FIFTEEN MILES AN HOUR.
Five hundred pounds for the best locomotive engine!
So ran the announcement one day in the year 1829. The Liverpool and
Manchester Railway was nearly completed, but yet the directors had not
fully decided what power they would employ to haul along their waggons.
Horse-power had at length been finally abandoned, and numbers of
schemes had been poured in upon the managers. But the contest seemed
at last to resolve itself chiefly into a rivalry between fixed and
locomotive engines. Principally, if not entirely, swayed however by the
arguments of George Stephenson, the directors yielded to the hint of a
Mr. Harrison, and offered a £500 prize.
The engine was to satisfy certain conditions. Its weight was not to be
above six tons; it was to burn its own smoke, haul twenty tons at a
rate of ten miles an hour, be furnished with two safety valves, rest on
springs and on six wheels, while its steam pressure must not be more
than fifty lbs. to the square inch. The cost was not to exceed £550.
Stephenson, who was the engineer of the Railway, decided to compete. He
was now in a very different position from that which he occupied when
he built his second locomotive in 1815. His appointment as engineer to
the Stockton and Darlington Railway had greatly aided his advancement,
and when it was decided to build a railway between the two busy cities
of Manchester and Liverpool it was not unnatural that he should take
part in the undertaking.
The idea of constructing rail, or tram ways, was not new. Railways of
some kind were used in England about two hundred years before, that
is, about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thus Roger North
writes:—“The manner of the carriage is by laying rails of timber from
the colliery to the river, exactly straight and parallel; and bulky
carts are made with four rollers fitting those rails, whereby the
carriage is so easy that one horse will draw down four or five chaldron
of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal merchants.”
It is said that the word tramway is derived from tram, which was wont
to mean a beam of timber and also a waggon. In any case, such rough
ways were introduced in mining districts, for, as may be readily
believed, one horse could draw twenty times the load upon them that it
could on an ordinary road.
The old ways were first made of wood, then of wood faced with iron,
then altogether of iron.
Now, in making his railway between Liverpool and Manchester, Stephenson
had many difficulties to encounter. He decided that the line should
be as direct as possible. But to accomplish this, he would have to
pierce hills, build embankments, raise viaducts, and, hardest of all,
construct a firm causeway across a treacherous bog called Chat Moss.
“He will never do it,” said some of the most famous engineers of the
day. “It is impossible!”
Impossible it certainly seemed to be. Chat Moss was like a sponge, and
how was an engineer to build a solid road for heavy trains over four
miles of soppy sponge! A person could not trust himself upon it in
safety, and when men did venture, they fastened flat boards to their
feet, something after the fashion of snow-shoes, and floundered along
upon them.
Stephenson began by taking the levels of the Moss in a similar manner.
Boards were placed upon the spongy moss, and a footpath of heather
followed. Then came a temporary railroad. On this ran the trucks
containing the material for a permanent path, which were pushed by boys
who learned to trot along easily on the narrow rails.
Drains were dug on either side of the proposed road, and tar-barrels
covered with clay were fitted into a sewer underneath the line in the
middle of the Moss. Heather, hurdles, tree branches, etc., were spread
on the surface, and in some parts an embankment of dry moss itself
was laid down. Ton after ton of it disappeared until the directors
became alarmed, and the desperate expedient of abandoning the works was
considered.
But Stephenson was an Englishman out and out. He never knew when he was
beaten. “Keep on filling,” he ordered; and in spite of all criticism
and all alarm, he kept his hundreds of navvies hard at work, pouring in
load after load of dry turf.
It must be borne in mind, however, that Stephenson did not continue
blindly at his task. He had good reason for what he did. His
persistence was a patient, intelligent perseverance, and not a stupid
obstinacy. His main arguments seem to have been two. He judged that if
he constructed a sufficiently wide road, it would float on the moss,
even as ice or a raft of wood floats on water and bears heavy weights;
and secondly, he seems to have been animated by the idea, that, if
necessary, he could pour in enough solid or fairly solid stuff to reach
the bottom and rise up to the surface in a hard mass.
Both ideas seem to have been realised in different parts of the bog.
Joy took the place of despair, and triumph exulted over discouragement,
as at length the solid mass appeared through the surface. Furthermore,
the expense was found to be none so costly after all. No doubt any
quantity of turf could be obtained from the surrounding parts of the
Moss and dried.
At another part of the railway called Parr Moss an embankment about
a mile and a-half was formed by pouring into it stone and clay from
a “cutting” in the neighbourhood. In some places twenty-five feet of
earth was thus concealed beneath the Moss. The eye of the engineer had
as it were pierced through the bog and seen that his solid bank was
steadily being built up there.
Before, however, the road across Chat Moss was fairly opened, the trial
of locomotives for the prize of £500 had taken place. The fateful
day was the 1st day of October, 1829, and the competition was held
at Rainhill. A grand stand was erected, and the side of the railway
was crowded. Thousands of spectators were present. The future of the
locomotive was to be decided on this momentous occasion.
Now, hitherto the difficulty in the locomotive had been to supply a
steady and sufficient supply of steam to work the engine quickly and
attain high speed and power. Partly, this had been accomplished by
Stephenson’s device of the steam-blast in the funnel. But something
more was needed.
That requirement was found in the tubular boiler. If the long
locomotive boiler were pierced with tubes from end to end, it is clear
that the amount of heating surface offered to the action of the fire
would be greatly increased. It was this idea which was utilised in the
“Rocket,” the engine with which Stephenson competed at Rainhill, and
utilised more perfectly than ever before.
Trevithick himself seems to have invented something of the kind, and
M. Seguin, the engineer of the St. Etienne and Lyons Railway utilised
a similar method. But Henry Booth, the secretary of the railway which
Stephenson was then building, invented a tubular boiler without, it is
said, knowing anything of Seguin’s plan, and Stephenson who had already
experimented in the same direction, adopted Booth’s method.
At first it was a failure. The boiler, fitted with tubes through
which the hot air could pass, leaked disastrously, and Stephenson’s
son, Robert, wrote to his father in despair. But again George said
“persevere,” and he suggested a plan for conquering the difficulty.
Again, it was a simple, but as the event proved, an effective plan.
The copper tubes were merely to be fitted tightly to holes bored in the
boiler and soldered in. The heat caused the copper to expand and the
result was a very strong and water-tight boiler. There were twenty-five
of these tubes, each three inches in diameter, and placed in the lower
portion of the boiler, leading from the furnace to the funnel. Water
also surrounded the furnace. Further, the nozzles of the steam-blast
pipes were contracted so as to increase the power of the blast, and
consequently raise the strength of the draught to the fire.
[Illustration: “THE ROCKET.”]
The cylinders were not placed at the top of the boiler, but at the
sides in a slanting direction, one end being about level with the
boiler roof. They occupied a position mid-way between the old situation
upright on the roof and their present position below, or at the lower
portion. The pistons acted directly on the driving wheels by means of a
connecting rod, and the entire weight of the engine with water supply
was but 4½ tons.
On the day of trial only four engines competed. Many had been
constructed, but either were not completed in time, or for various
reasons could not be exhibited. The famous four were:—The “Novelty” by
Messrs. Braithwaite and Ericsson; The “Rocket” by Messrs. R. Stephenson
& Co.; The “Perseverance” by Mr. Burstall; and The “Sanspareil” by Mr.
Timothy Hackworth. Each engine seems to have run separately, and the
length of the course was two miles. The test was that the engine should
run thirty miles, backwards and forwards, on the two mile level course,
at not less than ten miles an hour, dragging three times its own weight.
The “Novelty” at first appears to have beaten the “Rocket,” for she
ran at times at the rate of twenty-four miles an hour; while the first
trip of the “Rocket” covered a dozen miles in fifty-three minutes.
The engineers of the “Novelty” used bellows to force the fire, but
on the second day these bellows gave way, and the engine could not
do its work. The boiler of the “Sanspareil” also showed defects, but
Stephenson’s “Rocket” calmly stood the strain. Practicable as usual,
Stephenson’s work was as good in its results, nay, even better than
before, for he hooked the “Rocket” to a carriage load of thirty
people, and rushed them along at the then surprising speed of between
twenty-four to thirty miles an hour. Mr. Burstall’s “Perseverance”
could not cover more than six miles an hour.
The competitions continued, but the “Novelty,” although running at the
rate of twenty-four and even twenty-eight miles an hour, broke down
again and yet again; its boiler plates appear to have gone wrong on one
occasion; while the “Sanspareil” also failed, and furthermore blew a
good deal of its fuel into the air because of the arrangement of its
steam-blast.
But the more the “Rocket” was tried, the more practicable and reliable
the engine appeared to be. On the 8th of October it gained a speed of
29 miles an hour, its steam pressure being about 50 lbs. to the square
inch, and its average speed was fifteen miles an hour—that is, five
miles an hour over the conditions required. These results appear to
have been accomplished with a weight of waggons of thirteen tons behind
it. When detached it ran at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour.
In short, the “Rocket” was the only locomotive which fulfilled all
the conditions specified for the competition, and the prize was duly
awarded to Stephenson and Booth.
The battle of the locomotive was won. Men could see that the machine
was feasible and practicable; that it was a new force with immense
possibilities before it.
How have those possibilities been realised?