Tandjong Slamat was a place on the coast of the Langkat district of the East Coast of Sumatra, south of the Babalan river ground, which in the railway debates of 1912–1916 was the proposed junction point where the projected line Besitang–Tandjong Slamat would join the Atjeh-tram to the existing network of the Deli Spoorweg Maatschappij — the alternative disputed by Schadee in the Deli-Atjeh railway connection controversy.
The railway junction disputed
The line Besitang–Tandjong Slamat (30 kilometres, estimated at f 1,450,000) was defended by the chief of construction of the Atjeh tram and by Governor Van der Plas as the only connection along which a Kota Radja–Medan journey in two days would be possible: with the tram’s preserved speed of 20 and the company’s 30 kilometres per hour, the difference in running time between the two junction routes was about twenty minutes, falling to thirteen at higher speed, as Schadee demonstrated in the Cultuurraad debate of 20 February 1913.
Schadee’s counter-proposal — a junction at Pematang Pandjang with an 8-kilometre branch to Pangkalan Brandan, costing about f 300,000 — would, in his opponents’ view, postpone the valuable through connection Besitang–Tandjong Slamat indefinitely, and would serve chiefly the Deli Company itself. Roest wrote that the Tandjong Slamat link might not lag behind: if the Deli Company should refuse to build it, the Government would have to take the task on itself without delay, and he doubted, by the end of 1915, that it would be realised in the foreseeable future, or perhaps ever. The stretch Timbang Langkat–Tandjong Slamat, under the new speed regulations, would take 33 minutes more by the tram — an argument illustrating how a cheap spatial connection could upset speed on the old route.
See Also
- Deli-Atjeh railway connection controversy (1912-1916)
- Besitang
- Deli Spoorweg Maatschappij
- Atjeh-tram
- Langkat
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), pp. 470–474, 478.