Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 157, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 July 1917 — RAILROADS BUILT IN MIDAIR [ARTICLE]

RAILROADS BUILT IN MIDAIR

One of Greatest Engineering Accomplishments Under Our Flag-—Many Remarkable Scenes. A railroad journey on the Island of Hawaii, where the great Kilauea volcano is always active and so easily accessible by auto from Hilo, is filled with remarkable scenes. The railroad is built almost on the edge of the great cliffs overhanging the Pacific, and it crosses deep canons, bores through ridges and follows horseshoe trestles, all of which forms one of the great engineering accomplishments under the American flag. The railroad passes through banana and scores of miles of sugar cane plantations, picturesque villages of laborers with sections devoted exclusively to Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese and Filipinos. Coffee plantations show an intense dark green against the lighter shade of the sugar cane. Occasionally passengers on the trains pass beneath cane bundles, which look like great winged birds, brought over the fields to mills on wire cables or trolleys. In other places they see the cut cane floating down water flumes to the mill. Some of these flume trestles are at least 250 feet above the bottom of the canon. A splendid auto road parallels the railroad track and over this scores of taxis and jitneys carry a cosmopolitan population. —Boston Transcript.