Charles Knight thus describes this old line:—“The earliest railway for
public traffic in England was one passing from Merstham to Wandsworth,
through Croydon; a small, single line, on which a miserable team of
donkeys, some thirty years ago, might be seen crawling at the rate of
four miles an hour, with several trucks of stone and lime behind them.
It was commenced in 1801, opened in 1803; and the men of science of that
day—we cannot say that the respectable name of Stephenson was not among
them, (Stephenson was then a brakesman at Killingworth)—tested its
capabilities and found that one horse could draw some thirty-five tons at
six miles an hour, and then, with prophetic wisdom, declared that
railways could never be worked profitably. The old Croydon railway is no
longer used. The genius loci must look with wonder on the gigantic
offspring of the little railway, which has swallowed up its own sire.
Lean mules no longer crawl leisurely along the little rails with trucks
of stone through Croydon, once perchance during the day, but the whistle
and the rush of the locomotive are now heard all day long. Not a few
loads of lime, but all London and its contents, by comparison—men, women,
children, horses, dogs, oxen, sheep, pigs, carriages, merchandise,
food,—would seem to be now-a-days passing through Croydon; for day after
day, more than 100 journeys are made by the great railroads which pass
the place.”