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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 1, Issue 2 (June, 1926)

The Railways of India

The Railways of India

“Whatever may be the verdict of posterity on British rule in India during the past fifty years,” says Engineering, “the railways constructed by us in the country during that time must cause any future impartial critic to be predisposed towards the British nation. Perhaps no other type of activity better reflects the perseverance and constructive genius of our race, for the history of Railway building in our great Eastern Empire contains innumerable records of the conquest of almost insuperable obstacles, material, climatic and politic. Since it has been recognised that the administrative qualities of the Romans were evident no less from their public works than from their legal code, we appear to be rightly entitled to some measure of appreciation for our accomplishment of providing a great undeveloped territory with a serviceable transport system.”

Not only in India has the perseverance and constructive genius of the British race revealed itself in the provision of serviceable railway transport systems. It is questionable if in any country of the world have greater physical obstacles yielded to the genius of railway engineers than in New Zealand, whose railway history, but half a century old, offers us on the one hand the solution of geological and mechanical problems of extraordinary difficulty, and on the other, the reality of a transportation system responsive to the demands of commerce in our own day, and prophetic of the great future before this Dominion.