Fire and Steam (7 page)

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 passengers
²¹
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

In the trials, the Rocket performed peerlessly, living up to its name with Stephenson
père
at the controls and Locke as fireman. Back and forth it went over the 1.5-mile track, racking up average speeds of around 14 mph until, on the last leg, he let it loose, presumably as a way of showing all those tomfool lawyers and parliamentarians who had humiliated him how wrong they had been. The engine responded by averaging nearly 30 mph for the final run, demonstrating what good engineering could achieve as well as offering an exciting spectacle to the assembled gentry and peasantry who had never seen anything travel faster on land than a galloping horse or deer. The £500 prize was his, as was a commission to supply another four engines of the same design for the railway within the next three months, an onerous order which he fulfilled successfully bar a few weeks' delay on the delivery of the final locomotive. And bigger and better locomotives were delivered in time for the opening.

Rocket
is a tiny little engine that now sits rather glumly in London's Science Museum,
²⁶
dwarfed by its far larger successors. But its impact was to be monumental as its success demonstrated the potential of steam locomotives, just as the Wright brothers showed the potential of aircraft with their short flight seventy years later. The
Liverpool
Mercury
, which in anticipation of the trials predicted that the railway might ‘alter the whole system of our internal communications . . . substituting an agency whose ultimate effects can scarcely be anticipated'
²⁷
was to be proved right. The
Scotsman
was equally enthusiastic, stating pretentiously and clumsily: ‘The experiments at Liverpool have established principles which will give a greater impulse to civilisation than it has ever received from any single cause since the Press first opened the gates of knowledge to the human species'.
²⁸

Meanwhile, the railway had to be completed and opened. Now that the major issues over its operating methods were decided, the only remaining question was how quickly Stephenson could get the line open so that the railway started earning a return for its investors. Sections of the route had been completed and by mid 1829 eminent figures were given rides, even enemies of the railway like the MP Thomas Creevey who had crowed at the defeat of the first Bill. Now he reported that the ordeal of travelling on the railway was ‘like flying and it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion of instant death to all upon the least accident happening'.
²⁹
It gave the poor chap a headache which lingered for several days. His fellow campaigner Lord Sefton was apparently ‘convinced that some damnable thing must come of it', but poor Creevey confessed that no one else seemed to think so.

Stephenson was intent on showing the power of his new locomotives and took a party of forty passengers over the ‘floating' railway on Chat Moss, reaching the amazing speed of 30 mph on the return leg which passengers reported as remarkably comfortable. Trial runs were widely reported locally and, just as today, newspapers sought expert advice to assess the risks. A Doctor Chambers assured potential passengers that there was no cause for alarm even if the train reached 35 mph, and that their eyes would not be damaged by looking at the passing scenery.

The opening was scheduled for 15 September 1830, and by June the trackwork was sufficiently advanced to allow a full rehearsal from Liverpool to Manchester. Stephenson, driving one of his new locomotives, the
Arrow
, took a party of forty including the directors and, just to test the capability of his engine, he added wagons containing stone to give a weight of 39 tons. The journey took a mere two hours, and the return, when the stone was left behind, barely an
hour and a half discounting stops. The engineering had proved itself.