Deeds of a Great Railway / A record of the enterprise and achievements of the London and North-Western Railway company during the Great War

by G. R. S. Darroch

The flying chariot through the field of air!"

Evidently the "Jules Verne" of his day, Erasmus Darwin was physician as well as poet; his ideas, so we are told, were indeed "original and contain the germs of important truths," to which may, in some measure, be attributed the genius of his grandson, the famous Charles R. Darwin, discoverer of natural selection.

It is true the petrol engine has latterly proved its more ready adaptability to the purpose of road locomotion and of aviation, but the fact remains that steam to this day eminently preserves her predominance in the world of ocean and railway travel.

Seldom does one find the evolution of any one particular branch of scientific endeavour traced in so alluring as well as instructive a manner as proves to be the case, when, taking down from the nearest bookshelf that delightful little volume "British Locomotives," one pursues the author, Mr. C. J. Bowen-Cooke (now C.B.E. and Chief Mechanical Engineer of the London and North-Western Railway), with never-abating interest through his treatise on the early history of the modern railway engine. He tells us that "the first self-moving locomotive engine of which there is any authenticated record was made by a Frenchman named Nicholas Charles Cugnot, in the year 1769. It was termed a 'land-carriage,' and was designed to run on ordinary roads." Although we learn that "there are no particulars extant of this, the very first locomotive," this same Cugnot designed and constructed two years later, a larger engine, "which is still preserved in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers at Paris." The French are a people ever prone to looking further than their noses, hence the fact that the French Government not unnaturally "took some interest in this notion of a steam land-carriage, and voted a sum of money towards its construction, with the idea that such a machine might prove useful for military purposes." Man proposes, but God disposes, and as luck would have it the vehicle seemed fore-ordained to end its brief career somewhat ingloriously, for after it "had been tried two or three times it overturned in the streets of Paris, and was then locked up in the Arsenal." A lapse of ten or a dozen years supervened before England began looking to her laurels, but "in 1784 Watt took out a patent for a steam-carriage, of which the boiler was to be of wood or thin metal, to be secured by hoops or otherwise to prevent its bursting from the pressure of steam"! It was not long, however, ere the steam road carriage was superseded by a locomotive designed to run on rails, of which the earliest "broods," embracing such "spifflicating" species as the Puffing Billies, Rockets, Planets, etc., and "hatched" from the brains of eminent men such as Stephenson and Trevithick, were necessarily original and quaint to a degree. It is, unfortunately, impossible here to do more than skim the copious wealth of interesting data through which Mr. Bowen-Cooke so admirably pilots us, and which evidently he has spared no pains to collect; suffice it to add that the succeeding years bear unfailing witness to that intense earnestness which, sustaining the early locomotive pioneers unwearying in their well-doing, was so largely instrumental in the attainment of that perfection of which we, their beneficiaries, now in our own season reap the benefit.

It was not until the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, when the directors of that line offered "a premium of £500 for the most improved locomotive engine," that any real tendency towards modern design and external appearance began to make itself apparent. The stimulus afforded by this offer, however, was rousing in effect, engines becoming gradually larger and more or less powerful, until in the year 1858 Mr. Ramsbottom designed and built for the London and North-Western Railway Company at Crewe an express passenger engine known familiarly as the "seven foot six," in that its single pair of driving wheels measured 7 feet 6 inches in diameter. Bearing the name of "Lady of the Lake" (for, whilst sacrificing perhaps a certain amount of power for speed, it was "certainly one of the prettiest engines ever built"), this engine and others of the same "class" remained in the service of the London and North-Western Railway until quite recently, thus forming a link between the earth-shaking events of the present day and that period of anxious calm, when the scare (to which reference has previously been made) became the occasion in 1858 for centring public opinion on the possibilities of, and the advantages likely to accrue from, transport by rail in time of war.

The Crimean struggle of 1855 had done little enough to enhance England's military prestige, only to be followed, two years later, by the nightmare horrors of the Mutiny.

Throughout the first and second Palmerston Ministries, the reading of the European barometer remained at "stormy," and an attempt in 1858 to assassinate the Emperor Napoleon III., which was believed to have had its origin in England, served as a prelude to the "blowing-off" of a considerable volume of steam, especially when a year later, the war between France and Austria having terminated and the kingdom of Italy being created, the French people found themselves free to devote their then bellicose attentions, as had so frequently been their misguided and regrettable wont, to our insular selves. It is, however, an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and the very fact that the tone, particularly of the military party in France, was violent and aggressive to a degree, had the salutary effect of serving as a mirror in which was accurately reflected our own deplorable unpreparedness for war.

Commenting on the situation, the writer of a leading article in the Times of April 19th, 1859, openly deplores the fact that "the Englishman of the present day has forgotten the use of arms"; not merely this, but "the practice of football or of vying with the toughest waterman on the Thames is of little service to young men when their country is in danger."

Mercifully enough, perhaps, the pernicious sensationalism of the cinema, and the vacant thrills afforded by the scenic railway, were magic lures unknown in those mid-Victorian days, manly and open-air forms of sport already being considered sufficiently derogatory to the inculcation within the minds of the younger generation of that fitting sense of duty, of self-sacrifice, and subservience to discipline.

The opinion was further expressed that "there can be only one true defence of a nation like ours—a large and permanent volunteer force supported by the spirit and patriotism of our young men, and gradually indoctrinating the country with military knowledge," the article concluding with this ominous reminder—"We are the only people in the world who have not such a force in one form or another."