Great Facts / A Popular History and Description of the Most Remarkable Inventions During the Present Century

by Frederick C. Bakewell

It must be observed, with regard to the action of locomotive engines, that as the piston-rods are attached directly to cranks on the axle, each piston makes a double stroke for every revolution of the driving wheels; consequently, when the engine is running at great speed, the movement of the piston is so rapid, that there is neither time for the free emission of the waste steam, nor for the full action of the high-pressure steam admitted. There is, therefore, a great waste of power occasioned by the admitted steam having to act against the steam that is escaping; and an engine, calculated to have the power of 700 horses, will not exert a tractive force nearly equal to that amount. With a driving wheel 6 feet in diameter, a locomotive engine will be propelled 18 feet by each double stroke of the piston, if there be no slipping on the rails; consequently, in the space of a mile, the piston must make 300 double strokes. When running, therefore, at the speed of 30 miles an hour, the piston makes 150 double strokes per minute.

The success of the great experimental railway from Manchester to Liverpool not only stimulated similar works in this country, undertaken by private enterprise; but the Continental Governments quickly perceived the importance of that means of communication, and commenced the formation of railways at the national cost, and placed them under governmental control. Belgium was peculiarly adapted, by the general level state of the country, for the formation of railways; and long before any connected system was completed in this country, the chemins de fer formed a complete net-work in that kingdom, and the system of conducting the traffic was brought to a much higher state of perfection than was attained in this country. The rate of travelling, however, was slower.

It is a question that has been often mooted, whether it is better to allow the system of communication throughout the country to be conducted by independent companies of enterprising individuals, or to place it entirely under the control of the Government. The want of system manifested in the formation of the railways in England has proved a serious inconvenience, and has occasioned wasteful expenditure, besides having led to a fearful destruction of life, owing to the want of careful attention to the means of safety, and to ill-judged parsimony in the management of the traffic. There can be no doubt that if the Government had undertaken the work zealously, and with the view of establishing a complete system of railway communication, many of the inconveniences now experienced might have been avoided, and the railways might have been laid down and worked at considerably less cost, and with a large addition to the national revenue. There is, however, so strong a disinclination in this country to the centralization of Government power, and to the extension of Government influence, that the people generally had rather submit to considerable inconvenience and expense, than tolerate the system of railway management which has been adopted on the Continent. The necessity of interference, to protect the interests of the public, has nevertheless compelled the Government, though late, to adopt measures for controlling the management of the railway companies, and stringent regulations are now imposed with a view to prevent unnecessary danger to railway passengers.

The railway system of Great Britain, though established entirely by private enterprise, represents an amount of capital equal to one-third of the national debt, and nearly 100,000 individuals are directly employed in conducting the traffic on the various railways in this kingdom. An idea of the vastness of these undertakings, and the important interests involved in them, may be formed from the following facts, stated by Mr. Robert Stephenson, at the Institution of Civil Engineers:—

"The railways of Great Britain and Ireland, completed at the beginning of 1856, extended 8,054 miles, and more than enough of single rails were laid to make a belt round the globe. The cost of constructing these railways had been £286,000,000. The working stock comprised 5,000 locomotive engines and 150,000 carriages and trucks; and the coal consumed annually by the engines amounted to 2,000,000 tons, so that in every minute 4 tons of coal flashed into steam 20 tons of water. In 1854 there were 111 millions of passengers conveyed on railways, each passenger travelling an average of 12 miles. The receipts during 1854 amounted to £20,215,000; and there was no instance on record in which the receipts of a railway had not been of continuous growth, even where portions of the traffic had been abstracted by new lines. The wear and tear of the railways was, at the same time, enormous. For instance, 20,000 tons of iron rails required to be annually replaced, and 26 millions of wooden sleepers perished in the same time. To supply this number of sleepers, 300,000 trees were felled, the growth of which would require little less than 5,000 acres of forest land. The cost of running was about fifteen pence per mile, and an average train will carry 200 passengers. Without railways, the penny post could not have been established, because the old mail coaches would have been unable to carry the mass of letters and newspapers that are now transmitted. Every Friday night, when the weekly papers are published, eight or ten carts are required for Post Office bags on the North-Western Railway alone, and would hence require 14 or 15 mail coaches."

Adverting to other advantages derived from railway locomotion, Mr. Stephenson noticed the comparative safety of that mode of travelling. Railway accidents occurred to passengers in the first half of 1854 in the proportion of only one accident to every 7,194,343 travellers. As regards the saving of time, he estimated that on every journey, averaging 12 miles in length, an hour was saved to 111 millions of passengers per annum, which was equal to 38,000 years, reckoning eight working hours per day; and allowing each man an average of 3s. a day for his work, the saving of time might be valued at £2,000,000 a year. There were 90,000 persons employed directly, and 40,000 collaterally, on railways; and 130,000 men, with their families, represent 500,000 so that 1 in 50 of the entire population of the kingdom might be said to be dependent for their subsistence on railways.

Every year adds to the extent of the railway system, and to the increase of the traffic, so that considerable addition should be made to the amounts stated by Mr. Stephenson to represent the state of railway enterprise and railway traffic at the present day. The traffic returns for the week ending the 25th of September, 1858, amounted to £502,720; and the gross receipts of the railways in 1857 were £24,174,610. The railways now open for traffic in England, Scotland, and Ireland extended to upwards of 9,000 miles, and the lines reported to be in the course of construction amount to one-ninth the length of those completed.

In estimating the importance and advantage of railway travelling, there must not be omitted its cheapness and comfort, compared with travelling by stage coach. There are some persons, indeed, who look back with regret to the old coaching days; and it must be admitted that railways have taken away nearly all the romance of travelling, and much of the exhilarating pleasure that was experienced when passing through a beautiful country on the top of a well-horsed coach in fine weather. The many incidents and adventures that gave variety to the journey were pleasant enough for a short distance; but two days and a night on the top of a coach, exposed to cold and rain, or cramped up inside, with no room to stir the body or the legs, was accompanied with an amount of suffering which those who have experienced it would willingly exchange for a seat, even in a third-class railway carriage. In a national and in a social point of view, also, railways have produced important improvements. They tend to equalize the value of land throughout the kingdom, by bringing distant sources of supply nearer the points of consumption; they have given extraordinary stimulus to manufacturing industry; and by connecting all parts of the country more closely together, railway communication has concentrated the energies of the people, and has thus added materially to their wealth, their comforts, and to social intercourse.

Nor must we, in noticing the grand invention of locomotion on railways, omit to mention some of the many subsidiary works which have been created during its progress towards perfection, and which have contributed to its success. Tunnels, of a size never before contemplated, have penetrated for miles through hard rocks, or through shifting clays and sands; embankments and viaducts have been raised and erected, on a scale of magnitude that surpasses any former similar works; bridges of various novel kinds, invented and constructed for the special occasions, carry the railways over straits of the sea, through gigantic tubes; across rivers, suspended from rods supported by ingeniously devised piers and girders; and over slanting roads, on iron beams or on brick arches built askew. As to the locomotive engines, though the principle of construction remains the same, the numerous patents that have been obtained attest that invention has been active in introducing various improvements in the details of construction, to facilitate their working, and to increase their power. The various plans that have been contrived for improving the structure of the wheels and axles, for the application of breaks, for deadening the effect of collisions, for making signals, for the forms of the rails, and for the modes of fastening them to the road, are far too many to be enumerated.

In addition to the innumerable contrivances that have been invented for the improvement of the working of ordinary railways, several distinct systems of railway locomotion have been introduced to public notice, some of which seemed very feasible, though they have nearly all gradually disappeared. Of these, the Atmospheric railway was the most promising, and for a time it bid fair to supersede the use of locomotive engines. The propulsion of the carriages, by the pressure of the atmosphere acting on an attached piston working in a vacuum tube, possessed many theoretical advantages, and if it could be applied economically, railway travelling would become more pleasant and more free from danger than it is. On several lines of railway the atmospheric plan was put into operation, but owing to the expense of working, it was gradually abandoned. The short line from Kingston to Dalky, in Ireland, up a steep incline, was favourable to the working of the atmospheric railway, and there it continued to linger for some time after it had been abandoned elsewhere.