The celebrated Cuvier, in an address delivered by him before the French
Institute in the year 1816, thus referred to the nascent locomotive:—“A
steam engine, mounted upon a carriage whose wheels indent themselves
along a road specially prepared for it, is attached to a line of loaded
vehicles. A fire is lit underneath the boiler, by which the engine is
speedily set in motion, and in a short time the whole are brought to
their journey’s end. The traveller who, from a distance, first sees this
strange spectacle of a train of loaded carriages traversing the country
by the simple force of steam, can with difficulty believe his eyes.”
The locomotive thus described by Cuvier was the first engine of the kind
regularly employed in the working of railway traffic. It was impelled by
means of a cogged wheel, which worked into a cogged rail, after the
method adopted by Mr. Blenkinsop, upon the Middleton Coal Railway, near
Leeds; and the speed of the train which it dragged behind it was only
from three to four miles an hour.
Ten years later, the same power and speed of the locomotive were still
matters of wonderment, for, in 1825, we find Mr. Mackenzie, in his
“History of Northumberland” thus describing the performances on the Wylam
Coal Railroad:—“A stranger,” said he, “is struck with surprise and
astonishment on seeing a locomotive engine moving majestically along the
road at the rate of four or five miles an hour, drawing along from ten to
fourteen loaded wagons, weighing about twenty-one-and-a-half tons; and
his surprise is increased on witnessing the extraordinary facility with
which the engine is managed. This invention is indeed a noble triumph of
science.”
In the same year, the first attempt was made to carry passengers by
railway between Stockton and Darlington. A machine resembling the yellow
caravan still seen at country fairs was built and fitted up with seats
all round it, and set upon the rails, along which it was drawn by a
horse. It was found exceedingly convenient to travel by, and the number
of passengers between the two towns so much increased that several bodies
of old stage coaches were bought up, mounted upon railway wheels, and
added to the carrying stock of the Stockton and Darlington Company. At
length the horse was finally discarded in favour of the locomotive, and
not only coals and merchandise, but passengers of all classes, were drawn
by steam.
—_Railway News_.