EARLY RAILWAY COMPETITION.
The first Stockton and Darlington Act gave permission to all parties to use the line on payment of certain rates. Thus private individuals might work their own horses and carriages upon the railway and be their own carriers. Mr. Clepham, in the Gateshead Observer, gives an interesting account of the competition induced by the system:—“There were two separate coach companies in Stockton, and amusing collisions sometimes occurred between the drivers—who found on the rail a novel element for contention. Coaches cannot pass each other on the rail as on the road; and at the more westward public-house in Stockton (the Bay Horse, kept by Joe Buckton), the coach was always on the line betimes, reducing its eastward rival to the necessity of waiting patiently (or impatiently) in the rear. The line was single, with four sidings in the mile; and when two coaches met, or two trains, or coach and train, the question arose which of the drivers must go back? This was not always settled in silence. As to trains, it came to be a sort of understanding that light wagons should give way to loaded; as to trains and coaches, that the passengers should
have preference over coals; while coaches, when they met, must quarrel it out. At length, midway between sidings a post was erected, and a rule was laid down that he who had passed the pillar must go on, and the coming man go back. At the Goose Pool and Early Nook, it was common for these coaches to stop; and there, as Jonathan would say, passengers and coachmen ‘liquored.’ One coach, introduced by an innkeeper, was a compound of two mourning coaches, an approximation to the real railway coach, which still adheres, with multiplying exceptions, to the stage coach type. One Dixon, who drove the ‘Experiment’ between Darlington and Shildon, is the inventor of carriage lighting on the rail. On a dark winter night, having compassion on his passengers, he would buy a penny candle, and place it lighted amongst them, on the table of the ‘Experiment’—the first railway coach (which, by the way, ended its days at Shildon, as a railway cabin), being also the first coach on the rail (first, second, and third class jammed all into one) that indulged its customers with light in darkness.”
CALCULATION AS TO RAILWAY SPEED.
The Editor of The Scotsman, having engaged in researches into the laws of friction established by Vince and Coloumb, published the results in a series of articles in his journal in 1824 showing how twenty miles an hour was, on theoretic grounds, within the limits of possibility; and it was to his writings on this point that Mr. Nicholas Wood alluded when he spoke of the ridiculous expectation that engines would ever travel at the rate of twenty, or even twelve miles an hour.
ALARMIST VIEWS.
A writer in the Quarterly Review, in 1825, was quite prophetical as to the dangers connected with railway travelling. He observes:—“It is certainly some consolation to those who are to be whirled at the rate of 18 or 20 miles an hour by means of a high-pressure engine, to be told that there is no danger of being sea-sick while on shore, that they are not to be scalded to death, nor drowned, nor dashed to pieces by the bursting of a boiler; and that they need not
mind being struck by the flying off or breaking of a wheel. What can be more palpably absurd or ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives travelling twice as fast as stage coaches! We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s Ricochet Rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine going at such a rate. We will back old Father Thames against the Woolwich Railway for any sum. We trust that Parliament will, in all railways it may sanction, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which we entirely agree with Mr. Sylvestor is as great as can be ventured on with safety.”
PARLIAMENTARY OPPOSITION.
On the third reading of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Bill in the House of Commons, The Hon. Edward Stanley moved that the bill be read that day six months, assigning, among other reasons, that the railway trains worked by horses would take ten hours to do the distance, and that they could not be worked by locomotive engines. Sir Isaac Coffin seconded the motion, indignantly denouncing the project as fraught with fraud and imposition. He would not consent to see widows’ premises invaded, and “how,” he asked, “would any person like to have a railroad under his parlour window? . . . What, he would like to know, was to be done with all those who had advanced money in making and repairing turnpike-roads? What with those who may still wish to travel in their own or hired carriages, after the fashion of their forefathers? What was to become of coach-makers and harness-makers, coach-masters and coachmen, innkeepers, horse-breeders, and horse-dealers? Was the House aware of the smoke and noise, the hiss and whirl, which locomotive engines, passing at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, would occasion? Neither the cattle ploughing in the fields or grazing in the meadows could behold them without dismay. . . . Iron would be raised in price 100 per cent., or, more probably, exhausted altogether! It would be the greatest nuisance, the most complete disturbance of quiet and comfort in all parts of the kingdom, that the ingenuity of man could invent!”