Rambles on Railways

by Sir Cusack P. Roney

There are no locomotive building firms in Ireland.

The money value of the new locomotives only, turned out each year by these establishments is close upon £4,000,000 sterling. Nearly a third of the locomotives built are sent abroad.

In 1864, the number of locomotives on the German railways was 4,768,574 of which were manufactured abroad; Germany now not only builds her own locomotives, but she sent 1,000 last year to other countries, such as Switzerland, Italy, France, and Russia. The number of engines now used on the railways of Germany is 5,250, of which 340 have to be replaced every year, it being calculated that a locomotive seldom lasts longer than fifteen or sixteen years. The largest of the German factories is that of Borsig, of Berlin, which has built more than 2,000 engines since it was first established in 1841; the two-thousandth engine being the one that was sent to the Paris Exhibition of 1867. As the one-thousandth locomotive of this establishment was completed in 1859, it follows that its producing capacity is about 125 engines a year. Of the others, the principal are that of Maffei, in Bavaria; that of the Austrian railway companies at Vienna; Egerstorff’s, at Hanover; Henschl’s, at Cassel; and the Carlsruhe Factory, which sent its four hundred and fifty-ninth locomotive to the Paris Exhibition.

The great locomotive establishments of France are not more than six in number; those of Messrs. Schneider & Co., at the Creusot Iron Works, of Messrs. Cail & Co., Messrs. Gouin & Co., Messrs. Kœchlin & Co., of Mulhouse, the establishments at Five-Lilles, Graffenstadt, and Commentry. Each of the great French railway companies make locomotives. The capacity of construction of all the establishments in France does not exceed 450 engines per annum. Although France is very proud of having exported a dozen engines to England, she is herself a large importer of them, principally from Belgium; and she requires an expansion of at least 50 per cent. of her present locomotive production before she can be independent, for them, of other nations.

The largest locomotive constructing and engineering factory in Belgium is that of the “Societé, John Cockerill,” at Seraing, established in 1834, by our countryman of that name. Mr. Cockerill did not live to see the complete success of the establishment. The other leading locomotive constructing firms in Belgium are those of Messrs. Nicaise & Deleuwe, of Louvière; G. Raghens & Sons, of Malines; Messrs. Charles L. Cavels, of Ghent; “Compagnie Belge du Materiel des Chemins de Fer,” at Molenbeek Saint Jean; Thivenet, of Marchienne; Hanrez & Co., of Monceau-upon-Sambre; and A. Detombay & Co., of Marcinelle. The locomotive producing capacity of Belgium is about 600 engines per annum, and it can be easily extended.

Switzerland has one locomotive building factory, which was recently opened at Zurich. Italy, Spain, Russia, and Holland are not locomotive producing countries. About 4,500 engines per annum are now constructed in Europe, but in case of demand at least 2,000 a year more could be produced. Canada and Australia are the only British colonies in which they are made; in the former their first manufacture dates back about twelve years, but it is only in the present year that a commencement has been made of building them in Australia. The first Australian engine was made at Sydney, and others are now in process of construction there.

There are, according to the last Post Office returns, 814 head postal towns in Great Britain, besides at least 4,000 sub-postal towns, boroughs, and villages, scattered all over the kingdom. There are in France no less than 4,361 “Bureaux de Poste et de Distribution,” both major and minor, and, as we have already said at page 144, Monsieur Vandal, in his Annuaire des Postes for 1866, enumerates about 19,000 postal towns in Europe and North America, exclusive of Schindermanderscheid, Oberschindermanderscheid, and Nederschindermanderscheid, which he has omitted to mention. With all these the French Post Office has correspondence more or less direct; so also has that of England. What the number of cities, towns, and villages, may be in the other parts of the world it is impossible to say; but this, at all events, is certain, that there is only one town, one great town, that has been conceived for the locomotive, born for the locomotive, wet-nursed for the locomotive, weaned for the locomotive, breeched for the locomotive, birched for the locomotive, apprenticed for the locomotive; its prima lanugo was for the locomotive; and, finally, prima lanugo has since grown to manhood, and, by the usual metamorphosis, has been converted into bristles, through the locomotive.

Just thirty-three years ago, at the original planning of the Grand Junction Railway, Crewe, which otherwise might have never been more than a road-side station, was fixed upon as the site for the company’s locomotive and carriage establishments. Its locality was convenient, being 42½ miles from Liverpool, and 54½ from Birmingham. Besides, it was at a comparatively poor and unfrequented part of the railway, where land could be—and actually, in the first purchases, was—obtained cheaply. Well, the line was built, the station was opened, and the repairing shops were erected. They were (in the plural number) “parra metu primo,” for it was always the late Mr. Joseph Locke’s habit to build with as much cheapness and economy as were consistent with efficiency and good working. The locomotive and carriage requirements for 97½ miles of railway, with six trains a day in each direction on week days and four on Sundays, added to which were a couple or three goods trains each way on week days, were not great. Therefore, the first erections at Crewe were modest and unpretending.

In process of time Crewe grew, for not only was the Grand Junction married with the London and Birmingham, neither bride nor bridegroom, however, retaining its former name, but each becoming “London and North-Western.” A year or so after celebration of the marriage, Crewe became the junction point of the railway to Manchester; thence afterwards extended in a mystifying net-work of lines over all the manufacturing towns of Cheshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire. On the left there was the line to Chester, one of the railways constructed by George Stephenson, which, in 1849, was extended, by his son Robert, to Holyhead. The main arterial railway did not, in the first instance, extend farther north from London, than the point where the Liverpool and Manchester Railway bisected it at Newton Junction; but, by degrees, it stretched out to Preston, then to Lancaster, then to Carlisle, and therefrom all over western Scotland. So that the insignificant, almost unknown, Crewe of 1837 had not only become, in 1849, a great centre of traffic of every description, but it was also the workshop, the family residence, when in health, of upwards of 220 engines and tenders, as well as the hospital and place of receptacle for such of them as became sick, halt, or maimed, while working the traffic of what became, at the time of the amalgamation, the northern division of the London and North-Western Railway. The extreme southern point of this division was, and we believe still is, Stafford; at the commencement of the railway—very much like Crewe—an insignificant and unimportant road-side station. In the north, Crewe engines worked as far as Carlisle, westward to Holyhead, and eastward along the mystifying net-work of lines which fertilise Cheshire and its two adjacent manufacturing counties. Upwards of one hundred engines were at work every day; and besides keeping them all in perfect order, the establishment turned out a new engine and tender every Monday morning, commencing on the 1st of January, 1848.

In 1849 the number of men and boys employed in all the shops devoted to engines was 1,600; the weekly wages of each averaged just a pound a week—£1,600. “Close to the entrance of the locomotive department,” says Sir Francis Head, in his “Stokers and Pokers,” “stands, as its primum mobile, the tall chimney of a steam-pump, which, besides supplying the engine that propels the machinery of the workshops, gives an abundance of water to the locomotives, and also to the new railway town of Crewe, containing at present about 8,000 inhabitants. This pump raises about eighty or ninety thousand gallons of water per day from a brook below into filtering-beds, whence it is again raised about forty feet into a large cistern, where it is a second time filtered through charcoal for the supply of the town.”