A Small Episode in the History of Irony: On-Beyond Common Sense Rules from the Successor Company Which Built the World's Most Fatality-Stricken Railroad

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

The Panama Railroad was flat-out more costly in the terms of human lives than any railroad ever built in the Americas.  Probably anywhere in the world, at any time, mile-for-mile. From 1851 until it was finished in 1855 the railroad linking the oceans was a thin ribbon of red that was 47 miles long and cost perhaps 12,000 lives. The Panama Railroad Company admitted to something like 1500 deaths or some such, I forget now--it was impossibly low, particularly since the only thing they seemed to do with the bodies of non-white laborers was bury them or sell them to medical schools far and wide...they most certainly did not count them. There is no record of perhaps 10,000 dead laborers, and there never will be.  

The railroad was being built in an impossibly bad place, with no utilizable natural resources, no laboring population to hire, and so on, all the while taking place in fantastically bad circumstances. As much as landslides and accidents took the lives of workers, they also succumbed to smallpox, dysentery, cholera, various types of fevers, and a host of other killers. Melancholia and depression also took the lives of perhaps 1000 Chinese workers, who it seems took their own lives for terrible living conditions, terrible pay, and terrible human treatment. It seems too astonishing to be so, but I've read a number of accounts of the so-called "Chinese Tragedy", and it bears up. 

And so all of this bubbled up when I found this very small and incredibly skinny hardback publication from the Panama Railroad Company called Safety Rules. It seemed terribly ironic. 

Now this was not the same company though it carried the same company name as the originator, this rule book being published in the "C.Z." ("Canal Zone") in 1945, and 80-some years separated the two, but I couldn't shake the terrible connection of opposites, especially given the breadth of the 255 rules in the rule book, many of which were incredibly obvious. I've included the first few rules in the book, #1 being not to hop off a moving train in front of it...that's even a hard sentence fragment to write, let alone conjure why it was written in the first place.