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!”