The petition was referred to a Committee, who reported favourably on March 8, and the Bill was presented and read a first time on March 15. Then, however, came the opposition from the canal company. On April 8, as the "Journals" further record, the Commons received a petition from the Company of Proprietors of the Glamorganshire Canal Navigation setting forth that they had been authorised under two Acts to make and maintain a navigable canal from Merthyr to Cardiff; that they had expended on this undertaking a sum of £100,000; that they had seen the Bill above-mentioned, and, they proceed:—
"That the Dram Road or Way, proposed to be made by the said Bill, will pass from one End thereof to the other, nearly parallel, and in almost every Part near to the said Canal; and in some places will cross the same; and that the Petitioners were induced to undertake the making of the said Canal, in hopes of being repaid the Expence thereof, with proper remuneration for the Risk of the said Undertaking, by the Carriage of Coal, Lime, Iron, Timber, and other goods and Merchandizes thereon, but if the said Dram Road or Way should be made as proposed they would be deprived of a great Part of those Advantages which they apprehend they have had granted and secured to them, and are therefore now fully entitled to, by the said Two Acts, without the Country adjacent or the Public in General, receiving any particular Benefit or Advantage."
The company further pleaded that under their Acts they were "restrained from ever receiving more than a moderate Dividend on their Shares, and whenever the Profits of the Canal shall be more than sufficient to pay the same, their Rates of Tonnage are to be lowered;[[35]] and for that reason, as well as many others, of equal Justice, they conceive they should be secured in the possession of all the advantages proposed to be granted to them by the said Acts."
The House ordered that the petition do lie upon the table until the said Bill be read a second time, and that counsel be then heard on both sides. On May 3 a day was appointed for the second reading, and on May 4 the House received a further petition from landowners, tradesmen and others in support of the Bill. The "Journals," however, contain no record of the second reading having been reached, and their only further reference at all to the Bill is in the "General Index" to the volumes for 1790-1801, where, under the heading "Navigations: Petitions to make Dram Roads to Canals, &c.," it is said of the Bill in question "Not proceeded in."
There is no reason to doubt that this first scheme for the construction of a railway—even though under the name of a "dram road"—which would have been not only independent of canal transport but in direct competition therewith, was killed through the opposition of the then powerful canal interests. The tradition in Cardiff is that the Glamorganshire Canal Company "got hold" of the leading promoters, and persuaded them to abandon their scheme by electing them members of the managing committee of the canal. Whether or not some additional inducement was offered to them is not known. In any case, there was no further attempt to set up a railway in direct and avowed competition with a canal until the great fight over the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill, a quarter of a century later.
The significance of all these facts will be found still greater in the light of what I shall have to say subsequently in regard to the influence of canal interests and canal precedents alike on railway development and on railway legislation.
In some instances the railways belonging to the period here under review were constructed by the canal companies not merely as feeders to the canals but as substitutes for lengths of canal where the making of an artificial waterway presented special difficulties. The Lancashire Canal Company, incorporated in 1792, laid a line of railway for five miles, passing through the town of Preston, to connect two sections of canal. The Ashby Canal Company, under an Act of 1794, avoided a considerable expense in the construction of locks by supplementing thirty miles of canal on the level with intermediate lengths of railway to the extent of another twenty miles. Writing in 1884, Clement E. Stretton says, in his "Notes on Early Railway History," concerning these old tram-roads of the Ashby Canal Company: "One part has since been altered and absorbed into the Ashby and Worthington Railway;[[36]] but the branch from Ticknall tramway wharf to Tucknall has never been relaid or altered in any way, and, therefore, is a most interesting relic of ancient times. To see waggons with flat wheels drawn over cast-iron rails one yard long by a horse, cannot fail to interest those who watch the workings of railways, and it most clearly shows the great improvements made and the perseverance which has been required to develop the present gigantic railway system out of such small beginnings."
The Charnwood Forest Canal, again, concerning which I shall have more to say later, was a connecting link between two lines of edge-railway, the purpose of the combined land and water route being to enable Leicestershire coal to reach the Leicester market.
It will thus be seen that, whilst the coalowners introduced railways in the first instance, it was the canal companies themselves who, in the days before locomotives, mainly developed and established the utility of a new mode of traction which was eventually to supersede to so material an extent the inland navigation they favoured. It was open to those companies to adapt their undertakings much more completely to the new conditions, if they had had sufficient foresight and enterprise so to do.
The signs of the times were obvious enough to those who were able and willing to read them, and there were many indications that canals would assuredly be not only supplemented, but supplanted, by railways. An impartial authority like Thomas Telford, in adding a postscript to an article on "Canals" which he had contributed to Archdeacon Plymley's "General View of the Agriculture of Shropshire," wrote under date November 13, 1800:—