Roads--Railways
In speaking of the roads in the last chapter, we have come right
down to the present day and its needs; but we must go back a bit,
as far as time is concerned, to say something about one special
class of road which has played an important part in the making of
England. The story of the roads began before the dawn of written
history--ages and ages before. The story of the railways belongs,
as we may say, only to yesterday.
When we speak of a railway in these days we picture to our minds
a trackway, laid with parallel steel rails, along which long
trains of carriages and trucks are drawn by a locomotive engine.
The engine, indeed, is the first thing that a boy thinks of in
connection with a railway; and no wonder, for the "iron horse" is a
marvellous and interesting piece of machinery. But in the history
of our modern railways the _trackway_, or the _rail-way_ proper,
comes first. There were railways long before there were locomotive
engines; indeed, we shall not be far out if we say that there were
railways in England a few centuries before steam-engines of any
sort came into use.
It was up in the North, in the colliery districts by the Tyne, that
the idea of tramways, along which trains of trucks, drawn by horses
or mules, seem to have first come into use; and they can certainly
be traced there as far back as the time of King Charles I (about
the year 1630). The first railway which Parliament allowed to be
laid in the South of England was the "Surrey Iron Railway". This
connected Croydon with Wandsworth, and, later on, it was extended
to Merstham. That was about the year 1801, and was intended to
convey merchandise, not passengers. For a time it was of great
service to mills and factories on the River Wandle. That was the
first railway in that part of the country, and the trucks were
drawn by donkeys!
[Illustration: _George Stephenson's Locomotive "The Rocket",
which at its trial trip in 1830 ran 29 miles an hour_]
A writer of that time, who thought that he was a very wise,
far-seeing man, gave it as his opinion "that it was not probable
that railways would ever come into general use!" Well, it is never
very wise to prophesy until you really know.
Nearly every new invention has been scoffed at at first. Even in
this present century, when the early experiments in the use of
air-craft were being made, thousands of persons gravely shook
their heads in disapproval, declaring that man was never intended
to "fly". The Great War time has seen wonderful developments in
air-craft, and so many "impossible" things have been achieved that
we can realize, just a little bit, that air-craft has "a great
future" before it, greater than we can as yet grasp.
It would be impossible to give here even a bare outline of the
story of the English Railways, but the making of these railways and
their use and development brought about rapidly many marvellous
changes which have affected the life of the nation.
Seventy and eighty years ago, when railways were first being made,
they excited a great deal more attention and interest than they do
to-day. Railways were so new then, for one thing, and there were
so many of them being made about the same time for another thing.
There are hundreds of miles of railway going through quiet country
districts, which were made many years ago, and there are thousands
of people living in those districts who have been born since the
railways were made. To them the railway is as much an everyday
thing as the old parish church, the town pump, or the river. So far
as _they_ are concerned, the line has been always there--they never
saw the country-side before the railway came. But in the years--say
between 1830 and 1860--the work was watched with much interest, and
it excited much talk, both wise and foolish.
What did the people who lived in a country village see? Long before
the navvies came, for years in fact, the coming railway was talked
about. The surveyor, with his attendants, carrying theodolite and
measuring-chain, as he went about his work "taking levels", was
very narrowly watched, and his sayings and doings were noted and
discussed, time after time. In fact, not unfrequently the surveyor
and his men had some very lively experiences, for there were lots
of places in which they were regarded with suspicion, and all sorts
of tricks were played upon them. Stephenson, when out surveying,
was threatened with more than one ducking in a horse-pond; guns
were fired at him, and he had to get through his work at all
sorts of odd times. There was one surveyor who took a professional
prize-fighter with him as his assistant, and he found work for
him to do besides merely helping him in land-surveying. Bulls
were sometimes turned loose in the fields in which surveyors were
busy, and they had to leave in a hurry. Surveyors were quite used
to meeting with all sorts of abuse, and being faced by angry men,
armed with brickbats and pitchforks.
Then, when the road was staked out, and carts and men began to
arrive, and a whole town of huts for the workers on the railway
was set up on the broad hill-side, where the villagers and their
fathers before them, time out of mind, had ploughed, and sowed, and
harrowed, and reaped, and gleaned--tongues would wag still more,
and curiosity would be intensified. When the huts were finished the
navvies arrived. Strange folk they were to the villagers, speaking
a language of their own, and living by themselves--strong, powerful
men, doing great deeds of strength, capable of working hard, and
very often of drinking hard, and of fighting hard. The quiet little
inns and ale-houses became noisy and busy. The navvies brought
change and excitement with them; and also, at times, mischief,
strife, confusion, and drunkenness. For miles round the farmers
would complain that they could get no labour for farm-work. Young
men, attracted by the novelty, the higher wages, and the greater
numbers, turned navvies, "learned their works" and left the old
agricultural life of their forefathers for ever. Then, when the
navvies set to work, the villagers saw them busy, like ants upon
the hill-side, cutting a great cleft through it, many feet in
depth. As they came along, yard by yard, they saw a rough tramway
laid, along which long trains of trucks, drawn by a noisy, fussy
little engine, were being drawn, some full of earth and gravel or
stone which had been cut away.
[Illustration: _Building a Railway in the early Nineteenth
Century_]
Then, after many months' work, the men advanced out on to the open
plain. For weeks and months trains of trucks were constantly coming
laden with earth, which was tipped on to the lower ground, forming
an embankment, which gradually came nearer and nearer the river
bank. Down by the river bank, on the far side, and on the near side
as well, were men digging for weeks at a time. Then, these made
way for an army of brick layers and masons, and loads and loads of
brick and stone were brought along the line, or dragged by horses
through the old country lanes to the waterside. There, on each
side of the stream, what looked like big towers were erected, as
tall as the church tower, or taller perhaps, and still the earth
day by day was being brought along the way and tipped, adding to
the embankment yard by yard. Such earth, too; clay, perhaps, or
earth of such kind as the oldest man in the parish had never seen
in those parts before, because it had been brought from a place or
places many miles away.
Then, when the brickwork on each side of the river was in position,
there was the building of a bridge to watch. There were several
huge arches of brick, or perhaps of stone, brought from far-off
quarries. But what were those queer, lattice-work things, looking
something like spiders' webs, which were brought down to the
waterside? There was nothing like that ever seen in the village
before. What did it mean? They saw these great iron lattice-work
sections hoisted in the air by steam cranes and swung slowly up
and round till they were placed in position, resting on the piers
of masonry. It must have been a wonderful sight to watch the river
being spanned by a huge bridge or by these girders, and to see the
different sections being fitted and fastened together.
You may be sure that there was much shaking of heads and many
prophecies that this sort of thing was a flying in the face of
Providence--just as in our own time there has been over cycles,
motor-cars, and air-craft. How could those great trains and heavy
engines pass safely over such a flimsy-looking bridge as that?
It would be sure to snap in the middle. And when an accident
happened--and sad accidents did happen--many declared that it was
the Almighty's judgment upon men for thinking that they knew better
than their fathers before them.
[Illustration: _Sankey Valley Viaduct, constructed by George
Stephenson on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway (1826-9).
After a contemporary painting. By permission of the London and
North-Western Railway Company_]
So the work went on, and in time the railway became an accomplished
fact and was no longer a wonder, and a race grew up to whom
railways became part and parcel of everyday life.
But the railways brought many other changes. Those loads of earth
brought from distant parts of the line not only altered the
appearance of the country where they were deposited, but caused
other alterations as well. Grass soon grew on the slopes of
these embankments, but with the grass came up also strange weeds
and plants. These seeded, the wind scattered the seeds, and, in
the fields on either side of the line, these new weeds showed
themselves the next season. For a year or two, probably, nobody
noticed this very particularly; but, before very long, whole
districts might be overrun with varieties of weeds never seen in
that district before.
In some places marshes had to be drained, and, in consequence, many
broad, shallow stretches of water disappeared. Such "sedgy pools"
in quiet districts were once the haunt of many varieties of wild
fowl. As the pools have disappeared the wild fowl which made these
their haunt disappeared also, and with them the wild flowers and
water-plants belonging thereto have died out as well. In much the
same way insects have been imported in the loads of earth and found
a home in a new district where they have, so to speak, "settled",
and have done in some cases good, and in other cases harm, to the
land.
Many cuttings through the beds of gravel and rocks have taught us
something of the changes which have taken place in the earth's
crust. It has been possible to examine the structure of the soil of
many parts of England more thoroughly in the deep railway cuttings
and tunnels than could have been done in any other way. Geologists
have gathered much most valuable information from the soil and rock
dug out in railway excavations.
[Illustration: _The Town Hall, Carlisle, built in time of
Elizabeth. From a drawing made in 1780_]