Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. NARROW GAUGE, FELL, RIGI, PILATUS AND ABT MOUNTAIN RAILWAYS. Railways in mountainous districts are very costly in construction, even when they do not involve the making of the long tunnels at the summit, for which the Alpine railways are celebrated. Taking, for instance, the Peruvian railways described in the last chapter, where there are no long tunnels, and the expenditure has been kept down, as far as practicable in such rugged country, by very steep gradients and sharp curves, the line from Arequipa to Puno cost £18,730 per mile, and the line from Callao to Oroya cost £31,960 per mile. Accordingly, engineers have endeavoured to devise expedients for reducing the cost of construction, so as to extend railways to places out of the through lines of communication, or to parts where the prospects of traffic do not warrant a large expenditure. Narrow Gauge Railways.—A smaller distance between the rails than the standard gauge of 4 feet % inches has been adopted in several cases, with the object of reducing the first cost; and this system has received perhaps its largest development in the Denver and Rio Grande Railway and its branches, which wind Narrow Gauge Railways. 55 through the gorges of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. This railway system was laid to a gauge of 3 feet between the rails, and it extends over a length of 1467 miles. This arrangement, however, has not been followed on more recent lines in the United States. The Peruvian railways are laid to the standard gauge; and already 403 miles of the Denver and Rio Grande lines have been provided with a third rail outside, to adapt them to the standard gauge, thus widening the gauge to 4 feet 8- inches, just as the Great Western Railway 7-foot gauge has been narrowed by a third rail, with the sam...