Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  When the new prospectus and Bill were produced, the directors were confident of success. With the canal interests split, the railway’s directors weakened the opposition further by promising that land purchase would be at the full market rate and they muddied the water over traction by suggesting that steam locomotives would not be the primary form of power. Nor was there the stumbling Stephenson to face the committee. Instead, Vignoles and George Rennie who, along with his brother John, was in charge of engineering, gave a far better impression, convincingly batting back any difficult questions from the counsel representing the objectors.

  Suddenly, it all seemed obvious. Of course the railway project should go ahead; why would anybody object, since it represented progress and offered wealth generation? The Times, a good weathervane for the Zeitgeist, was suddenly fully supportive and just after the Bill was passed in May 1826 commented: ‘The petitioners’ faith in their project and their willingness to build in the face of such distress were to attract the admiration of all England and gave the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Company a reputation for courage and persistence.’13

  The resulting Act may have received the Royal Assent, but the concessions made to opponents meant that the scheme fell short of the fully-fledged railway so desperately needed to provide the two towns with a quick and efficient transport link. Locomotives were not to be used in Liverpool and engines on the rest of the line would have to be fitted with condensers to eliminate smoke. One rule that would become universal was established straightaway: level crossing gates would be closed across the railway and open to road users unless a train was imminent, rather than the other way around. Somehow, the primacy of road users was established right from the outset. While constraining the railway in so many ways, the legislators had also protected themselves against the prospect of excessive profits should the railway be too successful by stipulating that annual dividends could not exceed 10 per cent.

  With the Act at last in the bag, the big question was who should build the line? The job was initially offered to the Rennie brothers but their terms, which included keeping Stephenson out of the project, were rejected. Almost inevitably, there was only one man to whom the promoters could turn, the most experienced engineer of the time. So barely a year after his humiliating experience in Parliament, Stephenson returned in triumph, with the dual responsibility for both the civil engineering and the locomotives. Knowing that he was already employed in a similar capacity on the Stockton line, the directors gave him a salary of £800 annually for nine months’ work. Stephenson was to be in charge of all aspects of building a thirty-one-mile railway: bridges, tunnels, embankments, cuttings, pumping engines, drainage, stations, earth-moving wagons, track and points. As rail historian Adrian Vaughan says, ‘this was a vast field for a man who had dragged himself up by his bootstraps and who had not learned to read until he was eighteen’.14

  Stephenson, truculent as ever, soon fell out with Vignoles, who promptly resigned, and instead hired Thomas Gooch as his assistant. The whole construction of the railway centred on Stephenson, who became utterly indispensable: it was his vision and his ability to organize projects that brought about a successful conclusion to this unique enterprise. The task facing Stephenson and the team of twenty young acolytes he had hired and trained to prepare the design of the railway was completely unprecedented. The railway was to be a double-track line linking two towns and was a completely different proposition from the Stockton & Darlington or any of the numerous coal and mineral ore railways dotted around the north of England.

  Stephenson sketched out broad ideas for all the various aspects of the civil work – bridges, embankments, tunnels, machinery, turntables and so on – and Gooch developed them into working drawings. It is difficult to visualize the practical difficulties they faced in the absence of any modern equipment or communication methods. Even the typewriter had not been invented and every report had to be dictated to assistants and composed by hand. The simple task of sending a message to the other end of the line or one of the many work sites involved despatching couriers on horseback and waiting hours for a response. But Stephenson was tireless. He would work from dawn to dusk, often ending up on some remote part of the railway where he would lodge near by. Although he gave contracts to suppliers to provide rails and other pieces of equipment, he was effectively the main contractor who appointed the assistant engineers. Each of his assistants was responsible for teams of up to 200 men. In later years, the roles of engineers and building contractors would be separated and large companies undertaking the construction of railways would emerge, but for the Liverpool & Manchester Stephenson took on both tasks himself.

  The men who carved out the railway – and all those that followed in the next seventy years – were a special breed known as navvies, an abbreviation of ‘navigators’, for they were the direct descendants of the workers who had built the canals. As Terry Coleman points out in his seminal work on the history of this amazing band of men, not all labourers who worked on the construction of the railways could term themselves a ‘navvy’: ‘They must never be confused with the rabble of steady, common labourers, whom they out-worked, out-drank, out-rioted and despised.’15 The ordinary labourers would come and go, working on the railway when there was nothing to do in the fields but returning to them at harvest or planting time. In contrast, the navvies were an elite class of worker who could qualify for the appellation only if they fulfilled three criteria: they had to work on the hard tasks, such as tunnelling, excavating or blasting, and not on the easier types of work away from the railway; they had to live together and follow the railway, rather than merely residing at home; and they had to match the eating and drinking habits of their fellows, two pounds of beef and a gallon (eight pints) of beer a day. The agricultural labourers hired from nearby villages could eventually qualify to become navvies but at first they would down tools, exhausted, at three in the afternoon and it would take a year to build up their strength enough to earn a good wage through the piecework system, and cope with the hard living.

  The navvies came from all around the UK, but there were particularly large contingents from Scotland, Ireland and the two Rose counties, Lancashire and Yorkshire. They were a proud group of men whose fashions were surprisingly up to date and expensive. They favoured ‘moleskin trousers, double-canvas shirts, velveteen square-tailed coats, hobnail boots, gaudy handkerchiefs and white felt hats with the brims turned up’.16 Their most distinctive feature was a rainbow waistcoat, and they would pay a staggering 15 shillings (75p) for a sealskin cap.

  Wages were paid in pubs, encouraging the long drinking bouts that could last for several days and the navvies normally returned to work only once their money had run out. Long-lived navvies were a rarity, with the combination of diet, drinking and danger killing most of them by their forties. And yet their achievements cannot be belittled: between 1822 when work on the Stockton & Darlington started, and the turn of the century, they built 20,000 miles of railway, largely through wielding picks and shovels with the odd barrel of gunpowder to speed things along, often at great risk, and, until the final years of the nineteenth century, without mechanical devices apart from crude lifting gear. Navvies died in their scores on many railway projects, particularly tunnelling, often through sheer carelessness or the fact that they were drunk on the job. Neither their sobriety nor the safety of their work was helped by the fact that some companies refused to hire a man unless he agreed to receive part of his wages in beer.

  On the Liverpool & Manchester the most dangerous task was working on the tunnel on the approach to Liverpool and its excavation cost many lives, including the first recorded death of a navvy, reported in gory detail, as was the contemporary style, in the Liverpool Mercury on 10 August 1827: ‘The poor fellow was in the act of undermining a heavy head of clay, fourteen or fifteen feet high, when the mass fell upon him and literally crushed his bowels out of his body.’ Many would die in precisely the same manner because undermining a big chunk of ea
rth to precipitate its collapse was a way of getting more pay through the piece-rate system. It was particularly perilous as any misjudgement or unexpected fault line could lead to disaster.

  Progress on the tunnel was hampered by faulty surveying work by both Vignoles and Stephenson’s assistants, but Joseph Locke, one of Stephenson’s protégés who was to become one of the great railway engineers of the age, managed to sort out the errors. While tunnels were not new, this was the first one in the world to be cut out of the rock and earth under a major town. On its completion in 1829, it was opened as a tourist attraction after its walls had been whitewashed and gas lighting installed. For a shilling, visitors could walk through the tunnel with the sound of a band echoing through the chamber to provide a fairground-type experience and, crucially, help win over the public to the railway itself. This sort of public relations initiative was essential as the railway pioneers needed to improve their image, being still frequently portrayed as rapacious land-grabbers disrupting the established order of things. Which, of course, inter alia, they were.

  With work progressing well on all the other major obstacles, such as Chat Moss, the deep Olive Mount excavation at the entrance to Liverpool which was needed to keep the track almost level, and the long Sankey viaduct over a deep valley, several key decisions about the operation of the railway had to be made. The gauge had effectively been determined when Stephenson was chosen as engineer since he had already envisaged a national network of railways and therefore there was no doubt that he would use the same 4ft 8½ins as the Stockton & Darlington. But there is more to railway gauges than simply the distance between the two rails. What about the space between the two tracks? Here Stephenson was in uncharted territory as the Liverpool & Manchester was the world’s first double-track railway. He opted for the same distance as between the rails – a mistake precipitated by the need to keep the cost of land purchase to a minimum, since it was too narrow and constrained the width of the trains, as well as risking the lives of passengers. Indeed, the narrowness of what is still called the ‘six foot’17 between the two tracks of lines contributed to the death of William Huskisson, the former Cabinet minister famously killed on the day of the opening of the railway (see below).

  Another key decision was whether the railway should be an integrated operation – both carrier and operator – or, as with the Stockton & Darlington, it should be managed on the turnpike principle, open to all comers prepared to pay for access. The directors, with their customary thoroughness, set up a committee in February 1828 to discuss the issue, although it is pretty incredible that they had not fully considered and decided on such a crucial matter before. Running a railway was a fiddly business, involving considerable initial capital expenditure on equipment such as wagons and carriages, warehouses and horses and carts, as well as all the logistical complexity of ensuring onward delivery and the bureaucracy of invoicing. Why not leave it to others with long-established working methods such as Pickford’s, which was then a flourishing general carrier and is now famous as a removal firm? For a time this sentiment prevailed, but perhaps as the directors became acquainted with the chaotic situation on the Stockton & Darlington they reluctantly agreed to the railway becoming the sole carrier.18 After all, the railway would receive the entire revenue from its operations rather than merely getting tolls from independent operators.

  That decision, which had to be written into a new short Act passed by Parliament, led directly to the next key question: if the railway was going to run all the trains, both for goods and passengers, which method of power should be used? Since there was now no question of contracting out the services, the railway needed to buy the equipment to run the trains itself: locomotives or other forms of traction, such as stationary engines, cables or even horses. Stephenson had long entertained the vision of a national rail network and it was clear that the idea of using horses or cables to run hundreds of miles across the country was fanciful. With steam locomotive technology at last beginning to improve, and the difficulties of using alternative power sources, the answer might have seemed obvious, but there were nevertheless strong counter-arguments at the time.

  In fact, promoters of contemporary railway schemes were by no means convinced that steam locomotives were the future. The technology was still novel and there were remarkably few locomotives in use, only around thirty having been built by the time the Stockton & Darlington opened in 1825. Consequently, horses were still seen by many railway directors as the appropriate method of haulage and were used on the most significant new railway built after the completion of the Stockton & Darlington and before the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester – the seventeen-mile Stratford & Moreton, whose principal purpose was to bring coal from the navigable Avon to Moreton-in-Marsh.19 William James, who was involved in the early stages of the project, favoured using Stephenson’s engines, but the directors insisted on equine power, partly because it allowed steeper gradients which reduced the cost of construction. Even more remarkably, the parliamentary Bill for the sixty-two-mile-long Newcastle & Carlisle, which won parliamentary approval in 1829, envisaged the railway to be exclusively horse-drawn and went as far as including a clause that specifically ruled out the use of ‘steam locomotives and moveable steam engines’.20 The thirty-three-mile Cromford and High Peak railway, a virtual contemporary of the Liverpool & Manchester, used a mix of traction methods and was a bizarre hybrid of canal and railway. The railway, authorized in 1825 and opened five years later, was designed to carry minerals and freight but not passengers21 between two canals across the Peak District. It was built on canal principles with horses being used to pull wagons along the flat sections of track while the nine inclines were worked by stationary steam engines which hauled the wagons up the gradients – the rail equivalent of a flight of locks. Within a couple of years, steam engines had replaced the horses on the flat sections but stationary engines were still used for the inclines which ranged from 1 in 16 to 1 in 7.5, far too steep to be operated by conventional locomotives.22

  Despite these contemporary examples, directors of the Liverpool & Manchester were not taken in by the short-term advantages of using horses. Apart from the animals’ slowness and impracticability, horses were more expensive, despite the lower initial investment required, as the price of fodder was high and their life expectancy, given the arduous nature of the task, low. Indeed, on the Stockton & Darlington, horses were allowed to mount carriages called dandy cars on the downhill sections to give them a rest, but even that did not prolong their working lives beyond a few years. Yet several of the Liverpool & Manchester directors were keen on stationary engines which would pull the trains on long cables, a method which had to be used on the initial section out of Liverpool where, as mentioned previously, locomotives had been banned by the Act authorizing the line. Despite a report prepared by Robert Stephenson, George’s son, and Locke, which suggested cable haulage was more expensive, was unable to cope with heavy loads and, of course, was slower, the directors were not convinced. Instead, in April 1829, they decided on a ‘beauty contest’ of the available steam locomotives to be held six months later on a level 1.5-mile-long section of the track completed at Rainhill, nine miles from Liverpool. The rules were relatively simple, stipulating, for example, a maximum weight of four and a half tons, the need to have a pressure gauge, a maximum boiler pressure of 50 pounds per square inch and a cost not exceeding £550. The locomotives in the trial were required to pull a train of 20 tons at 10 miles per hour on a daily basis and in order to show they could do this, they were required to make ten return trips, a total of thirty miles.

  The trials attracted all sorts of madcap concepts. The directors were assailed with ideas from humble self-educated inventors to illustrious professors of philosophy, including devices powered by a fantastic variety of mechanisms ranging from hydrogen gas and high-pressure steam to perfect vacuums and even that ultimate goal, a perpetual motion machine. Carriages which had so little friction they could be hauled by silk thread
(but would have been jolly difficult to stop) were proffered, as well as the Cycloped, which consisted of a horse operating a treadmill that pulled the wagons. The latter was eliminated straightaway and was, in truth, probably a joke to entertain the crowds. And crowds there were. While the Rainhill trials were very much a real experiment whose result was not predetermined in any way, they were part PR, a way of stimulating interest in the railway. They attracted the imagination of the public and contemporary estimates suggest between ten and fifteen thousand people attended on 6 October 1829, the inaugural day of the event that was to stretch over the following week.

  After all the other crazy inventors had been eliminated, there were four realistic contenders who were listed in a programme rather like the runners and riders in a race, but in the event none of Stephenson’s three rivals put up a serious challenge since they all failed to complete the course. A couple of his rivals flattered to deceive. The elegant Novelty, designed by a Swedish engineer called John Ericsson, was praised as a pretty little engine by the local press but it was little more than a vertical boiler on wheels and after a couple of good runs reaching 28 mph, it started leaking badly and was quickly disqualified, despite attempts to patch it up with cement. Perseverance, designed by Timothy Burstall, was quickly withdrawn after its team failed to repair damage incurred in transit to Liverpool and, most humiliatingly, the safety plug in the boiler of Timothy Hackworth’s Sans Pareil melted in a cloud of steam in full view of the grandstand that had been erected for the spectators.23

  Stephenson, and in particular his son Robert, had worked hard to improve on the rather unreliable engines used on the Stockton & Darlington. Crucially Robert had developed the multi-tube boiler,24 a feature that greatly reduced the chances of the engine running out of steam and stalling. Several other improvements were incorporated into the ‘premium engine’, as it was known before it was given the name that is now famous throughout the world – the Rocket.25