[Manuscript Letter Advocating a Mexican Railway Route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Over the Panama Canal]

[N.p., likely New York]: January 4, 1884. Very good.. [4]pp., written rectos only on four sheets of stationery from the Tehuantepec Ship Railway. Minor wear and discoloration to edges. An informative autograph letter, signed, from Elmer Lawrence Corthell to Lt. John T. Sullivan, US Navy, involving an unusual engineering plan for providing access across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Corthell, a renowned engineer who had been involved in construction projects from Siberia to the Mississippi, was Chief Engineer of an enterprise to connect the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of a 150-mile-long railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico. Corthell’s plan was to install powerful hydraulic lifts to raise a ship out of its ocean berth onto a “lift carriage”, with locomotives then carrying vessels on a six-track rail line to the Pacific.  His project was in competition with the better-known enterprise to dig an interoceanic canal through Nicaragua across the Isthmus of Panama.

Corthell wrote this letter to Lieutenant John T. Sullivan, a Naval officer who had just published an official report, revealing what Corthell called a typical Naval predilection for the “Nicaragua scheme”, and pointing out that Sullivan had no personal knowledge of the subject, never even having seen the most reliable map of the Tehuantepec Isthmus. According to Corthell, Sullivan had disregarded the projected cost of $300,000,000, requiring twenty-five years of labor to excavate 180,000,000 cubic yards of clay soil. Corthell estimated that his Railway could be constructed for a sixth of that amount and predicted that within six years, Sullivan could take his vessel from ocean to ocean by railway across Tehuantepec. As it happened, the Tehuantepec plan proved impractical, and while the Panama Canal project also proceeded slowly by fits and starts over the next two decades, it was finally begun in 1904, with the Canal open to interoceanic commerce ten years later. The letter is written on handsomely engraved stationery, including a small inset map, of the Tehuantepec Ship Railway.