Joseph Locke

by Joseph Locke- Civil Engineer

  Now the line enters the bleak hilly country, and there will be more viaducts along the way, of which the grandest is the Lowther, built of locally quarried red sandstone. The six arches take it across the river and also over the approach drive to Lowther Castle. It is a mark of the huge amount of material that had to be shifted during construction of the line that a temporary wooden bridge was built so that material from the cutting on one side of the river could be moved on wagons to build up the approach embankment on the other. Once it was opened for passengers and freight, the service was run by the typical Crewe engines already in use on the Grand Junction. The 2-2-2 passenger locomotives could never have managed Shap unaided, and one can only presume there were banking engines in place from the first or that trains regularly ran double- or even triple-headed. But the line was run successfully, that much we do know even if we don’t know any of the operational details, and it showed a healthy profit. Everyone was satisfied – apart from the citizens of Kendal, forced to trudge over to Oxenholme to catch a train.

  Cornelius Nicholson, who had led the campaign for the line to Carlisle, was not prepared to accept second best for his home town of Kendal. He began a new campaign for a branch line that would leave the main line at Oxenholme to pass through Kendal and on to Ambleside at the northern end of Lake Windermere and possibly even further into the heart of the Lake District. He can hardly have been surprised that the area’s most famous resident took a very different view. William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived just a couple of miles from Ambleside and they had already said that they would have to leave their beloved home at Rydal Mount every summer to avoid the crowds that would appear if the railway was built even as far as Lancaster, though there is no evidence that they did so when that line was completed. This, however, was far worse. The local paper published the proposal for the railway in August 1844, and in October Wordsworth wrote a sonnet On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway. The first few lines give the flavour of the whole:

  Is there no nook of English ground secure

  From rash assault? Schemes of retirement sown

  In youth, and ‘mid the busy world kept pure

  As when the earliest flowers of hope were blown,

  Must perish; how can this blight endure?

  It is not perhaps the pithiest argument against the railways, nor indeed one of Wordsworth’s better poems, but the main thrust is clear. A railway would destroy the peace and tranquillity of a beautiful region. On 15 October 1844, the day after the poem was first written, Wordsworth also wrote to Gladstone, who was then President of the Board of Trade:

  My Dear Mr. Gladstone

  We are in this neighbourhood all in consternation, that is every man of taste and feeling, at the stir which is made for carrying a branch Railway from Kendal to the head of Windermere. When the subject comes before you officially, as I suppose it will, pray give it more attention than its apparent importance may call for. In fact, the project if carried into effect will destroy the staple of the Country which is its beauty, and, on the Lord’s Day particularly, will prove subversive to its quiet, and be highly injurious to its morals. At present I shall say no more, only let me beg of you to cast your eye over a letter which I propose shortly to address thro’ the public Press to our two county members upon this occasion.

  Believe me my dear Mr. Gladstone

  Faithfully yours much obliged

  Wm. Wordsworth

  In the event, the proposal that was brought forward was for a line that would stop short of Ambleside at a point roughly halfway up the lake at what is now the town of Windermere. The directors put the change down to the need to reduce the costs by avoiding an expensive viaduct at Troutbeck on the way to Ambleside, but it would at least have been some consolation to Wordsworth and his sister that the new terminus was to be 3 miles further away. In spite of the poet’s efforts, the Act for the branch line passed through Parliament in 1845 without opposition.

  The obvious choice for building the line was the team at work on the Lancaster and Carlisle and Locke was once again appointed Chief Engineer. It was a very straightforward route, roughly taking a curving path round the hills to follow the line of the River Gowan. The opening ceremony on 20 April 1847 must have confirmed all Wordsworth’s worst nightmares. First came a train of sixteen carriages full of passengers accompanied by a band, shortly followed by another similar train, this time with eighteen carriages, yet more passengers and another band. Two steam yachts plied the waters of the lake and it was reported that many passengers strolled on towards Grasmere, passing close to the poet’s home at Rydal Mount. One interesting point that emerged was that the trains needed three locomotives each, because according to the Westmoreland Gazette, the available engines were not ‘of a very powerful description’. It does make one wonder how, if three locomotives were necessary for this modest line, trains were coping with nearby Shap.

  The branch line was an undoubted success and has continued to be used, having survived the Beeching axe that felled so many branch lines in the twentieth century. It was not a line that taxed Locke’s skills and expertise in planning and executing the route, but it can still be described as it was over a century ago by Cornelius Nicholson – ‘a gem of a line’.

  Chapter Eleven

  A BUSY LIFE

  Although the major works that occupied Locke in the 1840s were in France and northern Britain, these were by no means the only projects in which he and John Errington, in their newly formed partnership, were involved. Locke was very much in demand, largely thanks to his growing reputation for bringing in lines on time and within budget – and within a budget lower than many other engineers considered feasible.

  The existing network was being steadily extended. The Southampton line was the starting point for a London & South Western Railway network. The Windsor, Staines and South Western Railway was not a line that presented many problems, and joined windsor to Richmond, Surrey. The one major engineering feature was the bridge across the Thames at Richmond. It was an elegant structure of three 100-foot arches, consisting of iron girders supported on stone-faced piers. Given Locke’s general preference for stone or brick viaducts, there could be a case for saying that the credit for this one should be given to Errington, but one cannot be sure. It has been altered over the years but it gave good service for many decades before heavier traffic made it necessary to strengthen the structure. Brassey was the contractor for the line.

  Locke also worked on another line in the London area, and one with an unusual history. It started with the passing of an Act in 1836 for what was originally known as the Commercial Railway, a line from Blackwall to the Minories district of East London, ending at a site now occupied by Tower Gateway Station on the Docklands Light Railway close to the Tower of London. The original plans were drawn up by John Rennie who decided on the curious gauge of 5ft ½in, but the directors decided at the last minute to change to an engineer with greater railway experience, Robert Stephenson. The line was little more than 3 miles long and Stephenson decided to work it by cable haulage and stationary steam engines. He retained the odd Rennie gauge. It made some sense as there was always a possibility of linking the line into the planned Eastern Counties Railway that was being constructed under the management of the engineer John Braithwaite. The directors of that line had originally suggested building it to Brunel’s broad gauge, but Braithwaite persuaded them to opt for 5ft, thus achieving the worst of both worlds. With the opening of the London end of the Eastern Counties Railway, it was decided to extend the line to make a junction at Fenchurch Street. This modest task was given to Locke, while at the same time the original line was converted to the more conventional Stephenson gauge and London Docks were now to be served by a railway that would run locomotives. It was not the most prestigious work that Locke carried out, but it did have an important role to play in the development of the London dockland. Locke also worked on minor lines from Royston to Hitchin with an extension to Shepreth, south of Ca
mbridge.

  The original aim of the Eastern Counties had been to build a line from London to Ipswich via Colchester and then continue at a later date to Great Yarmouth. However, they rapidly ran out of funds and work spluttered to a stop. At this point the engineer Peter Bruff stepped in with an alternative plan, for a revised route from Colchester to Ipswich and a new Company was formed, the Eastern Union Railway. Bruff’s name rarely crops up in railway history – he is probably better known for founding the seaside resort of Clacton-on-Sea, but it was his initiative that got the work under way and his plans that were approved by Parliament. Locke was called in to be Chief Engineer for the construction period, with Brassey yet again as the contractor.

  The opening of the line was quite a grand affair, with a dinner attended by some 200 guests who enjoyed a speech by George Hudson, who lavished praise on Locke. The engineer modestly, and very properly, insisted that much of the credit lay with Peter Bruff, who had rescued the moribund scheme to bring rails to East Anglia. The line certainly bore many of the characteristics we now associate with Locke. The 17-mile line was completed at a cost of £300,000, well below the original estimate and at a cost of slightly less than £20,000 per mile. Among the major engineering features was a double viaduct carrying the lines across two branches of the River Stour, built like many of Locke’s bridges at this period from timber. He also engineered the longer route between Haughley and Norwich, a line that presented few engineering problems. It must have come as something of a relief to be dealing with the flat lands of East Anglia instead of trying to force a route through the Cumbrian hills.

  Locke, by now, had such a high reputation that other engineers were willing to go to him for an opinion on their own work. Charles Vignoles had put forward a proposal for a line to Dover, the North Kent Railway. He took the plans to Locke who approved them and they were duly submitted to Parliament, but there they met opposition led by Robert Stephenson and were rejected. Locke and Vignoles tried to revive the idea in 1845 but to no avail. Relations between Locke and Stephenson had been soured after the disagreements over the Grand Junction, and this episode probably did little to improve them. Everything, however, was to change two years later.

  Robert Stephenson was Chief Engineer for the very important Chester & Holyhead Railway, which was used to carry the mail for the ferry to and from Ireland. His major problem was the crossing of the Menai Straits, but first the River Dee had to be bridged near Chester. It must have seemed a very straightforward affair at first and he had originally planned for a five-arch conventional viaduct in brick or stone. However, he had doubts about the foundations so he decided instead to have a 98ft span made of composite cast-iron girders and wrought-iron trusses. He had already built something similar, though not with quite such a wide span, and so had complete confidence in the design. As soon as the Chester end of the route was opened, trains began to use the line, but on 24 May 1847 three girders snapped under a passing train. The driver later remembered being aware of a strange vibration as he crossed the bridge, and the locomotive had just reached the far side when the collapse occurred. Four people died, including the fireman who was on the tender at the time, and sixteen were injured. It was obvious that there would be an inquest and an official enquiry. If it had found that the accident had been caused by faulty design, then Stephenson’s career could have been over. Local opinion ran so high on the subject that there was even talk of charging him with manslaughter.

  L.T.C.Rolt, in his biography of George and Robert Stephenson (1960), gives a detailed analysis of the problems inherent in the bridge, which was built with three spans using a combination of long cast-iron I-section girders with wrought-iron truss rods. The cast iron had cracked under compression, but the enquiry was told that the accident must have been caused by the derailment of the train, caused by a broken wheel, which had led to the girder being dealt a heavy blow. Stephenson had, at first, been ready to accept full responsibility for the accident, but the Company persuaded him to go along with this version of the story in order to protect both his own and corporate reputation. An array of engineers, including Brunel and Vignoles, came forward to testify on the engineer’s behalf. Locke was well known to have always distrusted cast-iron bridges but he still joined in the defence. There was only one voice raised against him, that of Robertson, engineer of the Chester & Shrewsbury Railway, who argued that the fault was entirely due to bad design, and that the way the wrought-iron trusses were used, far from strengthening the bridge actually caused additional stresses to the girders. Faced with such a wealth of expert evidence on one side, offered by the most respected engineers in the land, with just one comparatively unknown expert offering a different view, the inquest jury could only reach one verdict: accidental death. Rolt is quite clear in his own final verdict: Robertson was right and the great and good were wrong.

  Stephenson was particularly grateful to Locke, since relations between them had not been good for some time. Earlier he had been asked to act as a consultant on the French routes for which Locke was responsible and had declined, explaining his reasons that went back to the disagreement with his father:

  You are very likely aware that there is an unfriendly feeling between ourselves and Mr. Locke. We think he has used us ill; whether we are right or wrong is not the point. But, under that impression I feel it due to myself to avoid giving him any possible ground for complaint against me.

  But Stephenson was well aware that Locke had severe misgivings about the suitability of cast-iron for railway bridges, and could well have turned up at the inquest and said so. Instead he had rallied to the support of his former friend. It brought about a real reconciliation.

  Much later in his life, Stephenson wrote his own verdict on cast and wrought-iron composite girders, with only a hint of an excuse for why he had used that system at the Dee crossing:

  The objection to this girder is common to all girders in which two independent systems are attempted to be blended; and, as a general principle, all such arrangements should be avoided.

  It is useless to say any more on the subject of this form of girder, as since the adoption of wrought iron for girders they have been entirely superseded; they were designed when no other means existed of obtaining iron girders of great span, and the melancholy accident which occurred at Chester is the only existing instance of their failure.

  Stephenson’s reputation had been saved, but he still faced the far greater challenge in completing the route to Holyhead of how to cross the Menai Straits. The only bridge across at that time was Thomas Telford’s suspension bridge, but that type of structure was rightly considered as inappropriate for the heavy traffic of a railway bridge: when first tested the road bridge was seen to sway alarmingly under just the weight of a coach and horses and had required further strengthening. Stephenson needed to find a new, radical solution and he famously came up with the box-girder bridge, in which the trains actually ran inside the oblong, wrought-iron tubes. After the Dee disaster, he was understandably nervous: ‘I stood on the verge of a responsibility from which, I confess, I had nearly shrunk.’ He looked for reassurance to an old friend, Isambard Brunel, but he also sent the plans to Locke to seek his approval. The reconciliation was complete and, encouraged by his contemporaries, Stephenson went on to complete one of his greatest engineering triumphs, the Britannia Bridge at Menai. He was to go on to use a similar design for an even greater challenge, crossing the St Lawrence River in Canada.

  During the 1840s Locke was more than once called on for his expert opinion. For example, in 1843 he was a witness in an enquiry into the deterioration of rails on the London & North Western Railway at which he, naturally enough, recommended double-headed rails of the type he had developed and of appropriate weight. But by far the most important investigation at which he was invited to offer his opinion concerning the great debate about the gauge, with supporters of Brunel’s 7ft gauge ranged against Stephenson’s 4ft 8½ in gauge.

  Brunel’s broad-gauge empire
had spread steadily since the construction of the first line between London and Bristol. Problems first occurred when there was a head-on meeting at Gloucester – broad gauge arriving from the south, and the Stephenson gauge arriving from Birmingham. As a result, everyone and everything had to change at Gloucester. This was not necessarily a real problem for passengers: even today, living as I do on the line from London through Gloucester to Cheltenham, I still have to change at the latter station to go anywhere further north. But it was a huge inconvenience for freight, involving a great deal of loading and unloading of trucks and wagons. Brunel had a suggestion for overcoming the problem, by having what was in effect a form of containerisation, where goods could be packed into boxes that could be transferred from one gauge vehicle to the other. It was not a new idea: there were early tramways on which the bodies of wagons had been designed so that they could be lifted off their chassis by a crane and dropped directly into the hold of a canal boat at the wharf. But it was not considered seriously for the new railway system. When further breaks in gauge looked likely to take place in the Midlands it was decided enough was enough and a Commission was set up to examine the whole question. The Commissioners were Sir Frederick Smith, former Inspector General of Railways, an obvious choice and two less likely gentlemen, the astronomer George Biddell Airy and a mathematician, Professor Peter Barlow.

  Brunel’s argument was that the broad gauge allowed faster running than the narrower gauge and suggested a contest to test his claim. After a certain amount of arguing over how and where the contest should be held, it was finally agreed to compare runs on similar tracks with equivalent gradients, between Paddington and Didcot for the Great Western and York to Darlington for the others. Robert Stephenson’s latest type of long-boiler locomotive was to bear the colours of their camp, while the somewhat older Firefly class represented the broad gauge. In the event, the GWR engine managed a maximum speed of 60mph against their rival’s 53¾mph. But did that prove that broad gauge was better or simply that Gooch’s engine had outperformed Stephenson’s? In any case we now know that far higher speeds are easily obtainable on the narrower gauge.