Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/463

Rh the lower wards of New York. The feast came to a sudden end and not a speaker opened his mouth, lest it might be filled with dust.

"One swallow may not make a summer, but one brickfielder is enough for a whole year."

Consulting the railway time-table, Doctor Bronson found that the express train for Melbourne left at 5.15, and ran through in nineteen hours, thus making the greater part of its journey in the night. As our friends wished to see as much of the country as possible during their tour through Australia, they decided to take a slower train at 9, which would bring them to Goulburn, one hundred and thirty-four miles, at 4 Another train at 10.35 the following morning would reach the frontier at Albury, three hundred and eighty-six miles from Sydney, at eight o'clock in the evening. In this way they would get a good view of the country, and be able to say far more about its features than if whizzed through on an express train at night.

The first railway in the colony of New South Wales was projected in 1846, and within two years the surveys for the line to Goulburn were completed. Ground was broken in July, 1850, the first turf being turned by the Hon. Mrs. Keith Stewart, in the presence of her father. Governor Fitzroy, and a large assemblage of people. The first railway-line in the colony, from Sydney to Paramatta, was opened in 1855.

The engineering difficulties and the high rate of interest upon loans retarded the work of railway building, so that in twenty years after the opening of the first line only four hundred and six miles had been