Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  Not suburban England in the nineteenth century, but an outback station in New South Wales.

  Railway building in Australia was not a question so much of joining centres of population as of pushing out a route into the wilderness which settlers could follow. One English engineer at least was unimpressed by the process. C.O. Burge had moved on from working in India (see Chapter 5) and arrived to work in New South Wales, surveying a new route. ‘The district was one which was called populous, yet on the whole of about thirty miles of the proposed railway there was only one squatter.’ Conversation was less than amusing: ‘If you cannot talk sheep, you are out of it.’ And when he did reach towns, he found them even less impressive than the outback.

  Our next move was to an up-country township to take charge of the construction of another line; and here I would remark that, having seen since a vast number of Australian country towns, the deadly, drab, dull similarity of one to the other I never saw equalled except in a sack of peas. At a later period, some of my duties involved fixing the site of new townships in the then uninhabitable Bush at suitable distances on projected railways, and as they were to be on the terrible chessboard plan, and would no doubt be built in the usual formal style, my artistic conscience must bear the weight of having assisted in the extension of such hideous-ness. The style consists of straight wide streets, flanked with brick barrack-like houses roofed with corrugated iron, with verandahs painted with yellow and red stripes covering the footways, and supported by posts at edge of the latter, the court house, banks and hotels being slightly more pretentious than the ordinary shops.

  Lines were soon spreading south as well as west out of Sydney, while at the same time the broad gauge routes were developing in Victoria. Here work proved even more difficult than it had in New South Wales, with conditions more like those of the jungles of Africa. Thomas Griffin surveyed one 14-mile stretch of line: the work was to take him two whole years. He had to carve a way through almost impenetrable undergrowth, hacking through dense forest and clearing fallen trees. The land was impossible for pack animals, so everything had to be carried on the survey party’s backs. In 1883 the routes from Victoria and New South Wales met at Albury, when for the first time the inconveniences of a break of gauge made itself felt. Everything, passengers and freight, had to be moved from one train to the other. In 1887, the Victoria and South Australian Railways were also united.

  There was still one gap to be filled in New South Wales. The line running north from Sydney stopped at the Hawkesbury River. Here passengers were ferried across on an aged stern-wheeled paddle steamer. After that they could continue on their journey north to Newcastle and Queensland. There had already been a number of iron bridges built in Australia, which had been designed and prefabricated in Britain. The Murray Bridge, for example, was designed by the UK consultant William Dempsey with ironwork supplied from Crumlin in Ebbw Vale. However, rather as the Canadians had done, the Australians began to have doubts as to whether the British were always the best people to turn to for design. Other countries, notably America, had conditions much more similar to those of Australia: the bush has more in common with the prairie than it has with the neatly hedged fields of Surrey. Not only that but the collapse of the Tay Bridge in 1878 severely dented the old country’s reputation for unmatched excellence. It was Henry Mais, a Bristolian who had begun his working life on the GWR, who encouraged the spread of American techniques. He had come to Australia in 1850. After a somewhat varied career in New South Wales – resigning from the Sydney Railway Company in 1852 and being sacked from the Sydney waterworks for gross misconduct – he moved to Victoria. As part of his railway work, he undertook a world tour to look at how others were tackling production problems. He returned full of enthusiasm for American ideas, and these notions soon spread through the Australian engineering community.

  When it came to the Hawkesbury River crossing, the work was put out to international tender, with a very distinguished committee vetting the applicants. These included W.H. Barlow who was responsible for the second – successful – Tay Bridge and Sir John Fowler of the Forth Bridge and the Severn Tunnel. They awarded the contract to the Union Bridge Company of New York. Even so many parts ended up being made in Britain, and CO. Burge was appointed as one of the resident engineers in charge of the work on site. It was certainly an imposing affair, with seven spans, each of 410 feet, and a total length of 2896 feet. Furthermore, space had to be allowed for small steamers to pass underneath. Burge and his associates were faced with the problem of making piers that had to go down through 40 feet of water, after which instead of reaching a good solid foundation they met mud, over 100 feet of it. The traditional method of making a coffer dam, pumping it out and building the pier inside, was clearly impossible. Instead they decided to make a 150-foot high cylinder on the bank, sink it down through the mud and fill it with concrete. This was easier said than done: there was no way a tube of that size could be towed out, raised to the vertical and sent straight down. No system then available could control the accurate movement of such a huge structure through swirling water and cloying mud and then settle it down with perfect accuracy. The whole operation would have to be carried out a section at a time: sink one bit, add another on top, sink that and so on. Burge explained how it worked in practice:

  To understand the shape of the caisson and the operation of sinking it, the reader should imagine for the bottom length a top hat without its crown and brim, and inside it three vertical tubes each about the diameter, proportionally to the hat, of a small coffee-cup. Unlike the cup, however, the tubes must be supposed to be bottomless and splaying out like a trumpet-mouth below, so as to meet the bottom edge of the hat, forming a sharp edge. Such, on a very large scale, was the bottom length, or shoe as it is called, of the caisson. This shoe was floated out slightly weighted with concrete, to the exact site of the pier for which it was destined, and from the hold of a ship anchored alongside, more concrete in a liquid state was poured into the space between the outside of the tubes and the sides of the caisson, the weight of this concrete causing the shoe to sink to the bottom of the river. This done, the next thing was to get the structure down through the mud, and in order to do this, the mud had to be got out of its way. It was for this purpose that the tubes were provided which, it will have been noted, were as yet not filled with the concrete which was all round them. Specially shaped dredging buckets, or grabs as they are called, were then let down inside the tubes, and from their peculiar action forced their massive jaws into the mud and drew it up by means of steam hoists, this going incessantly day and night concurrently with the concrete filling and weighting, until the great mass was sent down to its final resting-place, in one case 162 feet below the water-line. The tubes, which were, of course, built up simultaneously with the sides of the caisson, were then filled with concrete, so that there was a solid mass of this material from the hard bottom up to the water-level, upon which the stone piers above water were subsequently built. In this bridge, therefore, what is visible to the spectator, large as that is, is only about half of the entire structure, the other half being sunk under water.

  Stopping the train at a remote Australian station, by holding out the disc by day or a lantern by night.

  The hardest part was manoeuvring the caisson into position. On one occasion the giant cylinder was caught by a sudden rising wind. The tugs could not hold it and it set off majestically for the open sea: fortunately the wind dropped, more tugs were called up and the errant caisson retrieved. Having finally got it into position over the spot it still had to be sunk with considerable accuracy, as girders each 410 feet long and a thousand tons in weight then had to be set in place on the bearings at the top. Even when that was achieved, the girders themselves still had to be raised into position. Once again the usual practice of erecting a temporary timber staging between the piers was useless thanks to the deep mud and fast currents. Burge goes on:

  The locomotive on the Victorian Railway was designed in
Britain but built in Belgium

  The plan adopted was to construct and float in shallow water adjoining the shore an immense pontoon of timber, somewhat less in length than a span of the bridge, and to erect on it a scaffolding up to the same height above low tide as the top of the bridge piers were over low water. This done, while still at the moorings along the shore, the girders were put together on the top of the scaffolding with their ends projecting. When this was complete, and when a favourable condition of wind and current existed, the great craft with its top-heavy load was towed out by a sufficient number of steamers to the span for which that particular pair of girders was destined. The operation was so timed that on arrival between the piers high water would occur. The whole construction would then gradually sink with the falling tide until the projecting ends of the girders rested in their places on the pier, and the pontoon and staging sinking further would become free from their great load and be towed back to shore to serve the same purpose for the other sets of girders – seven in all.

  This was anxious work, but only once did the whole process almost end in disaster, with the span nearest the shore at the southern end.

  The pontoon with its load was successfully navigated to near the site, and all was going merrily as a wedding bell, when great delay occurred in trying to warp her round. The hitherto rising tide had begun to turn, and before the manoeuvre was complete one end of the pontoon got aground on a sunken rock, the rest of it being in deep water. For many hours all efforts to draw her off failed – efforts stimulated by the possible serious consequences of failing to do so, for with the tide still falling the floating end would gradually sink more and more, the other end remaining stationary; and unless the slope at low tide was still insufficient to cause it, the great girders of one thousand tons weight would slip off into the deep river. In such case they would be utterly lost, not only by smashing themselves to pieces, but by being sunk in one hundred feet of mud, and nothing that could be done would have held them back. Moreover, if the whole vessel with its load had slipped off, destruction would equally have occurred, as the top-heavy character of the loading was only suitable for quiet movement, and not for the violent plunge downwards into the water which this result would have caused. The loss in a moment of time would have been enormous, besides causing serious delay in the opening of the bridge. The engineers and contractors’ representatives stood by on shore absolutely helpless, only trusting in the possibility of the tide turning before the steepness of the inclination of the girders would have been too much for their stability. Their hearts almost stood still as the time for low tide indicated by the almanac approached. The situation seemed desperate; great creaks and groans were heard as if the mighty structure was straining all its muscles, so to speak, to save itself, when, just as it was thought that all was over, the witching time of low tide arrived, the crisis was passed, and the girders still held fast. A few inches less of water and the newspaper posters of the world would have been blazoned with the disaster. As the tide rose, the pontoon again lifted itself level, and when high water occurred she was afloat end to end, and was safely brought into position.

  Even at this distance in time, reading Burges’ account still makes one gasp in astonishment at the sheer audacity of the plan. In the mind’s eye one can see the tottering array of scaffolding with its massive load being edged out into a fast-flowing river to be positioned with inch-perfect accuracy between the tall piers. It is amazing that anyone could conceive of such a plan – even more amazing that it worked.

  Burge went on from Hawkesbury to look for new railway routes, often through the most difficult territory. In one section he had to cut through scrub hung with creepers that clung tenaciously to the traveller and drew blood: the Australians called them ‘lawyers’. His first journey was of 640 miles, during which he was trapped for a week by floods, marooned in a pub. As well as deciding on a line, he also had to find station sites. At one stop the local mayor asked if he could call with a delegation. Burge waited, but no one came. The next day the mayor sent an apology. They had stopped off for a beer en route and it was, of course, unthinkable that they should move on until everyone had bought a round. There were fourteen in the delegation. On the whole, Burge seems to have enjoyed his time in Australia.

  To the north of the Hawkesbury River in Queensland, engineers found quite different problems to those that faced the pioneers of Sydney. Brisbane had only been founded in 1824 and here, 500 miles away from Sydney at the edge of the huge, virtually unopened spaces of the Northern Territory, thoughts of gauge breaks and unified systems must have been far from anyone’s mind. There was, however, once again an imperative for building, with the discovery of gold in the Golden Mile that stretched from Kalgoorlie to Boulder. Fitzgibbon, the first engineer to consider the problem, suggested a narrow gauge, but it was his successor W.T. Doyne, who had worked with Brassey in the Crimea, who successfully argued the case. He began by setting out quite frankly that the proposed 3 ft. 6 in. gauge was second best. It would mean less powerful locomotives and a poorer surface, but he then went on with admirable pragmatism to argue the case that second best is a good deal better than nothing at all.

  The position of Queensland appears to me to be simply this. It possesses a great territory inland which is cut off from the ports on the seaboard by mountain ranges, which have to be crossed by any system of communications which may be adopted. The present means of the colony are inadequate to provide a system of broad-gauge railways, while the wants of the community demand some power superior to the bush-tracks of transit. A medium course has, therefore, been introduced – I think, wisely. A railway is being constructed at a moderate cost which will amply meet the needs of this community for many years to come, which is perfect as far as its powers extend, and will, I have no doubt, act as a pioneer to develop the resources of the colony, and enable it to carry out superior works when necessity demands them, without having in the first instance loaded it with the incubus of debt which would retard its progress in other matters.

  Peto and Betts were to take one contract in Queensland for a line across the Great Dividing Range from Ipswich to Toocoombs. The consultant engineer was Sir Charles Fox, with Abram Fitzgibbon as the man on the spot. It was a fierce line of steep grades – up to 1 in 54 – tight turns and the long Victoria tunnel to pierce the summit ridge. Hardware and structures of all kinds, including prefabricated stations, were sent out from England, together with locomotives and rolling stock. By now, however, there was a local labour force available, and 800 men were recruited from inside Australia. The engineers complained, as engineers always did, of poor work and slow work, but the line was ready in three years. Local men could do the job – and in future no Queensland contracts were to go to England. Australians could build their own railways.

  This immense oil-burning 2-8-0 was built for Australia at the Vulcan Foundry in Newton-le-Willows in Lancashire

  Australia prided itself on being, and proved to be, a land of opportunities for individuals with the energy and drive to grab them. Richard Speight came to Australia in 1864 as a railway administrator and engineer after an early career spent on the Midland Railway in England. A stout, balding, heavily bearded man, he appeared the very model of Victorian probity and respectability; yet he used his post in Melbourne to please venal politicians rather than to serve the public. He built a station at a cost of £4000 to serve a country racecourse where no race was ever held. He ran an express train from Melbourne to Bendigo though there was never the remotest chance of there being enough people wanting to visit Bendigo to make it pay. But the politicians of Bendigo were pleased – and showed it. Friends and relations of prominent men were given jobs and when they were fired for incompetence, Speight took them on again. His land purchases were notorious, paying as much as ten times the true value. The press became ever more vociferous, until at last he was forced to resign. Even then the company paid him £5250 in compensation, which he promptly used to sue the papers that had br
ought him low. He paid out around £3000 in legal fees and, in a hearing that lasted 86 days in September 1894, he received the judgment in his favour. It was a sorry triumph: the jury awarded him one farthing in damages and no costs. It was a squalid episode in the otherwise decent tradition of British railway building in Australia.

  Tasmania offered an even more mountainous terrain than the worst of mainland Australia so that when the Launceston and Western Railway Company began to build the first line they had no hesitation in opting for the 3 ft. 6 in. gauge. The line, opened in 1871, set the standard for the island, though in the very worst areas the gauge was dropped to 2 ft. Hauling heavy trains on narrow gauge tracks was a problem that troubled operators the world over. It was the very nature of such lines that they would have tight curves which would seem to rule out the use of big, powerful locomotives. A solution occurred to the inspecting engineer for New South Wales, William Garratt. His design called for an articulated locomotive with two power units fed by the boiler. The result looked as if the designer had begun with a conventional locomotive with driving cab, boiler and chimney, with the only difference being the positioning of the cylinders at the back, under or behind the cab. There, however, convention ended, for in front of this was a strange assemblage, with a second power unit and a further set of cylinders. The first design called for a 2-4-0 + 0-4-2 wheel arrangement. There was plenty of power, and the locomotive could ‘bend’ in the middle where the extra power unit was attached. Garratt came to England and showed his designs to Beyer, Peacock of Manchester. They developed the design commercially, and the very first Garratts were sold to Tasmania for use on the 2 feet line in 1909.