in materials to form the road, there did not yet appear to be the least sign of our being able to raise the solid embankment one single inch; in short we went on filling in without the slightest apparent effect. Even my assistants began to feel uneasy, and to doubt of the success of the scheme. The directors, too, spoke of it as a hopeless task: and at length they became seriously alarmed, so much so, indeed, that a board meeting was held on Chat Moss to decide whether I should proceed any further. They had previously taken the opinion of other engineers, who reported unfavourably. There was no help for it, however, but to go on. An immense outlay had been incurred; and great loss would have been occasioned had the scheme been then abandoned, and the line taken by another route. So the directors were compelled to allow me to go on with my plans, of the ultimate success of which I myself never for one moment doubted.”
During the progress of this part of the works, the Worsley and Trafford men, who lived near the Moss, and plumed themselves upon their practical knowledge of bog-work, declared the completion of the road to be utterly impracticable. “If you knew as much about Chat Moss as we do,” they said, “you would never have entered on so rash an undertaking; and depend upon it, all you have done and are doing will prove abortive. You must give up the idea of a floating railway, and either fill the Moss hard from the bottom, or deviate so as to avoid it altogether.” Such were the conclusions of science and experience.
In the midst of all these alarms and prophecies of failure, Stephenson never lost heart, but held to his purpose. His motto was “Persevere!” “You must go on filling in,” he said; “there is no other help for it. The stuff emptied in is doing its work out of sight, and if you will but have patience, it will soon begin to show.” And so the filling in went on; several hundreds of men and boys were employed to skin the Moss all round for many thousand yards, by means of sharp spades, called by the turf cutters “tommy-spades;”
and the dried cakes of turf were afterwards used to form the embankment, until at length as the stuff sank and rested upon the bottom, the bank gradually rose above the surface, and slowly advanced onwards, declining in height and consequently in weight, until it became joined to the floating road already laid upon the Moss. In the course of forming the embankment, the pressure of the bog turf tipped out of the waggons caused a copious stream of bog-water to flow from the end of it, in colour resembling Barclay’s double stout; and when completed, the bank looked like a long ridge of tightly pressed tobacco-leaf. The compression of the turf may be imagined from the fact that 670,000 cubic yards of raw moss formed only 277,000 cubic yards of embankment at the completion of the work.
At the western, or Liverpool end of the Chat Moss, there was a like embankment; but, as the ground there was solid, little difficulty was experienced in forming it, beyond the loss of substance caused by the oozing out of the water held by the moss-earth.
At another part of the Liverpool and Manchester line, Parr Moss was crossed by an embankment about 1½ mile in extent. In the immediate neighbourhood was found a large excess of cutting, which it would have been necessary to “put out in spoil-banks” (according to the technical phrase); but the surplus clay, stone, and shale, were tipped, waggon after waggon, into Parr Moss, until a solid but concealed embankment, from fifteen to twenty-five feet high, was formed, although to the eye it appears to be laid upon the level of the adjoining surface, as at Chat Moss.
The road across Chat Moss was finished by the 1st January, 1830, when the first experimental train of passengers passed over it, drawn by the “Rocket;” and it turned out that, instead of being the most expensive part of the line, it was about the cheapest. The total cost of forming the line over the Moss was £28,000, whereas Mr. Giles’s estimate was £270,000! It also proved to be one of the best portions
of the railway. Being a floating road, it was smooth and easy to run upon, just as Dr. Arnott’s water-bed is soft and easy to lie upon—the pressure being equal at all points. There was, and still is, a sort of springiness in the road over the Moss, such as is felt in passing along a suspended bridge; and those who looked along the line as a train passed over it, said they could observe a waviness, such as precedes and follows a skater upon ice.
During the progress of these works the most ridiculous rumours were set afloat. The drivers of the stage-coaches who feared for their calling, brought the alarming intelligence into Manchester from time to time, that “Chat Moss was blown up!” “Hundreds of men and horses had sunk; and the works were completely abandoned!” The engineer himself was declared to have been swallowed up in the Serbonian bog; and “railways were at an end for ever!”
In the construction of the railway, Mr. Stephenson’s capacity for organising and directing the labours of a large number of workmen of all kinds eminently displayed itself. A vast quantity of ballast-waggons had to be constructed, and implements and materials collected, before the army of necessary labourers could be efficiently employed at the various points of the line. There were not at that time, as there are now, large contractors possessed of railway plant, capable of executing earth-works on a large scale. The first railway engineer had not only to contrive the plant, but to organise and direct the labour. The labourers themselves had to be trained to their work; and it was on the Liverpool and Manchester line that Mr. Stephenson organised the staff of that mighty band of railway navvies, whose handiworks will be the wonder and admiration of succeeding generations. Looking at their gigantic traces, the men of some future age may be found to declare of the engineer and of his workmen, that “there were giants in those days.”