HIGH LEVEL RAILWAYS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4125, 10 June 1874, Page 3

HIGH LEVEL RAILWAYS.

In noticing an account of a trip made in a construction train from Avequipa, over the Andes, the Scientific American says : “Among other places reached was Yilcomayo, 11,533 ft. above the level of the sea. The newspaper man lias reached these high altitudes. ‘As I write,’ says the tourist, ‘there lie before me copies of El Cuhhulano, a newspaper published at Puuo, and of Kl Jlevaldo , a newspaper published at Cusco, both of them being well printed and well written sheets, and both of them being published more than 12,000 ft. above the level of the sea. Nor is either of these the champion climhest of the newspaper world. At Cerro do Pasco they issue a very clever Gazette devoted to mining and the muses; and Ocrro de Pasco is 14,000 feet above tide water.’ Of Yilcomayo, the writer says:—‘Here, amid the supreme desolation of the Andes, at a height at which man in Europe does not dream of living, was a genuine railway village. There was an ‘American hotel,’ two stories high, with a piazza, and some forty or fifty rooms for the accommodation of the railway people. There were all the buildings, station-houses, machine-shop, enginehouses, coal-yards, required for a large load. There were the cabins of the laborers employed on the work, many hundreds of men, Chilians (the Yankees of South America), Bolivians, Peruvians, whites, ladiuos, Indians —a motley multitude, but superior, both in respect to capacity and conduct, to the average navvies of Europe and the United States. With the early morning, a further run of an hour at good speed brought ns to the actual summit of the road, at 14,585 feet above the sea level, and then we began to descend the Atlantic slope.’ ”