For instance, he who along dark, intricate, subterranean passages, or “heavings,” as they are termed, often only three feet and a half high, and occasionally only two feet high, creeping and crawling through foul air, could with great speed, not only with unerring certainty find his way, but in such a secluded study could plan a variety of new cuttings, each forming part and parcel of a reticulated system of excavation which an unpractised mind would find it utterly impossible to comprehend, would, it may easily be conceived, experience but little difficulty, when walking erect in sunshine and in balmy air, to carry in his mind from, say Harrow to Watford, Watford to Tring, Tring to Wolverton, and Wolverton to Birmingham, those great leading features of the surrounding country which would enable him to exercise for the laying out of a railway the judgment and decision required.
Again, what, it may justly be asked, are embankments, deep cuttings, and occasionally here and there a straight tunnel thirty feet broad, twenty-seven feet high, usually forming by drainage its own adit, in comparison with the overwhelming and intricate difficulties attendant upon—
1st. The excavation of coal from strata of various characters, at various depths, each passage or “air-heaving” requiring perhaps a different system of support.
2nd. Encountering at various depths quicksands.
3rd. The great as well as minute arrangements necessary for wheeling carriages and raising the coals.
4th. The organization and management of a subterranean army of men and horses.
5th, and lastly. Lifting by steam-power from various depths, by night and by day, streams, floods, and occasionally almost rivers of water?
It has been beneath the surface of our country that these and many other difficulties of vast magnitude—unknown to and unthought of by the multitude—have for many generations been successfully encountered by science, capital, and by almost superhuman physical exertion; and it was accordingly, as we have stated, from beneath the surface of Great Britain that an organised corps of civil engineers, who, like those we have named, had regularly served as apprentices, arose, in the emergency of a moment, to assist their eminent brother engineers above ground, in constructing for the country the innumerable railways so suddenly required.