The bags have also to be stowed away in compartments according to their respective destinations. One lot for Manchester, Liverpool, and Dublin; one for Chester; a bundle of bags for Newcastle-under-Lyne, Market-Drayton, Eccleshall, Stone, Crewe, Rhuabon; a quantity of empty bags to be filled coming back; a lot for Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Carlisle; and one great open bag contained all the letter-bags for Dublin taken upon the road.
The minute arrangements necessary for the transaction of all this important business at midnight, while the train is flying through the dark, it would be quite impossible to describe. The occupation is not only highly confidential, but it requires unceasing attention, exhausting to body and mind. Some time ago, while the three clerks, with their right elbows moving in all directions, were vigorously engaged in sorting their letters, and while the guard, with the light of his lamp shining on the gilt buttons and gold lace which emblazoned the pockets of his waistcoat, was busily sealing a letter-bag, a collision took place, which, besides killing four men, at the same moment chucked the sorting clerks from their pigeon-holes to the letter-bags in the guard’s compartment. In due time the chief clerk recovered from the shock; but what had happened—why he was lying on the letter-bags—why nobody was sorting—until he recovered from his stupor he could not imagine.
CHAPTER XI.
Crewe.
We have now reached the most important station on the London and North-Western Railway; indeed the works here are on a scale which strikingly exemplifies the magnitude of the arrangements necessary for the maintenance of an arterial railway.
The Company’s workshops at Crewe consist of a Locomotive and of a Coach department. In the manufactories of the former are constructed as well as repaired the whole of the engines and tenders required for the Northern Division, namely, from Birmingham to Liverpool; Rugby to Stafford; Crewe to Holyhead; Liverpool to Manchester; Liverpool, Manchester, and Warrington to Preston; Preston to Carlisle. The establishment also “works,” as it is termed, the Lancaster and Carlisle and Chester and Holyhead Lines. The total number of miles is at present 360, but the distance of course increases with the completion of every new branch line. In this division there are 220 engines and tenders (each averaging in value nearly 2000l.), of which at least 100 are at work every day. Besides repairing all these, the establishment has turned out a new engine and tender on every Monday morning since the 1st of January, 1848. The number of workmen employed in the above department is 1600, their wages averaging 3800l. a fortnight. The accounts of these expenses, as also a book of “casualties,” in which every accident to, as well as every delay of, a train is reported, are examined once a fortnight by a special committee of directors.
Without attempting to detail the various establishments, we will briefly describe a few of their most interesting features.
Close to the entrance of the Locomotive Department 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 at the station, as also to the new railway town of Crewe, containing at present about 8000 inhabitants. This pump lifts 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. On entering the great gate of the department, the office of which is up a small staircase on the left hand, the first object of attention is the great engine-stable into which the hot dusty locomotives are conducted after their journeys to be cleaned, examined, repaired, or, if sound, to be greased and otherwise prepared for their departure—the last operation being to get up their steam, which is here effected by coal, instead of coke, in about two hours.
After passing through a workshop containing thirty-four planing and slotting machines in busy but almost silent operation, we entered a smith’s shop, 260 feet long, containing forty forges all at work. At several of the anvils there were three and sometimes four strikers, and the quantity of sparks that more or less were exploding from each,—the number of sledge-hammers revolving in the air, with the sinewy frames, bare throats and arms of the fine pale men who wielded them, formed altogether a scene well worthy of a few moments’ contemplation. As the heavy work of the department is principally executed in this shop, in which iron is first enlisted and then rather roughly drilled into the service of the Company, it might be conceived that the music of the forty anvils at work would altogether be rather noisy in concert. The grave itself, however, could scarcely be more silent than this workshop, in comparison with the one that adjoins it, in which the boilers of the locomotives are constructed. As for asking questions of or receiving explanations from the guide, who with motionless lips conducts the stranger through this chamber, such an effort would be utterly hopeless, for the deafening noise proceeding from the riveting of the bolts and plates of so many boilers is distracting beyond description. We almost fancied that the workmen must be aware of this effect upon a stranger, and that on seeing us enter they therefore welcomed our visit by a charivari sufficient to awaken the dead. As we hurried through the din, we could not, however, help pausing for a moment before a boiler of copper inside and iron outside, within which there sat crouched up—like a negro between the decks of a slave-ship—an intelligent-looking workman holding with both hands a hammer against a bolt, on the upper end of which, within a few inches of his ears, two lusty comrades on the outside were hammering with surprising strength and quickness. The noise which reverberated within this boiler, in addition to that which was resounding without, formed altogether a dose which it is astonishing the tympanum of the human ear can receive uninjured; at all events we could not help thinking that, if there should happen to exist on earth any man ungallant enough to complain of the occasional admonition of a female tongue, if he will only go by rail to Crewe and sit in that boiler for half an hour, he will most surely never again complain of the chirping of that “cricket on his hearth”—the whispering curtain-lectures of his dulce domum.
The adjoining shop contains a brass and also an iron foundry, in which were at work seven brass-moulders and five iron-moulders. In the corner of this room we stood for a few moments looking over the head and shoulders of a fine little boy who was practically exemplifying the properties of the most wonderful of the mineral productions of nature—the loadstone. Among the mass brought into this workshop to be recast are occasionally a quantity of brass shavings and other sweepings, among which there is a small proportion of iron filings, &c. The little boy’s occupation consisted in constantly stirring up the mass or mess before him with a magnet, which, as often as it came out bristling with resplendent particles of iron of various sizes, he swept clean, and then continued his work until the investigator came out of the heap as clear of iron as it went in.