This South American line is not an ordinary mountain railway: it is an audacious marvel of engineering science. Nor does it merely offer facilities for sight-seeing among the impressive Cordilleras, but acts as a traffic highway between the coast and the mines on the high inland plateau. As might be supposed, the difficulties which the engineers had to break down were numerous and stupendous. Moreover, the work was extremely costly. In the case of the Oroya road it averaged about £60,000, or $300,000, per mile, and altogether £8,500,000 ($42,500,000) were sunk in the enterprise--more than the total cost of the St. Gotthard railway, with its famous tunnel and 172 miles of track. The first attempt to subjugate this range by the iron road was made in the ’sixties by a daring Philadelphia engineer, Henry Meiggs. His idea was ambitious in the extreme. He proposed to start from Callao, lift the metals over the crests of the mountains, drop down the other side on to the highlands, and to push across the plateau until he gained a point on the mighty Amazon which could be reached by steamer from the Atlantic. By this means the Pacific seaports of South America would be brought into closer touch with the markets of the Old World, avoiding the protracted and hazardous journey round Cape Horn. That the idea was never carried to success was one of the sorry tricks of Fate. Internecine strife and wars with neighbouring states sapped the financial strength of Peru to such an extent that there was not enough money to complete this grand scheme. Possibly some day the steel thread will be picked up again at Oroya and forced to its original objective. For the first 107 miles this railway makes a continual ascent; there is not a single foot of downhill in the whole distance. Work was commenced in 1870, and was pushed forward so energetically that in the course of twelve months Meiggs had completed 20 miles of the line, and had the earthworks well advanced as far as Chosica, some 33 miles out of Callao. In order to ease his task as much as possible, the engineer decided to follow the Rimac River into the mountains. But as the innermost recesses of the Cordilleras are gained, the river narrows considerably, until it plunges merely through a slender defile, the walls of the peaks dropping down precipitously into the water. The result was that the engineer found it very difficult to find a natural lane for his metals, so he had to hew and blast galleries, to swing first from one bank to the other, in order to seize the slightest foothold.