OLIVE MOUNT CUTTING. [By Percival Skelton.]
The Olive Mount cutting was the first extensive stone cutting executed on any railway, and to this day it is one of the most formidable. It is about two miles long, and in some parts more than a hundred feet deep. It is a narrow ravine or defile cut out of the solid rock, and not less than four hundred and eighty thousand cubic yards of stone were removed from it. Mr. Vignolles, afterward describing it, said it looked as if it had been dug out by giants.
SANKEY VIADUCT. [By Percival Skelton.]
The crossing of so many roads and streams involved the necessity for constructing an unusual number of bridges. There were not fewer than sixty-three, under or over the railway, on the thirty miles between Liverpool and Manchester. Up to this time bridges had been applied generally to high roads, where inclined approaches were of comparatively small importance, and in determining the rise of his arch the engineer selected any headway he thought proper. Every consideration was indeed made subsidiary to constructing the bridge itself, and the completion of one large structure of this sort was regarded as an epoch in engineering history. Yet here, in the course of a few years, no fewer than sixty-three bridges were constructed on one line of railway! Mr. Stephenson early found that the ordinary arch was inapplicable in certain cases, where the headway was limited, and yet the level of the railway must be preserved. In such cases he employed simple cast-iron beams, by which he safely bridged gaps of moderate width, economizing headway, and introducing the use of a new material of the greatest possible value to the engineer. The bridges of masonry upon the line were of many kinds; several of them were skew bridges, while others, such as those at Newton and over the Irwell at Manchester, were straight and of considerable dimensions. But the principal piece of masonry on the line was the Sankey viaduct.
This fine work is principally of brick, with stone facings. It consists of nine arches of fifty feet span each. The massive piers are supported on two hundred piles driven deep into the soil; and they rise to a great height—the coping of the parapet being seventy feet above the level of the valley, in which flow the Sankey brook and Canal. Its total cost was about £45,000.
By the end of 1828 the directors found they had expended £460,000 on the works, and that they were still far from completion. They looked at the loss of interest on this large investment, and began to grumble at the delay. They desired to see their capital becoming productive; and in the spring of 1829 they urged the engineer, to push on the works with increased vigor. Mr. Cropper, one of the directors, who took an active interest in their progress, said to Stephenson one day, "Now, George, thou must get on with the railway, and have it finished without farther delay: thou must really have it ready for opening by the first day of January next." "Consider the heavy character of the works, sir, and how much we have been delayed by the want of money, not to speak of the wetness of the weather: it is impossible." "Impossible!" rejoined Cropper; "I wish I could get Napoleon to thee—he would tell thee there is no such word as 'impossible' in the vocabulary." "Tush!" exclaimed Stephenson, with warmth, "don't speak to me about Napoleon! Give me men, money, and materials, and I will do what Napoleon couldn't do—drive a railroad from Liverpool to Manchester over Chat Moss!" And truly the formation of a high road over that bottomless bog was apparently a more difficult task than the making even of Napoleon's far-famed road across the Simplon.
The directors had more than once been embarrassed by want of funds to meet the heavy expenditure. The country had scarcely yet recovered from the general panic and crash of 1825, and it was with difficulty that the calls could be raised from the shareholders. A loan of £100,000 was obtained from the Exchequer Loan Commissioners in 1826; and in 1829 an act was passed enabling the company to raise farther capital, to provide working plant for the railway. Two acts were also obtained during the progress of the undertaking, enabling deviations and alterations to be made; one to improve the curves and shorten the line near Rainhill, and the other to carry the line across the Irwell into the town of Manchester. Thanks to the energy of the engineer, the industry of his laborers, and the improved supply of money by the directors, the railway made rapid progress in the course of the year 1829. Double sets of laborers were employed on Chat Moss and at other places in carrying on the works by night and day, the night shifts working by torch and fire light; and at length, the work advancing at all points, the directors saw their way to the satisfactory completion of the undertaking.
It may well be supposed that Stephenson's time was fully occupied in superintending the extensive and for the most part novel works connected with the railway, and that even his extraordinary powers of labor and endurance were taxed to the utmost during the four years that they were in progress. Almost every detail in the plans was directed and arranged by himself. Every bridge, from the simplest to the most complicated, including the then novel structure of the "skew bridge," iron girders, siphons, fixed engines, and the machinery for working the tunnel at the Liverpool end, had all to be thought out by his own head, and reduced to definite plans under his own eyes. Besides all this, he had to design the working plant in anticipation of the opening of the railway. He must be prepared with wagons, trucks, and carriages, himself superintending their manufacture. The permanent road, turn-tables, switches, and crossings—in short, the entire structure and machinery of the line, from the turning of the first sod to the running of the first train of carriages on the railway, went on under his immediate supervision. And it was in the midst of this vast accumulation of work and responsibility that the battle of the locomotive engine had to be fought—a battle not merely against material difficulties, but against the still more trying obstructions of deeply-rooted mistrust and prejudice on the part of a considerable minority of the directors.
He had no staff of experienced assistants—not even a staff of draughtsmen in his office—but only a few pupils learning their business, and he was frequently without even their help. The time of his engineering inspectors was fully occupied in the actual superintendence of the works at different parts of the line, and he took care to direct all their important operations in person. The principal draughtsman was Mr. Thomas Gooch, a pupil he had brought with him from Newcastle. "I may say," writes Mr. Gooch, "that nearly the whole of the working and other drawings, as well as the various land-plans for the railway, were drawn by my own hand. They were done at the company's office in Clayton Square during the day, from instructions supplied in the evenings by Mr. Stephenson, either by word of mouth, or by little rough hand sketches on letter-paper. The evenings were also generally devoted to my duties as secretary, in writing (mostly from his own dictation) his letters and reports, or in making calculations and estimates. The mornings before breakfast were not unfrequently spent by me in visiting and lending a helping hand in the tunnel and other works near Liverpool—the untiring zeal and perseverance of George Stephenson never for an instant flagging, and inspiring with a like enthusiasm all who were engaged under him in carrying forward the works."[63]