The Iron Horse

These managing and guiding men having been appointed, the physical workers are then called into action, in the form of bands of navvies. As the steam and mechanism of the locomotive are useless except in regulated combination, so brain and muscle can achieve nothing without wise and harmonious union. If boys and men would reflect more deeply on this great truth, pride, boasting, and the false separation of classes would be less rife. We say false, because there is a separation of classes which is natural and unavoidable. No one ever complains of that. If ill-advised or angry navvies were to refuse to work, what could directors and engineers do? If, on the other hand, ill-advised or angry directors and engineers refused to pay, what could navvies do? Antagonism is an unhealthy condition of things. There is far too much of it between employers and employed in this world. “Agree with thine adversary quickly” is a command which applies to bodies of men quite as much as to individuals, and the word is “agree,” not coerce or force. If we cannot agree, let us agree to differ; or, if that won’t do in our peculiar circumstances, then let us agree to separate. Fighting, save in self-defence, is only fit for fools.

But to return. When bone and muscle have been for the time welded to brain, then the work of construction goes on “full swing.” Difficulties and obstructions are overcome in a way that appears to the unskilled eye nothing less than miraculous. But the work is often hindered and rendered greatly more expensive by the sudden appearance of evils against which no amount of human wisdom or foresight could have guarded.

The Kilsby tunnel of the London and North west Railway is a case in point. When that tunnel was proposed, it was arranged that it should be about 3000 yards long, and 160 feet below the surface, with two great ventilating shafts 60 feet in diameter. It was a gigantic work. The engineer examined the ground in the usual way, with much care, and then advertised for “tenders.” The various competing contractors also examined the ground minutely, and the offer of one of them to work it for 99,000 pounds was accepted. Forthwith the contractor went to work, and all went well and busily for some time, until it was suddenly discovered that a hidden quicksand extended 400 yards into the tunnel, which the trial shafts had just passed without touching. This was a more tremendous blow to the contractor than most readers may at first thought suppose, for he believed that to solidify a quicksand was impossible. The effect on him was so great that he was mentally prostrated, and although the company generously and justly relieved him from his engagement, the reprieve came too late, for he died. It then came to be a question whether or not the tunnel should be abandoned. Many advised that it should. At this juncture Mr Robert Stephenson, son of the great George, came forward and undertook the work. He placed his chief dependence on the steam-engine to keep the water down while the work was in progress. At first he was successful, but one day, while the men were busy laying their bricks in cement one of them drove into the roof, and a deluge of water burst in on them, and although they tried to continue their work on a raft the water prevailed and at last drove them out. They escaped with difficulty up one of the air-shafts. The water having put an effectual stop to the work, the directors felt disposed to give it up, but Stephenson begged for a fortnight more. It was granted. By means of thirteen steam-engines, the amazing quantity of 1800 gallons of water per minute was pumped out of the quicksand night and day for eight months. With the aid of 1250 men and 200 horses the work was finally completed, having occupied altogether thirty months from the laying of the first brick.

Two very singular accidents occurred during the course of the construction of this tunnel. On one occasion a man who had been working in it was being hauled up one of the shafts, when his coat caught in an angular crevice of the partition, that separated the pumps from the passage for the men, and became so firmly jammed that he was compelled to let go the rope, and was left there dangling in the air, about a hundred feet from the bottom, until his horrified comrades went down and rescued him by cutting away the piece of his coat. This piece of cloth was long preserved in the engineer’s office as a memorial of the event! On another occasion some men were at work on a platform, half-way down the shaft, executing some repairs, when a huge navvy, named Jack Pierson, fell from the surface, went right through the platform, as if it had been made of paper, and fell to the bottom. Fortunately there was water to receive him there, else he had been killed on the spot. The men, whom of course he had narrowly missed in his fall, began to shout for a rope to those above, and they hallooed their advice down the shaft in reply. In the midst of the confusion Jack Pierson himself calmly advised them to make less noise and pull him out, which they very soon did, and the poor man was carried home and put to bed. He lay there for many weeks unable to move, but ultimately recovered.

What we have said of the Kilsby tunnel gives a slight glimpse of some of the expenses, difficulties, and dangers that occasionally attend the construction of a railway.

Of course these difficulties and expenses vary according to the nature of the ground. In some places the gradients are slight, bridges few, and cuttings, etcetera, insignificant; but in other places the reverse is emphatically the case, and costly laborious works have to be undertaken.

One such work, which occurred at the very opening of our railway system in 1828, was the bridging of the Chat Moss, on the Liverpool and Manchester line. George Stephenson, the constructer of the “Rocket,” was also the hero of the Chat Moss. This moss was a great swamp or bog, four miles in extent, which was so soft that it could not be walked on with safety, and in some places an iron rod laid on the surface would sink by its own weight. Like many other difficulties in this world, the solidification of the Chat Moss was said to be impossible, but the great engineer scarce admitted the propriety of allowing the word “impossible” to cumber our dictionaries. He began the work at once by forming an embankment twenty feet high, which he carried some distance across the treacherous soil, when the whole affair sank down one day and disappeared! Undismayed, Stephenson began again, and went on steadily depositing thousands on thousands of tons of earth, which were greedily swallowed up, until at last a solid foundation was obtained over the greater part of the bog. But there was a particularly soft part of it, known by the name of the “flow moss,” which was insatiable. Over this hurdles interwoven with heath were spread, and on these earth and gravel were laid down. When this road showed a tendency to sink below the level, Stephenson loaded the moss beyond the track to balance it; when water oozed through, he invented a new kind of drain-pipe formed of old tallow casks, headed into each other, and ballasted to keep them down, and at last the feat was accomplished—the railway was run over the wet quaking moss on firm dry land.

It was in the formation of this, the true beginning of railways, that the British “navvy” was called into being. To perform the laborious work, Stephenson employed the men called “inland navigators,” in other words, the canal excavators. This body of strong “navigators” or “navvies” formed the nucleus, which gathered recruits from all parts of the kingdom. As the work of railway making, which thenceforward grew fast and furious, was unusually severe, only men who were unusually powerful were suited for the navvy ranks, so that they became a distinct class of gigantic men, whose capacity for bread and beef was in accordance with their muscular development and power to toil. Splendid fellows they were, and are; somewhat rugged and untamed, no doubt, with a tendency to fight occasionally, and a great deal of genuine kindness and simplicity. That they are capable of being imbued with refined feeling, noble sentiment, and love to God, has been shown by the publications of Miss Marsh, which detail that lady’s interesting and earnest labours to bring the unbelievers among these men to our Saviour.

Another celebrated piece of railway engineering is the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Straits, which separates Caernarvonshire from the island of Anglesey. This was the first bridge ever built on the tubular principle. The importance of crossing the strait was very great, as it lay in the direct route to Holyhead and Ireland. Telford, the engineer, daringly resolved to span the strait with a suspension bridge 100 feet above the water. He began it in 1818, and on the last day of January 1826 the London mail coach passed over the estuary. The bridge remains to this day a vast and beautiful monument of engineering skill. But when railways began to play, something more ponderous and powerful became necessary. A bridge with arches was talked of, but this was considered likely to be obstructive to the navigation of the strait, therefore another plan was demanded. At this juncture Robert Stephenson came forward with a plan. Pounding his opinion on the known fact that hollow columns are stronger than solid ones; that hollow beams are better than solid beams, he leaped to the bold conclusion that a hollow iron beam, or tube, could be made large enough to allow a train to pass through it! As usual there sprang up a host of cold-waterers, but thanks to British enterprise, which can dare anything, there were found enough of men willing to promote the scheme. It was no sooner resolved on than begun. Massive abutments of stone were raised on each shore to the height of 100 feet above high-water. The width of the strait between these abutments is nearly 500 yards. Midway across is the Britannia Rock, just visible at half tide. The engineer resolved to found one of his towers on that rock. It was done; but the distance being too great for a single span of tube, two other towers were added. The centre towel rises 35 feet higher than the abutments, thus giving to the tube a very slight arch, which, however, is barely perceptible.

The tubes were rectangular, with double top and bottom made of plates of wrought-iron, from three-eighths to three-quarters of an inch thick, and varying in length according to their position—the whole when put together forming a single tube about 500 yards long. The two centre ones were the largest and most difficult to manage, each having to be built on shore, floated off on barges, and lifted by hydraulic power a height of about 100 feet. Some idea of what this implied may be gathered from the following fact. Each tube weighed 1800 tons—the weight of a goodly-sized ocean steamer! A perfect army of men worked at the building of the tubes; cutting, punching, fitting, riveting, etcetera, and as the place became the temporary abode of so many artificers and labourers, with their wives and children, a village sprang up around them, with shops, a school, and a surgery. Two fire-engines and large tanks of water were kept in constant readiness in case of fire, and for many months rivet-making machines, punching machines, shearing machines, etcetera, were in full work. There were two million rivets used altogether, and the quantity of three-quarter-inch iron rod used in making them measured 126 miles. The total weight of iron used was nearly 12,000 tons. The bridge was strengthened by eighty-three miles of angle iron. For many months the outlay in wages alone was 6000 pounds a week, and the cost for the whole of the works more than 600,000 pounds. A curious fact connected with this enormous mass of iron is, that arrangements had to be made to permit of shrinkage and expansion. The tubes were placed on a series of rollers and iron balls, and it was afterwards found that in the hottest part of summer they were twelve inches longer than in winter—a difference which, if not provided for, would have caused the destruction of the towers by a constant and irresistible pull and thrust! The Menai Bridge was begun in 1846 and opened for traffic in March 1850.

Space would fail us were we to attempt even a slight sketch of the great engineering works that railways have called into being. We can merely point to such achievements as the high-level bridges at Newcastle-on-Tyne, Berwick-on-Tweed, and at Saltash, over the Tamar. There are viaducts of great height, length, and beauty in all parts of the kingdom; there are terminal stations so vast and magnificent as to remind one of the structures of Eastern splendour described in the Arabian Nights Entertainments; and there are hundreds of miles of tunnelling at the present time in the United Kingdom.

The Metropolitan Railway is the most important and singular of these tunnels—for it is entitled to be regarded as a gigantic tunnel—which burrows under the streets of London.

This stupendous work was undertaken in order to relieve the traffic in the streets of London. The frequent blocks that used to occur not many years ago in the main thoroughfares of the Metropolis, had rendered relief absolutely necessary. When the increase of railways began to pour human beings and goods from all parts of the kingdom into London in a continuous and ever-increasing stream, it became obvious that some new mode of conveyance must be opened up. After much deliberation as to the best method, it was finally resolved that an underground railway should be made, encircling the Metropolis, so that travellers arriving from all points of the compass might find a ready and sufficient means of conveyance into the central parts of the city. There was opposition to the scheme, of course; but, through the persevering energy of the solicitor to the undertaking and others, the work was at length begun, and the line opened for traffic in January 1863. Its extraordinary success soon proved the wisdom of its promoters.

At first it was thought that the chief revenues would be derived from the conveyance of goods from the west to the eastern districts of London, but its enormous passenger traffic eventually became the chief cause of its great prosperity. In the very first year of its opening the number of passengers who travelled by it between Farringdon Street and Bishop’s Road, Paddington, amounted to nearly nine and a half millions of individuals, which is more than three times the entire population of London—also, let us add, more than three times the entire population of Scotland!

The number of trains which are constantly following each other in quick succession (at times every two or three minutes) on this magnificent railway has rendered a most perfect system of signalling necessary, as well as a working staff of superior intelligence and activity. The drivers are all picked men, and indeed it is obvious to every one who travels by it that the porters, and guards, and all employed on the line are unusually smart men. The engineering difficulties connected with the Metropolitan railway were very great as may easily be believed, seeing that it had to be formed under streets whose foundations were unavoidably shaken, and amongst an infinite ramification of gas and water-pipes and sewers whose separate action had to be maintained intact while the process of construction was going on. Some of the stations are most ingeniously lighted from the streets above by bright reflecting tile-work, while others, too deep for such a method, or too much overtopped with buildings to admit of it, are lit perpetually with gas. The whole of the works are a singular instance of engineering skill, reflecting great credit on Mr Fowler, the engineer-in-chief. Despite its great length of tunnelling the line is perfectly dry throughout.

At first fears were entertained that human beings could not with safety travel through such tunnels as were here formed, but experience has proved those fears, like many others, to have been groundless, and a very thorough analysis of the atmosphere of the line in all circumstances, and by the most competent men of the day, has demonstrated that the air of the Metropolitan railway is not injurious to health. The excellent general health of the employés also affords additional and conclusive testimony to this fact even although it is unquestionably true that there is at times a somewhat sulphurous smell there.

This thorough ventilation, of course, could only have been achieved by ingenious arrangements and a peculiar construction of the engines, whereby the waste steam and fumes of the furnaces should be prevented from emitting their foul and sulphurous odours. The carriages are brilliantly lighted with gas, contained in long india-rubber bags on their roofs, and the motion of the trains is much gentler than that of ordinary railways, although they travel at the rate of from fifteen to twenty miles an hour, including stoppages,—a rate, be it observed, which could not have been ventured on at all but for the thorough and effective system of telegraphic and semaphore signalling employed, to indicate from station to station the exact state of the line—as to trains—at all times. On the whole the Metropolitan Railway has proved one of the most useful and successful undertakings of modern times.1

In reference to foreign railways, we have only space to say that there are works as grand, and as worthy of note, as any of which we can boast; and it is with much regret that we feel constrained to do no more than point to such magnificent undertakings as the Mont Cenis Railway, which ascends and tunnels through the Alps; and that stupendous line, the Union Pacific Railroad, 3000 miles in length, formed by the daring and enterprising Americans, by means of which the prairies and the Rocky Mountains are made of no account and New York is brought within seven days of San Francisco! The engineering works on the Sömmering Railway, between Vienna and Trieste; the mighty Victoria Tubular Bridge at Montreal; the railway bridge over Niagara; the difficulties encountered and overcome in India; the bold achievements of railway engineers amid the dizzy heights and solitudes of the Andes—all these subjects must be passed over in silence, else our readers will, we fear, come to the conclusion that we have lost command of the Iron Horse altogether, allowed him to take the bit in his teeth and fairly run away.