Blair Collection > Celtic monthly > Volume 5, 1897

h
taE CELTIC MONTHLY.
with labour of a very different kind, and much
more difficult to deal with than that of India
and Ceylon. The work on this line was very
heavy, some portions costing as much as £80,000
a mile. On the Ewarton line (17 miles) there
Were four large viaducts and live tunnels, one,
the Gibraltar tunnel, over half a mile long.
Owing to the want of suitable stone or bricks,
cement concrete was used for viaducts, bridges,
culverts, retaining walls, and stations, in fact
the line was then the first example of the
exclusive vise of cement concrete. The arched
viaducts of fifty feet span, and all tunnel liniugs,
were built of cement concrete in mass without
a single failure, and all done by negro labour.
These lines were opened to traffic in 188.'j-86
by Sir Henry Norman, then Governor of the
island, who in his public speeches bore flattering
testimony to Jamaica's indebtedness to Mr.
Campbell for the way the works had been
carried out, and the labourers managed and
cared for. The thousands of labourers round
the station when he was leaving gave evidence
of their love for " The Chief," as they always
called him, by carrying him shoulder high in
procession.
On his return from .Jamaica Mr. Campbell
was elected an Associate Member of the
Institution of Civil Engineers.
In 1887 Mr. Campbell was appointed by the
^l.THE]iI,AXr>SIIIKK
late Sir John Hawkshaw to rejjort on a scheme
for a railway from the White Sea across the
Ural Mountains to the Obi, but the promoters
could not get the permission of the Russian
Government to the scheme and it was dropped.
Sir John then nominated Mr. Campbell as
Engineer-in-Chief and Manager of the Midland
Railway of Western AustraUa, from Perth to
Gerald ton. Owing, however, to the great
delay in raising the capital Mr. Campbell
resigned the appointment and accepted an
offer from Messrs. Jardine, Matheson, & Co.,
to go to Furmosa to shew the Chinese Governor
General, Lieu Ming Chuan, how to open the
island by railways. He was in Formosa for a
year and with only a young assistant, Alister
Campbell, yr. of Auchindarroch, made extensive
surveys and laid out 80 miles of railway. The
opposition however of the Mandarins, the
impossibility of getting proper control over the
works, and helplessness in stopping the bribery
and corruption which reigned supreme, made
his position untenable, and he resigned.
In 1889 Mr. Campbell undertook the survey
and construction of railways in the protected
native .States of the Malay Peninsula, and in
1891 his tender for the construction and
equipment of 150 mUes of line in Siam waa