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These diagrams contain the temperatures during the four journeys a b c d, which are performed with only one quantity of soda lye during about twelve hours, and show the effects of the changing resistances of the engine and of the duration of the process upon the steam pressure, which, considering the condition of the gradients, are generally not greater than in an ordinary locomotive engine.
Outside, a fair stretch of grass presented itself, falling in mild gradients to the banks of the Broadwater, sprinkled with cattle, dotted with groups of trees clustering round white farm houses, from whose chimneys the thin, blue lines of the smoke of morning fires were just beginning to ascend.
With our railways laid out with the curves and gradients existing, and with our national gauge, and our present type of locomotive, no great advance in speed is very probable; the mean speed of express trains is about fifty miles an hour, and to take an average train of 200 tons weight at this speed over a level line requires between 650 and 700 effective horse-power, within the compass of the best engines of the present day.
But though there are steep gradients to be climbed, and the engine labours heavily, there is scarcely sufficient time to get any idea of the astonishing scenery from the windows of the train, and you can see nothing of the huge expanses of moorland stretching away from the precipices on either side.
The region is an ancient peneplain, uplifted and dissected in late Tertiary times, with mature valleys whose gentle gradients are unbroken by waterfalls and rapids. Thus the driftless area is in strong contrast with the immature drift topography about it, where lakes and waterfalls are common. It is a bit of preglacial landscape, showing the condition of the entire region before the Glacial epoch.
Across this undulating country the gradients are occasionally rather steep. Seven hundred kilometres separate us from the important city of Lan-Tcheou, where we ought to arrive to-morrow morning, running thirty miles an hour. I remarked to Pan-Chao that this average was not a high one. "What would you have?" he replied, crunching the watermelon seeds.
The character of the country forbade the construction of a flat line, or one of comparatively easy gradients, except by the expenditure of a much larger capital than was placed at the engineer’s disposal.
The Union Pacific Railroad, now a double-tracked, transcontinental highway, laid with ninety and one hundred pound steel rails, and ballasted with disintegrated granite, a model of railroad construction, equipment, and maintenance, was, after the close of the Civil War, being pushed with light iron rails and heavy gradients across what was then known to geographers as the Great American Desert, and the project of a transcontinental railroad was meant at that time to unite the chief port of the Pacific coast, San Francisco, with the leading cities of the Atlantic seaboard.
Goods engines of the most powerful class, on the other hand, run at a much slower pace, but they drag with ease a load of from 300 to 350 tons, with which they can ascend steep gradients. But whether light or heavy, strong or weak, all of them are subject to the same laws.
No one seemed to know much about the Bekwando Land Company, and the country that way was very rough. However, we got sent out at last, and Cathcart, he simply scoffed at the whole thing from the first. There was no proper labour, not half enough machinery, and none of the right sort and the gradients and country between Bekwando and the sea were awful.
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