20 C. U. C. P. ALUMNI JOURNAL February. 1918 



will be done only after the passeng-er has secured and exhibited his ticket. The 

 ticket and ba8^2:age offices are usually far apart. The passenger, after purchasing- 

 his ticket, g^oes to the freight depot to have his bagg-age weighed. This service 

 is not performed by the railroad officials, but by a separate porter who must be 

 employed to put the bag^gage on and remove it from the scale. At every station, 

 there are men who make their livin;g through the performance of such services. 

 Tn practice they are allowed to charg^e what they like, and the inexperienced 

 stranger, especially if he cannot speak the language, fares very badly. The scene 

 at one of these stations where there is extensive travel, is one of great confusion. 

 There is no formation of a line or regular order of procedure and the porters 

 wrangle, struggle and all but fig^ht for precedence. One porter will often take 

 charge of the baggag-e of several passengers, and his skill in keeping track of all 

 the different pieces is marvelous. Breakage and theft of baggage is of very com- 

 mon occurrence. I have struggled from eleven P.M. until four A.M. to hold my 

 luggage together at a transfer station until its turn was reached, in a large room 

 piled nearly to the roof with a confused mass of baggage of every conceivable 

 form and kind. Wlien at last one secures his certificates of weight, he must go 

 hack to the ticket office, make payment, obtain his receipt and return again to the 

 freight house for his check. There can, of course, be no rapid work, and unless 

 there happens to be plenty of time, the passenger is likely to be left for many 

 hours and even for an entire day or more. Employees are almost always polite 

 and attentive and once upon the train, travel is very comfortable. There are no 

 sleeping car arrangements, because there is no night travel. These mountain 

 railways in the Andes are exceedingly dangerous, and companies will not risk 

 running their trains at night. Many if not most of the engines are wood burners. 

 Water transportation in Colombia is by far more prevalent than that by 

 means of railways. Most of the large cities are on or near the coast, of which 

 Colombia has about a thousand miles on the Pacific and another thousand on the 

 Caribbean Sea. There are some rivers on the Pacific side that are navigable for 

 short distances for small boats but most of the river navigation is upon streams 

 running north into the Carribean. The most western of these streams is the 

 Atrato, which debouches quite close to the Canal Zone. The steamers plying upon 

 this stream are small. Farther to the east, the Sinu is quite important, although 

 navigation bv large steamers is scarcely possible. Into the Sinu flows the San 

 Jorge. Both of these streams descend from valleys of the northwestern Andean 

 slope. Throughout the most of their length they are rapid and rocky and permit 

 of no navigation, except the very perilous use of rafts, of which more will be 

 said farther on. Their lower portions, however, run to a low coastal plain where 

 there is an extensive network of interconnecting channels, the total length of 

 ' which affords a very extensive range for steamer travel. Still farther to the east 

 is the river Cauca, which runs north through a very long and rich mountain valley, 

 separated by high mountains from the Sinu upon the west, and from the Magda- 



