AN AFFRIGHTED TOLL-KEEPER.
There is a story told by Coleridge about the steam engine which Trevithick exhibited at work on a temporary railroad in London. Trevithick and his partner Captain Vivian, prior to this exhibition were riding on the carriage on the turnpike road near to Plymouth. It had committed sundry damage in its course, knocking down the rails of a gentleman’s garden, when Vivian saw the toll-bar in front of them closed he called to Trevithick to slacken speed which he did just in time to save the gate. The affrighted toll-keeper instantly opened it. “What have us got to pay?” asked Captain Vivian, careful as to honesty if reckless as to grammar.
“Na-na-na-na!” stammered the poor man, trembling in every limb, with his teeth chattering as if he had got the ague.
“What have us got to pay, I ask?”
“Na-noth-nothing to pay! My de-dear Mr. Devil, do drive as fast as you can! Nothing to pay!”
AN EARLY RAILWAY.
More than twenty years before the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the celebrated engineer Trevithick constructed, not only a locomotive engine, but also a railway, that the London public might see with their own eyes what the new high pressure steam engine could effect, and how greatly superior a railway was to a common road for locomotion. The sister of Davies Gilbert named this engine “Catch me who can.” The following interesting account in a letter to a correspondent was given by John Isaac Hawkins, an engineer well known in his day.
“Sir,—Observing that it is stated in your last number (No. 1232, dated the 20th instant, page 269), under the head of ‘Twenty-one Years’ Retrospect of the Railway System,’ that the greatest speed of Trevithick’s engine was five miles an hour, I think it due to the memory of that extraordinary man to declare that about the year 1808 he laid down a circular railway in a field adjoining the New Road, near or at the spot now forming the southern half of Euston Square; that he placed a locomotive engine, weighing about ten tons, on that railway—on which I rode, with my watch in hand—at the rate of twelve miles an hour; that Mr. Trevithick then gave his opinion that it would go twenty miles an hour, or more, on a straight railway; that the engine was exhibited at one shilling admittance, including a ride for the few who were not too timid; that it ran for some weeks, when a rail broke and occasioned the engine to fly off in a tangent and overturn, the ground being very soft at the time. Mr. Trevithick having expended all his means in erecting the works and enclosure, and the shillings not having come in fast enough to pay current expenses, the engine was not again set on the rail.”