Sappers: The military engineers who built Indian Railways

CHENNAI: “Mr Ananth, I have a small complaint against Indian Railways. Nowhere in any of the books on the history of Indian Railways has the work of the engineers of the Indian Army, i.e., the Sappers, been documented," said the Colonel in charge of the archives of the College of Military Engineering (CME), Pune, in a bit of a lamenting tone. Thereupon, I was given access to the archival material at CME where there was a wealth of information on the contribution of military engineers to the planning, construction and administration of the early railway companies.

When rail lines were proposed to be laid in India during the late 1840s, much of the engineering knowledge and experience lay with the military engineers or the Sappers as the Corps of Engineers of the Indian Army was formed way back in 1777. Besides their technical expertise, the military engineers were also spurred by the ambition to become agents or managers of rail companies, given the pay and status of such posts and the prospects they hold out of further employment after retirement. In the early days, the average Royal Engineer wielded a more facile pen than his civilian contemporary. His training had taught him the use of those well-turned phrases with which Victorian official correspondence was interlarded, and naturally, this gift was appreciated by the government and sometimes led to their rapid advancement.

The first initiative towards building a rail line by a military engineer was in 1838 when Captain Arthur Cotton laid a few miles of line from Madras City towards the Red Hills for the transport of road material. However, it can hardly be considered the true beginning of railways in India, as it was not intended for passenger or goods traffic. In 1845, when the Court of Directors of the East India Company admitted the desirability of railways for India, a railway expert, FW Simms, was sent to investigate the question. Simms worked in collaboration with Captain AHE Boileau and Lieutenant JR Western, of the Bengal Engineers, who were chosen by the Government of India. This small committee reported on March 13, 1846, that railways could easily be made and maintained in India, that they should be introduced by private companies, and that a line should be constructed from Calcutta to Mirzapur and thence to Delhi. This served as the basis for the introduction of railways in India.

Military engineers also played a great role in the inception of the railway system in the Madras Presidency. It was when Col. (later Maj Gen) Pears was appointed as the Consulting Engineer for Railways that he supported a general system of Madras railways, through a series of memoranda to the Court of Directors in 1850. He said the province should be served by two trunk lines – one should run from Madras by Salem and Coimbatore, and thence through a gap in the Western Ghats to the small seaport of Beypore near Calicut on the Malabar Coast; and the other, diverging from the first line at a point some 70 miles from Madras should be taken westwards to Bangalore, then northwards to Bellary, and so to Raichur, where it would meet the railway from Bombay. At the end of 1851, he asked for permission to begin to build a line at once almost due west from Madras to Wallajahnagar and the Government of India sanctioned this project in March 1853.

If we look at prominent military engineers who played a major role in developing railways in India, the first on the list would be the maverick Sapper, Lt. Col. JP Kennedy. As the chief engineer of the Bombay, Baroda & Central India Railway, he was permitted to construct a line from Surat to Ahmadabad in 1855. However, he soon found that Surat was unsuitable as a terminal seaport and induced the Court of Directors in 1859 to permit him to extend the railway from Surat southwards to Bombay. He was then confronted with the problem of bridging the swampy and tidal creeks and rivers between these coastal towns.

Being an ingenious engineer, he had already experimented successfully on the Surat-Ahmedabad line with special types of piers suitable for railway bridges on alluvial soils and had also standardised his iron bridge spans with great benefit to speed and quickness of construction. So, on the section from Surat to Bombay, he rejected masonry piers and abutments in favour of screw piles which he forced into riverbeds with the aid of 32 bullocks to each pile. Three such piles, screwed home, cleared of mud and filled with concrete, sufficed for each pier of his railway bridges, and on his piers, he placed Warren girder spans, always 60 feet in length. Among the most difficult bridges which Kennedy had to build were those over the Bassein Creek separating the island of Salsette from the mainland, where there were two channels to be crossed, one of which was nearly a mile wide; but he completed both bridges by 1864, the southern with 69 spans of Warren girders and the northern with 25 spans. By 1866, trains were running between Bombay and Ahmedabad.

Another prominent military engineer who played a major role in the development of early Indian Railways was Major General JS (John Salisbury) Trevor (1830-1896). He came to India in 1855, when he was appointed in the Railway Department as Deputy Consulting Engineer in Bombay. In 1872, he was promoted to Colonel and functioned as the Deputy Secretary to the Government of India Railway Branch. After his retirement in 1878, he was made the president of the two Railway Conferences – the mini Railway Conference in 1879 and the second major one in 1880 to establish a coordination system between the various railway companies. In these conferences, general rules were agreed to for the interchange of rolling stock between all the broad-gauge railways. Different rules were laid for recording locomotive mileages, standardisation of weights and goods classification. In 1880, he was appointed the Director General of Railways in India. On returning to India a few years later, his wide experience and profound knowledge of the working of Indian Railways were utilised by several of the guaranteed companies, on the boards of which he had a seat. At the time of his death in 1896, he was chairman of the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway, the Southern Mahratta Railway and the Rohilkhand and Kumaon Railway companies.

Nonetheless, one military engineer who had a more lasting imprint in the development of early Indian Railways was Lt. Gen. Richard Strachey. He was a versatile personality – a soldier, engineer, financier, botanist, meteorologist, geologist and geographer – all rolled into one. Though he came to India in 1839 and was with the Bengal Sappers, his contribution came to the fore when he was appointed the secretary of PWD (Public Works Department) in 1862. As secretary, PWD, Strachey was the technical engineering adviser to three Viceroys – Lords Elgin, Lawrence and Mayo – and as a member of the Supreme Council, had great influence. Strachey was made the chairman of the East Indian Railway Company and during his tenure from 1879-1889, he was responsible for bringing that company to a financial prosperity which was unique and advising on all its more important developments almost to the date of his death in 1908. Strachey also pioneered the expansion of the metre gauge railway network as it was more economical for railway companies. Besides the railways, in 1892, Strachey attended the International Monetary Conference at Brussels as a delegate for British India. He was also largely instrumental in the formation of the Indian Meteorological Department in 1875.

Lastly, the other Sapper who made a great contribution to the railways in India was Maj. ADG Shelley. On his arrival in India in 1883, he joined the Railway Department in Madras in 1888, and seven years later, when he was just 33, became the agent of the South Indian Railway. This post he occupied until 1906 when he became the agent of the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway. In 1916, two years after leaving India, he was appointed chairman of the London Board of the BB&CI Railway. He remained as the chairman of the company till well into the 1930s. Shelley's success as an administrator is shown by the fact that, while he was the agent of the South Indian Railway, the dividends rose from 3.5 per cent to 7.5 per cent and the company changed from a very modest concern into a first-class organisation.

Without the contribution of the Sappers, Indian Railways wouldn’t have grown into the kind of organisation which has sustained itself for more than 170 years. They provided the technical calibre and the administrative acumen that was necessary for the network to grow fast and design systems that endured for a long time. It is thus necessary that any work on the history of Indian Railways would be incomplete without the mention of the contribution of the military engineers.

(Ananth Rupanagudi is a Financial Advisor with the Integral Coach Factory and is passionate about telling stories about Indian Railways)