Such was the expansion of business caused by the inventions to which we have referred, that the navigation was found altogether inadequate to accommodate the traffic, which completely outgrew all the Canal Companies’ appliances of wharves, boats, and horses. Cotton lay at Liverpool for weeks together, waiting to be removed; and it occupied a longer time to transport the cargoes from Liverpool to Manchester than it had done to bring them across the Atlantic from the United States to England. Carts and waggons were tried, but proved altogether insufficient. Sometimes manufacturing operations had to be suspended altogether, and during a frost, when the canals were frozen up, the communication was entirely stopped. The consequences were often disastrous, alike to operatives, merchants, and manufacturers.
Expostulation with the Canal Companies was of no use. They were overcrowded with business at their own prices, and disposed to be very dictatorial. When the Duke first constructed his canal, he had to encounter the fierce opposition of the Irwell and Mersey Navigation, whose monopoly
his new line of water conveyance threatened to interfere with. [147] But the innovation of one generation often becomes the obstruction of the next. The Duke’s agents would scarcely listen to the remonstrances of the Liverpool merchants and Manchester manufacturers, and the Bridgewater Canal was accordingly, in its turn, denounced as a monopoly.
Under these circumstances, any new mode of transit between the two towns which offered a reasonable prospect of relief was certain to receive a cordial welcome. The scheme of a tramroad was, however, so new and comparatively untried, that it is not surprising that the parties interested should have hesitated before committing themselves to it. Mr. Sandars, a Liverpool merchant, was amongst the first to broach the subject. He had suffered in his business, in common with many others, from the insufficiency of the existing modes of communication, and was ready to give consideration to any plan presenting elements of practical efficiency which proposed a remedy for the generally admitted grievance. Having caused inquiry to be made as to the success which had attended the haulage of heavy coal-trains by locomotive power on the northern railways, he was led to the opinion that the same means might be equally efficient in conducting the increasing traffic in merchandise between Liverpool and Manchester. He ventilated the subject amongst his friends, and about the beginning of 1821 a committee was formed for the purpose of bringing the scheme of a railroad before the public.
The novel project having become noised abroad, attracted the attention of the friends of railways in other quarters. Tramroads were by no means new expedients for the transit of heavy articles. The Croydon and Wandsworth Railway, laid down by William Jessop as early as the year 1801, had been regularly used for the conveyance of lime and stone in waggons hauled by mules or donkeys from
Merstham to London. The sight of this humble railroad in 1813 led Sir Richard Phillips in his ‘Morning Walk to Kew’ to anticipate the great advantages which would be derived by the nation from the general adoption of Blenkinsop’s engine for the conveyance of mails and passengers at ten or even fifteen miles an hour. In the same year we find Mr. Lovell Edgworth, who had for fifty years been advocating the superiority of tram or rail roads over common roads, writing to James Watt (7th August, 1813): “I have always thought that steam would become the universal lord, and that we should in time scorn post-horses; an iron railroad would be a cheaper thing than a road upon the common construction.”
Thomas Gray, of Nottingham, was another speculator on the same subject. Though he was no mechanic nor inventor, he had an enthusiastic belief in the powers of the railroad system. Being a native of Leeds, he had, when a boy, seen Blenkinsop’s locomotive at work on the Middleton cogged railroad, and from an early period he seems to have entertained almost as sanguine views on the subject as Sir Richard Phillips. It would appear that Gray was residing in Brussels in 1816, when the project of a canal from Charleroi, for the purpose of connecting Holland with the mining districts of Belgium, was the subject of discussion; and, in conversation with Mr. John Cockerill and others, he took the opportunity of advocating the superior advantages of a railway. He was absorbed for some time with the preparation of a pamphlet on the subject. He shut himself up, secluded from his wife and relations, declining to give them any information as to his mysterious studies, beyond the assurance that his scheme “would revolutionise the whole face of the material world and of society.” In 1820 Mr. Gray published the result of his studies in his ‘Observations on a General Iron Railway,’ in which, with great cogency, he urged the superiority of a locomotive railway over common roads and canals, pointing out, at the same time, the advantages to all classes of
the community of this mode of conveyance for merchandise and persons. In this book Mr. Gray suggested a railway between Manchester and Liverpool, “which,” he observed, “would employ many thousands of the distressed population of Lancashire.” The treatise must have met with a ready sale, as we find that two years later it had passed into a fourth edition. In 1822 Mr. Gray added diagrams to the book, showing, in one, suggested lines of railway connecting the principal towns of England, and in another, the principal towns of Ireland.
These speculations show that the subject of railways was gradually becoming familiar to the public mind, and that thoughtful men were anticipating with confidence the adoption of steam-power for the purposes of railway traction. At the same time, a still more profitable class of labourers was at work—first, men like Stephenson, who were engaged in improving the locomotive and making it a practicable and economical working power; and next, those like Edward Pease of Darlington, and Joseph Sandars of Liverpool, who were organising the means of laying down the railways. Mr. William James, of West Bromwich, belonged to the active class of projectors. He was a man of considerable social influence, of an active temperament, and had from an early period taken a warm interest in the formation of tramroads. Acting as land-agent for gentlemen of property in the mining districts, he had laid down several tramroads in the neighbourhood of Birmingham, Gloucester, and Bristol; and he published many pamphlets urging their formation in other places. At one period of his life he was a large iron-manufacturer. The times, however, went against him. It was thought he was too bold, some considered him even reckless, in his speculations; and he lost almost his entire fortune. He continued to follow the business of a land-agent, and it was while engaged in making a survey for one of his clients in the neighbourhood of Liverpool early in 1821, that he first heard of the project of a railway between that town and Manchester.
He at once called upon Mr. Sandars, and offered his services as surveyor of the proposed line, and his offer was accepted.