you how little we know of this tiny globe on which our lot is cast? To how many of us is It given to look at what this earth does contain and to enjoy its variety? How many of us can hope to see the fjords of Norway, the harbour of Sydney, or to listen to the chattering monkeys in a moonlit orchiddecorated forest of Brazil.

Narrow as our cell is, we cannot even have the satisfaction of touching the four walls of it. How miserably restricted our existences have been!