Alexander Bremner (2)

Alexander Bremner ( -1917) of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway

1917 Died. 'Mr. Alexander Bremner, whose death at Tarbert is announced in another column, was an engineer who for 30 years did excellent work in the development and extension of the railways of the Indian Empire. He was first employed in the eighties in Kathiawar; later he worked on the Kafka line, and during the latter part of his career he was a district engineer of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, residing first at Jhansi and then at Jubbulpore. Owing to failing health, he retired in 1914. Mr. Bremner belonged to a family of engineers. His cousin Mr. J. R. Bell, the original of Kipling's "Bridge-Builder," performed in 1879-80 the feat, then unsurpassed in railway engineering, of laying the strategic line of the Ruk-Sibi Railway from a point south of Sukkur up to the Bolan Pass, 113.5 miles in 101 days, through a waterless desert, in a route unsurveyed and no material existing on the spot. This triumph of organisation was an important factor in the successful march of Lord (then Sir F.) Roberts to Kandahar. Both Mr. Bell and Mr. Bremner were grandsons of James Bremner, the Scottish engineer, harbour builder, and raiser of sunken and stranded ships, who in 1847 floated the Great Britain off the Dundrum coast, the largest ship in the world at that date. Mr. A. Bremner leaves widow and two daughters.'

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