The road is in use to-day, and I had the pleasure last year of riding over a part of it. Of course it now looks in all respects like a modern English road, but I was deeply moved by the thought that it was there that George Stephenson built his first public railway and achieved his first public triumph.
Stephenson was not unmindful of the importance of that step. He said, on that occasion, to some young men, "Now, lads, I will tell you that I think you will live to see the day (though I may not live so long), when railways will come to supersede almost all other methods of conveyance—when mail coaches will go by railway. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working-man to ride than to go on foot." He lived to see all that himself, and far more.
It is difficult for us to appreciate the popular surprise and delight at that first railway excursion. We are so accustomed to splendid engines, luxurious cars, and high speed, that we think nothing of them; but when all were new—when coaches and carts on highways were the sole reliance for passengers and freight—it was astonishing indeed to see a "travelling engine," in charge of two men, draw a train of forty cars and six hundred people!
Many men would have been satisfied with the result, but Stephenson was not. He said there was no limit to the speed but the strength of the machinery and the supply of steam. He saw there was no limit to the load but the strength and weight of the locomotive, and no limit to the weight but the strength of the rails and the character of the road-bed; thus he early saw how progress was to be made.
But Stephenson's greatest triumph was yet to come. The Darlington road was chiefly for coals, between small towns in a rough northern county. The vast majority of English people heard nothing, and knew nothing about it. Consequently when it was proposed to connect the great commercial city of Liverpool with the great manufacturing city of Manchester, forty miles away, by a railway, it was taken for granted that the cars were to be drawn by horses. Nevertheless a tram-road was opposed, first, by the Duke of Bridgewater, who had a canal between the two cities; and, secondly, by those who owned the coaches and the inns. Though proposed in 1821, the opposition was so great that it was laid over for several years. In 1824 a committee of interested parties went to Darlington and Killingworth to see Stephenson's road and locomotives. The Darlington line was not yet in operation, but the old locomotives were at work at Killingworth. The committee decided that they must have a double track for cars, whatever might be the motive power.
Accordingly Stephenson was invited to make surveys and estimates, as he was said to be a man of great energy and the only man in England with the necessary experience.
The surveys were made in 1825 with the greatest difficulty, on account of the opposition of landowners. The surveyors were ordered off the grounds, threatened with arrest and violence. Stephenson testified before a Parliamentary Committee that the duke's manager threatened to have him thrown into the mill-pond if he trespassed. Stephenson kept on as good terms as he could with the hostiles, and surveyed their grounds by stealth.
The chief points of difficulty were a tunnel at Liverpool, and a vast and treacherous morass known as "Chat Moss."
Early in 1825, before the Darlington road was opened, Parliament was considering the railway bill and Stephenson was called before the committee as a most important witness. All the opposition was out in force and every means was used to ridicule the undertaking and defeat the bill.
The spectacle presented by plain, blunt, unlettered George Stephenson before the lawyers and members of the House of Commons was strange and interesting, and no wonder it has become historical.