The Iron Horse, Robert Michael Ballantyne [good ebook reader .TXT] 📗

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