If one can imagine a ship railway across the Allegheny Mountains between Lewiston Junction and Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Railroad, or between Washington and Goshen, Va., on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, he will have a very good idea of the difficulties which would be encountered in building such a railway. The present Tehauntepec railroad is 188 miles long. When crossing the Cordilleras there are numerous places on this road where the rear car of the train and the engine are traveling in diametrically opposite directions. The road is well-built, and, as one crosses the backbone of the continent, and beholds the engineering difficulties that were encountered in building an ordinary American railroad, he can not help but marvel at the confidence of a man who would endeavor to build across those mountains a shipway large enough and straight enough to carry a 7,000-ton ship. Yet Captain Eads estimated that his shipway could be constructed in four years at one-half the cost of the Nicaraguan Canal; that vessels could be transported by rail much more quickly than by canal; that in case of accident the railway could be repaired more speedily; and that it could be enlarged to carry heavier ships as business demanded. He declared that he did not think it would be as difficult to build a ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehauntepec as to build a harbor at the Atlantic entrance of the Nicaraguan Canal. His confidence in his project was such that he proposed to build a short section of the road to prove its practicability before asking the United States to commit itself to the project. Commodore T. D. Wilson, at that time Chief Constructor of the United States Navy, declared in a letter to Captain Eads that he did not believe the strains upon a ship hauled across the Isthmus, as Eads proposed, would be greater than those to which ocean steamers are constantly exposed. Gen. P. T. G. Beauregard, of Confederate Army fame, declared that a loaded ship would incur less danger in being transported on a smooth and well-built railway than it would encounter in bad weather on the ocean. A prominent English firm offered to undertake the building and completion of the necessary works for placing ships with their cargo on the railway tracks of the trans-Isthmian line, declaring that they had no hesitation in guaranteeing the lifting of a fully loaded ship of 8,000 or 10,000 tons on a railway car to the level of the railroad in 30 minutes, if the distance to be lifted was not over 50 feet. The death of Captain Eads ended this picturesque project. A proposition once was made to build a canal across the Isthmus of Tehauntepec. This would have required 30 locks on each side of the Isthmus of 25 feet each, and these locks alone would have cost, on the basis of the locks at Panama, perhaps as much as the whole Panama Canal.