The Highest Railway in the Wokld. 449 



along the liighlaiids, and is designed to open up the ricli 

 mines of that region, and to benefit 200,000 inhabitants. 

 It will begin with a magnificent iron pier, 1640 feet long; 

 and there will be thirty tunnels on the route. 



The Oroya Railroad. — Situated in lat. 12°. Termini, 

 Callao and Oroya. Length, 136 miles ; finished, 82 miles, 

 to Anchi ; tunnel nearly through, and grading done on 

 the Oroya side. Conti'act taken by Mr. Meiggs, at $27,- 

 600,000 in bonds at 79. This is one of the nine wonders 

 in the Peruvian world ; and certainly it is the greatest 

 feat of railroad engineering in either hemisphere. As a 

 specimen of American enterprise and American work- 

 manship, it suffers nothing by comparison. It was begun 

 in 1870, and will be finished in 1876. Starting from the 

 sea, it ascends the narrow valley of the once sacred Rimac, 

 rising the first 46 miles nearly 5000 feet ; then it threads 

 the increasingly-intricate gorges of the sierras (a winding, 

 giddy pathway along the edge of precipices and over 

 bridges that seem suspended in the air), tunnels the Andes 

 at the altitude of 15,645 feet — the most elevated spot in 

 the world where a piston-rod is moved by steam — and 

 ends at Oroya, 12,178 feet above the Pacific. The won- 

 der is doubled by remembering that this great elevation is 

 reached in 78 miles. Between the coast and the summit 

 there is not an inch of down grade. The difliculties en- 

 countered in its construction are without a parallel. The 

 valley narrows to a ravine, and then to a gorge, till the 

 closing mountains fairly overhang the infant Rimac ; in 

 fact, at one point, a stone dropped will fall on the opposite 

 side of the stream. So that, in forcing the railway up 

 the Cordilleras, the engineers have literally threaded the 

 mountains by a series of sixty-three tunnels, whose aggre- 

 gate length is 21,000 feet. The great tunnel of Galera, 

 by which the locomotive is to be taken over the Andes, 

 2 F 



