A Railway Bridge in Peru

A Railway Bridge in Peru

Categories
Special Collections > Keystone Slides
Type
tiff scanned file from original glass slide
Description
This is the Cofa bridge on the Oroya ( r´ yä) railway. It is built across a steep valley in the Andes (n´ dz) Mountains in Peru. It is, perhaps, no more wonderful than other bridges on this railway, for the Oroya railroad climbs to a point higher than any other railroad in the world. It starts at Callao (käl-yä´ ) on the Pacific Ocean, and rises to the height of 15,665 feet. And this climb is made in a little over 100 miles! Imagine Pike's Peak at Albany, N.Y. A train then in going from the city of New York to the top of Pike's Peak would not climb quite so rapidly as the Oroya trains have to do all the time in going up from Callao. There are tunnels-some fifty of them-that open out on bridges at a height that makes one dizzy. There are great peaks all about, rising into the land of eternal snow. When one looks at the bridge shown here, he wonders how the road was built. An engineer from the United States laid out the railway. He solved the problems of tunnels, bridges, curves, and cuts. The railroad is a monument to its builder-Henry Meiggs. The road starts from Callao, the chief port in Peru, and one of the four great ports on the western shore of South America. It runs to Lima, tha capital of Peru, 6 miles from the coast. Then it climbs eastward into the mountains to cities whose names are very hard to pronounce, and to rich mines. It is easy to build railways in level country. This is one of the reasons that the United States has the greatest railway systems in the world. Western South America has few railroads because of the Andes Mountains. Only one line extends across the continent. Locate Callao; Lima. What other great bridges to you know of? Keystone ID: 21811 Note: All titles, descriptions, and location coordinates are from the original Keystone Slide documentation as supplied by the Keystone View Company. No text has been edited or changed.
Rights
Copyright by the Keystone View Company. The original slides are housed in McConnell Library's Special Collections.