Part 37

“Fortune favored his scheme more than he had anticipated. At a boarding-house where he was temporarily lodged, he found that a boarder named Johnson was in very bad health, and not expected to live. Affecting an interest in him, and claiming to discover a relationship, he tended him carefully until the time of his death. The detective had a suspicion that the sick man was helped along, but of that there was no proof. Immediately after the death of the invalid, the telegram was sent, and the wife proceeded east, as before related. She had been at one time an actress, and was very good at simulating grief. She deceived all the relatives of her husband in the most complete manner. They thought her bowed down and broken-hearted with grief, when all the time she was doubtless laughing in her sleeve. The honest Johnson, whose name had been used without his knowledge or consent, was found, after the detective’s return, to have lived at St. Louis, the place to which he had first emigrated, and had gone thence to New Orleans. He was much surprised when he learned what had occurred, and positively denied ever having an insurance on his life, or on that of anybody else. I suppose the swindler Johnson is still in Australia, and trust that he will end his days there in peace and quiet—though I fear his success in this instance will embolden him to some other fraud. His operation was fairly, though not exceedingly profitable, as, after deducting the premiums for the first year of insurance, the expenses of his expedition, and the money he returned, he did not net more than ten thousand dollars by the operation.”

[Sidenote: HOW POLICIES ARE VITIATED.]

Some of the insurance companies insert in their policies an announcement that the policy becomes void if death results from execution on the gallows, or in any other legal way, or from suicide. On one occasion a man whose life was insured was killed in a duel, and the company refused to pay the policy, on the ground that the man died virtually by his own act. His adversary was known to be a dead shot. The lawyer of the company, after stating all the arguments to show that a man who goes a duelling is, for all practical purposes, a suicide, clinched his argument by declaring that a man who would go out with such an adversary might know beforehand that he would be killed, and therefore his death was voluntary. I believe the court did not sustain the claim of the company, but required the amount named in the policy to be paid to the heirs of the unfortunate duellist.

I have heard it argued by insurance men that, where a person insured takes to hard drinking, and dies from the effects of rum, he dies by his own hand, and the suicide clause exempts the insurance company. In some cases, I believe, this claim has been sustained; but it is now generally discarded. A few cases have occurred in the United States where men have insured their lives for the benefit of their families, and have then deliberately killed themselves. The insurance companies, in those cases, have resisted the payment of the claims; but, I believe, they have been generally, though, not always, allowed.

[Sidenote: POPULARITY OF SUICIDE IN CHINA.]

There are some countries in the world where an insurance company would be ruined in a very short time, if it paid the insurance claims of men who kill themselves. In China, for instance, let a company start upon this basis, and it would do a flourishing business for a short time. Men in China are much more ready than others to die for the benefit of their families or themselves; and a Chinese who could make a good thing by killing himself would be sure to do it. A company doing business in the way I have just stated would find, some pleasant morning, that about half of its policy-holders were dead, and the other half were making their preparations for blotting themselves out of existence. The Chinese loves his family, and would think he was doing a nice stroke of business by insuring his life for their benefit, and then, quietly bidding them good by, “handing in his checks.” If he could effect an insurance for a thousand dollars, he would spend a hundred in having a glorious spree, and leave nine hundred dollars to his afflicted widow.

[Sidenote: CHINESE SUBSTITUTES.]

The indifference of the Chinese to death may be well illustrated by an allusion to the substitute system, as practised in the Celestial Empire. Persons condemned to death for certain offences are allowed to die by a substitute. This would be utterly impossible in America, as one could nowhere buy a substitute who would be willing to die for a stipulated sum; but in the Celestial Empire it is easy enough to find a man who is ready to take the place of one accused of a crime and ordered to be executed. The real culprit sends a friend to make the negotiations. The broker can find a man for about six hundred dollars, half down, and the balance on the fulfilment of the contract. The cash is paid, and the time fixed for the execution, both of the contract and substitute. With the money in hand, the substitute assembles his friends, and they have a right royal spree. Everybody gets blind drunk on samshoo or opium, and when the money is all expended, the substitute bids farewell to his friends, and delivers himself up for sacrifice. He is led to the place of execution, where he drops on his knees. His head is bent forward, the executioner’s sword whizzes through the air, and the substitute is a head shorter by the operation. The culprit, who has thus satisfied the law by proxy, pays over the balance of the money to the widow of the departed; everything is lovely, and everybody is happy.

XXXIII.

RAILWAY TUNNELS.

TUNNELS AMONG THE ANCIENTS.—HOW THEY WERE MADE.—MODERN TUNNELS AND THEIR LENGTH.—LAUGHABLE INCIDENTS IN RAILWAY TUNNELS.—THE TWO LOVERS.—THE ANXIOUS FRENCHMAN.—ROBBERS.—THE HOOSAC TUNNEL.—ITS HISTORY.—THE AUTHOR’S VISIT.—NATURE AND PROGRESS OF THE WORK.—AN EXPLOSION.—ACCIDENT FROM NITRO-GLYCERINE.—THE CENTRAL SHAFT.—THE TERRIBLE CALAMITY OF 1867.

Quite recently I picked up a newspaper about thirty years old, and read in it an account of the great engineering difficulties which had been overcome in the construction of the Boston and Lowell Railway.

This road, twenty-five miles in length, was among the earliest constructed in America, there being less than half a dozen railway lines which are older. The account proceeded to say that the great obstacle was the deep cut through solid rock, near the city of Lowell; and I can remember, in my boyhood days, riding over this road, and as we reached the cut, the attention of passengers was called to it, and at least half our number projected their heads through the windows to look at the wonderful work. Three times was the work let out on contract, and twice did the contractors fail, one of them failing not only to complete the work, but to pay the men he employed. The third contractor succeeded, but I believe he made no money out of his speculation.

This once famous cut through solid rock is only a few hundred feet in length, and I think about forty feet in depth. It has dwarfed into almost microscopic insignificance by hundreds of other railway cuts in this country and in Europe.

Railway tunnels were at that day unknown, though tunnels existed in Europe for other purposes, some of them of very ancient date.

[Sidenote: LENGTH AND EXTENT OF TUNNELS.]

Tunnelling, in civil engineering, is an underground passage usually constructed for conducting a canal or road beneath elevated ground. In mining the term is also sometimes applied to horizontal excavations. Tunnels are more common in Europe upon railways and canals than in this country. In the United States the total length of tunnels is not more than one mile for every thousand miles of road. In Great Britain it is considered cheaper to tunnel through rocks than to make open cuts deeper than sixty feet. In England the Wood-head Tunnel exceeds three miles in length; and there is another on the London and North-western Railway nearly three miles long. Twelve or fifteen others on different roads exceed one mile each. The Box Tunnel on the Great Western Railway, between Bath and Chippenham, is thirty-one hundred and twenty-three yards long, or rather more than one and three fourth miles.

On the canals of England there are five tunnels exceeding three thousand yards in length. The longest of these is the Marsden Tunnel, fifty-five hundred yards long. In France there is one tunnel on the St. Quentin Canal over thirteen thousand yards long.

Some of the tunnels of the ancient Romans were quite extensive in their character. One which was constructed by the Emperor Claudius was cleared out some years since by the Italian government. It proved to be about three miles long, thirty feet high, and twenty-eight feet wide at the entrance, and was nowhere less than twenty feet high.

The excavation seems to have been conducted, after the plan practised at the present time, by means of a number of vertical shafts first sunk on the line of the tunnel, and from the bottom of these shafts the work was carried on simultaneously in opposite directions.

Another tunnel, made in the early period of the Roman republic for the partial drainage of the Alban Lake, is more than one mile long.

[Sidenote: TUNNELS IN AMERICA.]

Most of the tunnels in America are on the lines crossing the Alleghany Mountains. There is one tunnel on the Pennsylvania Railway thirty-six hundred feet long. It was built in two years, and cost half a million dollars. There are many short tunnels on the line of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway? and there is a tunnel on the Blue Ridge Railway in Virginia forty-two hundred feet long. In South Carolina there are several tunnels, one of them nearly six thousand feet long. The Long Dock Tunnel in Bergen, New Jersey, opposite New York city, was completed in 1860. It is forty-three hundred feet long, twenty-three feet high, and thirty feet wide. On the line of the Central Pacific Railway, over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, there are several tunnels, the longest of them exceeding a mile; and railway engineering was carried to such perfection in the construction of this road that its tunnels were completed in a shorter time than in works of the same kind and with an equal hardness of rock anywhere else in the United States.

A journey through a railway tunnel is always more or less interesting to a novice, but an old traveller soon gets accustomed to it, and pays very little attention. On most roads, when a long tunnel is approached, it is customary in the daytime to light the lamps but this is by no means the general rule. Some queer incidents occur in these dark journeys through tunnels.

The darkness is so thick that one could almost cut it with a knife. It affords opportunities for enterprise, either for entertainment or mischief. Enterprising robbers sometimes conduct their operations in railway tunnels. Half a dozen of them will jostle a passenger, pick his pocket, and carry away his satchel, and when he emerges from the tunnel the robbers will have disappeared. It not unfrequently happens that loving couples bestow attentions upon each other in passing through tunnels which they would hardly indulge in were they in open daylight, and under the eyes of their fellow-passengers.

Every one has read, and many have seen, demure couples sitting quietly in their seats as the train enters a tunnel. There would be heard the sounds of a slight struggle, and also of less slight kisses. When the train emerges into the daylight, the pair will be sitting as demure as ever, but with reddened cheeks and a general appearance of disorder.

[Sidenote: INCIDENT IN BERGEN TUNNEL.]

On one occasion I was riding on a train approaching the Bergen Tunnel, near New York. The lamps were not trimmed and burning, and when in the tunnel we were as much in the dark as an ignorant newsboy attempting to read a page of Sanscrit.

In front of me was a young couple, and by their devoted attention to each other I concluded that they were not married, or, if married, were wedded to somebody else than to themselves. The gentleman was reading a newspaper; the lady was busy with a novel, and giving an occasional glance out of the window. As soon as the train entered the tunnel it was so dark that you could not see anything. I heard a struggle. There seemed to be a dislocation of hair, accompanied by a shower of hair pins. The gentleman’s hat fell to the floor, and I heard his paper crush as though it had been taken up by a clothes-wringer. Then there were several warm osculations, accompanied by ejaculations which sounded like, “You ought to be ashamed. Somebody will hear you.”

These utterances seemed to be more a matter of form than anything else, as the kissing went on like a company of infantry engaged in file-firing. You would have imagined that a whole flock of school-girls had met another flock of school-girls, from whom they had been separated at least six months.

By and by the train came out of the tunnel.

The gentleman recovered his hat and pretended to be reading his newspaper; he had it upside down, and it was torn, half through. The lady’s book was open at about the first page, though she had been reading it for three hours. Her hair had been loosened, and was falling down. Her lace collar was disordered, and quite in keeping with the collar of her masculine friend, one side of which was turned up like the toe of an old boot, while his neck-tie had lost its trim knot, and its ends were dangling like a pair of fish lines over the side of a ship. The gentleman and lady were very red in the face, and somewhat exhausted, and altogether they looked like a pair of butterflies that had been run through a sausage machine.

[Sidenote: AN UNHAPPY FRENCHMAN.]

A story is told of a Frenchman travelling in a railway coach in England, who was very anxious to change his shirt in order to make a visit after the train had arrived, without taking the trouble to go to a hotel. His guide-book indicated a tunnel on the road, and he asked the guard or conductor how long the train would be in the tunnel. The guard mistook his question, and supposed he asked how long before the train would reach the tunnel. He answered briefly, “Half an hour.”

The coach in which the Frenchman was travelling was filled with ladies and gentlemen. The traveller got down his valise, unlocked it, and made everything ready for a change of apparel while they were in the tunnel. As soon as they entered it he pulled off his shirt, and prepared to put on a clean one; but imagine his surprise, and that of his companions, on discovering that the train remained only three minutes in the tunnel, instead of thirty. As they came out in open daylight he was standing in their midst in a condition quite unfit for a mixed company of ladies and gentlemen.

The longest railway tunnel in the United States, is the Hoosac Tunnel, in Massachusetts. Its total length is twenty-four thousand five hundred feet, or more than four and one-half miles. Its width is eighteen feet, and its depth fourteen feet. As long ago as 1825, the Hoosac Tunnel route was surveyed, and a legislative commission was appointed to investigate the practicability of building a canal from Boston to the Hudson River. They made their report, in which they recommended a tunnel through the mountain.

In 1828 another commission reported to the legislature of Massachusetts that they could get over the mountain with a railway more quickly and more cheaply than through it, and recommended the Boston and Albany line, which was opened for travel in 1842.

From Boston to the Hudson River the route by way of the Hoosac Mountain is very feasible, with the exception of the mountain itself.

A story is told that Loammi Baldwin, the engineer who made the first survey for the canal, was very much in favor of this route. With a map or plan spread before him, he would say to the listener, “Why, sir, it seems as if the finger of Providence had marked out this route from the east to the west.” “Perhaps so,” said a listener, one day; “but what a pity it is that the finger of Providence had not been thrust through the Hoosac Mountain!”

[Sidenote: THE HOOSAC TUNNEL.]

In 1848 a company was chartered to construct a railway between Troy and Greenfield. Three years later the work was begun, and the directors voted to expend twenty-five thousand dollars in making experiments upon the proposed tunnel. An enormous machine was constructed and set to work in the winter of 1852. It was expected to perform wonders, and it did; but they were all the wrong way. The chief wonder was, that the machine, so carefully constructed, at such great cost, could do nothing whatever.

According to the description, it was “designed to cut a groove around the circumference of the tunnel thirteen inches wide and twenty-four in diameter, by means of a set of revolving cutters. When this groove had been cut the proper depth, the machine was to be run back on its railway, and the centre core blasted out by gunpowder, and split off by means of wedges.” This wonderful engine was not all that fancy painted it. It cut a very smooth and beautiful hole into the rock for about ten feet. Then it became deranged, and then—it never smiled again. Its cutting days were over, and when it was withdrawn it was quickly discarded and sold for old iron.

Another boring machine of the same sort, which was to cut a hole only eight feet in diameter, was tried at the other end. That, too, made a most glorious failure. Its failure was even more brilliant than that of the first machine, for it never succeeded in cutting a single inch of rock.

Different engineers have tried their hands and their skill on the Hoosac Tunnel. In 1854, the legislature of Massachusetts appropriated two millions of dollars to the Troy and Greenfield Railway, and in the following year they were at work in earnest.

[Sidenote: CROSSING THE HOOSAC MOUNTAIN.]

General Haupt, who became famous in the late war as a bridge-builder, attempted to pierce the Hoosac Mountain; but after several years he abandoned the work, and the whole property of the company was transferred to the State of Massachusetts. When the state took possession it began work on its own account, and in 1868 the legislature appropriated five millions of dollars, and made a contract with Walter and Francis Shanly, of Canada, for the completion of the tunnel. They began work in the following March, and there is very little doubt of their completing the tunnel.

In 1870 I made an excursion up the valley of the Connecticut as far as Greenfield, and there took the railway train to the Hoosac Mountain. At the east side or end of the tunnel I abandoned the cars, and took to a six-horse coach. I managed to obtain a seat near the driver, a burly, moon-faced fellow, who collected fifty cents extra for the privilege of riding near him. He treated everybody on the outside as politely as though he were king of the Cannibal Islands, and we were his subjects. For downright impudence, with a good deal of rudeness to the bushel, I will back an American stage-driver against any other man in the world.

Soon after dinner we drove away from the station, and after the horses had given us a little circus exhibition on their own account, which threatened to overturn us and break half a dozen necks, we climbed slowly up the valley skirting the edge of a forest, whose leaves were tinged with the varying colors of autumn. Our progress up the eastern face of the mountain was slow, but when we came down the western side the case was different. On the upper part of the mountain there is a long and comparatively level stretch of ground, on which there are many fine farms, and a general appearance of prosperity. Approaching the western face of the mountain, we overlooked the flourishing town of North Adams, and a region of country spread out before us like a beautiful panorama. I have looked from mountains in many countries, but rarely have I gazed upon a landscape more beautiful and more attractive than this. It is not grand—awfully grand—in its character, like many other landscapes, but there is an air of beauty about it which makes it charming in the extreme.

The road winds, in a sort of zigzag, down the side of the mountain, and our horses went at a good speed. The coach swung from side to side, and the baby of a feminine passenger screamed as if a dozen pins were being driven an inch or so, into its arms and legs. Down, down, down the mountain we went, and soon we were inside the busy town, and were driven up in front of the Wilson House. There I concluded to remain, and take my point of departure the next day for the tunnel.

On the following morning it was raining, not exactly cats and dogs, but a drizzly, misty, damp—very damp—sort of rain. I did not care very much for rain, though, especially as it made no difference, when once in the tunnel, what the outside weather might be. When breakfast was over, I started for the tunnel under the escort of the proprietor of the hotel.

[Sidenote: VISITING THE TUNNEL.]

The western portal of the tunnel is two miles south of the village. The road leading to it is among some small hills that appear trying to hug the mountain. Mr. Haupt began his work on this side of the mountain, in a limestone rock, from which he expected to pass directly into the solid primary rock, forming the base of the mountain; but to his surprise and mortification, his hopes were not realized.

[Sidenote: DEMORALIZED ROCK.]

Instead of reaching the solid rock, he entered into a mass that is known as demoralized rock, a sort of combination of mica, quicksand, water, and everything else that is disagreeable. It was perfectly unmanageable. As fast as they dug it out it flowed in. Imagine a mouse attempting to construct a tunnel through a barrel of swill, and you can form a very good idea of the difficulty of working in this rock. You might as well attempt to make a tunnel through a thousand cart-loads of soft mud; in fact, you could get along easier in the mud than in this demoralized rock, because you could take precautions against the flowing in of the mud, which you could not take against this disintegrated mica. It is a sort of soft stuff which French miners denominate “moutarde,” and English miners allude to as “porridge.”

In order to escape this porridge, the engineer tried to make a tunnel farther up the hill-side; but it was of no use. There was the stuff again, and somehow it must be met. Not only was it impossible to prevent its caving in, but it was necessary to prevent its rising upward. Consequently an arch must be made below, as well as above; in fact, it was necessary to construct the brick-work in such a way that it would form, when completed, a perfect cylinder, as the pressure of the porridge would be exerted in all directions. As the work was put forward and completed, a casing of timber was made, and inside this casing of timber the brick arch of the tunnel was built.

Our first visit was made to the western portal, into which we penetrated several hundred feet. For about seven hundred feet, the tunnel is laid in brick seven or eight courses thick, and forms a complete arch. Beyond that the rock is quite soft, but sufficiently hard to sustain itself long enough to permit the construction of an arch. When this work is completed there will be some two thousand feet of brick arching.