Foto: Geo P. Lewis/Studio Kurkdjian/National Gallery of Australia
One of the markers of civilization is the existence of road or transportation access. And the railway was one of the earliest forms of modern transportation to develop. Starting from the invention of the steam engine that sparked the industrial revolution, revolutionary transportation was born with the emergence of trains and steamships.
Just as the United States built railways to connect the East and West coasts, the Dutch East Indies government also built railways to connect cities on the islands of Java and Sumatra.
The Dutch East Indies government first built railway in Java in 1864, making Indonesia the second country to have railway in Asia after India. The railways built by the Dutch East Indies government later became the foundation for the railways in Indonesia today.
The photo above is railway in East Java in 1910 by Geo P. Lewis published by Studio Kurkdjian in Surabaya. The train can be seen running on tracks that pass through difficult terrain, through valleys and through hills. This means that the civil engineering technology used was already quite high at that time. Experts from the Netherlands were often brought in to work on various development projects in the Dutch East Indies.