CHAPTER V.

THIRD YEAR'S WORK (1876).

EARLY in 1876, the surveying staff was broken up. Causes that had been at work almost from the time of our arrival in Japan, had first modified the sanguine ideas of the Minister of Public Works, and then extinguished the hopes entertained by the Railway Department, of the future of railway development in the country. The revenue of the country, drawn almost entirely from the laborious farming class, and burdened with the maintenance of the now useless and practically obsolete caste of fighting men, could not be made to yield a surplus, to be sunk in works not immediately productive, at all commensurate with the extent and variety of the claims brought forward to aid from the Treasury; and the proposal of a new foreign loan for public works was firmly rejected by the Ministry. In principle, the strategic value of a line of communication across the island was admitted, and it was therefore determined that the links connecting Kiyōto with the lake, and the lake with the west coast, should be kept in remembrance as having the first claim in case the expenditure of capital should be again found possible in

that direction; but all else was indefinitely postponed. In fact, the extension from Kiyōto to Ōtsu, was only commenced in 1879, and the separate link between the lake and the sea in the following year.

The traffic on the first line opened, the suburban railway, connecting the capital Tōkiyō, with its port of Yokohama, which at the beginning had been very large, seemed to fall off unaccountably; and both that and the length already opened in 1874, between Kobe and Osaka, competed disadvantageously with the transport by water of all heavy goods. There was still the line between Ōsaka and Kiyōto in hand, without going any farther; and it was determined, after much vacillation, that the efforts of the Railway Department should be confined to this work for the time being.

The reduction of the engineering staff thus became necessary; and in the end of 1875 steps were taken to that end, some of them not well devised or immediately effective. We who had been appointed in 1873-4, with agreements for three years' employment, were not immediately concerned, though a tentative proposal came to us, suggesting that, "as men of honour, we probably should not desire to eat the bread of idleness." As, however, the possibility of such a state of things coming about as was now impending had been foreseen when we were appointed, and power reserved for the authorities to cancel our agreements without assigning any cause, upon payment of one year's salary, it was only necessary for us to remind them that the same was part of the consideration that had brought us to Japan, and thereupon leave them to take what course they

thought fit; whereupon, it no doubt occurred to them, that as the said agreements had only about a year to run, they might as well have our services for their money; and so we heard no more of it.

But in other directions reductions were ruthlessly carried out, and employés unprotected by agreements were set adrift. I mention this because it should not be supposed that the old staff did not include several whose assistance our Chief would willingly have retained had it been possible to do so. The character of the change of policy, and the pressure it brought upon the Railway Department, however, from the end of 1875 onward, may be estimated from the fact, that from a full strength of twenty-five engineers and draughtsmen, reduced by death and retirements to twenty-two at the date just referred to, and again subsequently by another death and two retirements while the reductions by intent were in progress, the remainder after the expiration of all the three years' agreements only numbered five, two of whom belonged to the old staff, and these two again, dying in 1877 and 1878, were, though much regretted, not replaced; at least, not by additional engineers.

In the course of these changes, first Jimmy went away to Yokohama, to take charge of the line between that place and Tōkiyō; then Billy was called upon to take a length on the Ōsaka-Kiyōto line; Ned and Claude were "lent" to the Mining Department, and went off to the extreme south; James compromised with the Department and went home; Christopher returned to his friends; and only Charlie was left behind in Kiyōto, awaiting expiration of his notice. I had

myself taken over charge of the railway under construction near Kiyōto, and had Charlie for a time as an assistant on the terminal station; but I was now, according to our official nomenclature, a " District Engineer "doing duty as a "Resident Engineer," my staff having evaporated, and except for seniority was just on a level with my old friend Tom, who was on the next length, and Billy who was half-way to Ōsaka. We all set to work to push forward our line to completion, and had a busy summer.

My length embraced a large quantity of bridging; arched flood openings to the extent of fifty spans of fifteen feet opening; girder flood openings and bridges, eleven spans of forty feet; two smaller girder bridges and numerous culverts; and the "big" bridge across the Katsura river, twelve spans of one hundred feet each. A great deal of work had been already done by my predecessor on the length, the earthworks and culverts being virtually complete, with about half the arched flood openings, and a good start made with the foundations of the rest of the bridging.

The key to the work was of course the big bridge, and considerable difficulty was encountered in sinking the foundation wells. The point of crossing was about half a dozen miles from the mouth of the gorge through which the river issued on to the plain, and the bed of the river was composed of gravel of all descriptions, from small shingle to good-sized boulders, brought down by the stream in times of flood, and more or less disturbed by every freshet. The actual bottom of the main stream was some ten feet below the level of the

surrounding country, but the spaces within the floodbanks that were dry except in time of flood and partly cultivated, had been raised by successive deposits to an average of six feet above the fields outside the banks, and were themselves submerged at times to the extent of several feet in depth, the top of the river bank being some ten or twelve feet above the enclosed ground and nearly twenty above the fields. The main channel was somewhat variable both in position and depth, and the whole deposit permeated by water, which, when the river rose, leaked out through the foot of the floodbank into the open country in many places, as the material of which the banks were composed was the same gravel, barely covered by vegetable soil, and strengthened by the roots of bamboos that grew all along the slopes. When the river was low, it drained the surrounding stratum of gravel, so that our foundation pits showed that the surface of the permeating water fell towards the channel; but this was reversed with every rise of the stream above an average level, when the surface of the water in the pits fell away from the river towards the flood-banks; and after the first few feet, all the excavation within the wells had to be done under water. My predecessor had devised a sort of circular dredge that acted very satisfactorily, but the difficulty was to keep the wells upright as they went down.

In many places the gravel was so hard, that the wells-great masses of brickwork twelve feet in outside diameter and two feet thick, bound together by iron rings and vertical rods-hung up on a mere shelf under the sharp cutting edge with which they were provided