Van Stipriaan Luïscius was a Dutch Hoofdinspecteur der Spoor- en tramwegen (Chief Inspector of Railways and Tramways) in the Netherlands Indies, who — according to J. Roest’s 1916 article De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai — openly declared to the direction of the Deli Spoorweg Maatschappij that the Atjeh tramway plan of the Government was based on the assumption that the works at Belawan would fail and that the Aru Bay would become the ocean harbour of the East Coast.
The declaration
Roest cites this declaration of the then Chief Inspector as the unequivocal explanation of why the Government designed the Atjehtram at all to wind up at Telok Taboehan: only for the event that the Belawan dredging should fail was the choice of Telok Taboehan as the end point of the Atjeh tram well chosen. On the same citation the former administrator Schadee based his question whether it would not be in a high degree premature to spend millions on this very uncertain chance, while refusing a few hundred thousand guilders to the connection about which a favourable result could be expected with certainty.
The officer’s name survives in the record as the voice of the railway officialdom whose worst-case reasoning behind the great plan of 1912–1916 fell, by Roest’s chronicle, entirely within the truth.
See Also
- Deli-Atjeh railway connection controversy (1912-1916)
- De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai
- Atjeh-tram
- Aroebai
Source
De spoorwegverbinding tusschen Deli, Atjeh en de Aroebaai, door J. Roest, in Tijdschrift voor het Binnenlandsch Bestuur, Deel XLIX, Afl. 6 (Batavia, December 1916), p. 466.