118 The Start of the Railway Service and the River Barge Driver

Text on the Right Side
The railway service in Kyushu started in 1889. (The railway line from Moji to Kumamoto via Tosu and from Tosu to Saga were in service in August, 1891.)
As for the railway in the Chikuho region, the Chikuho Kogyo Tetsudo Railway Company first started their service between Nogata and Wakamatsu in 1889. The company extended the line to Usui via Iizuka and merged with the Kyushu Tetsudo Railway Company in 1897. Their line reached Oguma in 1898 and Kamiyamada in 1901. Another of the company’s lines reached Tento and Nagao in the same year. Most river barge drivers who had worked as coal transporters lost their jobs.
The river barges for coal transportation had been decreasing in number since 1894 or 1895 up until then. A lot of barge drivers abandoned their barges one after another and got jobs working for coal mines. Each of them was so physically strong and muscular that they quickly adjusted themselves to their new way of life as pit workers who humbly called themselves gezainins (ex-convicts; some miners were real ex-convicts but most of them were not). Barge drivers at that time would complain, “Ah, the steam train finally robbed me of my job.”

Text at the Top Left
A locomotive like a tin toy with a stand-up type sand dome (sutongappu-gata sunaire ikko) with a brass covering shining brightly on top is puffing along a gentle slope stretching from Iizuka Station to Yoshio, pulling 12 or 13 coal cars.
[Translator’s Notes: This sentence was textually translated but the creator probably confused a “steam dome” with a “sand dome.”]
The coal car had the capacity of 6 or 8 tons and a top part made of wood. The bridge was Yoshio Railway Bridge over the Kama River, an upstream branch of the Onga River.