and they were propelled by boys running behind them along the narrow bar of iron. The boys became so expert that they would run the four miles across at the rate of seven or eight miles an hour without missing a step; if they had done so, they would have sunk in many places up to their middle. The slight extension of the bearing surface was thus sufficient to enable the bog to bear this temporary line, and this circumstance was a source of increased confidence and hope to the engineer in proceeding with the formation of the permanent road alongside.

The digging of drains had for some time been proceeding along each side of the intended railway; but they filled up almost as soon as dug, the sides flowing in, and the bottom rising up; and it was only in some of the drier parts of the bog that a depth of three or four feet could be reached. The surface-ground between the drains, containing the intertwined roots of heather and long grass, was left untouched, and upon this was spread branches of trees and hedge-cuttings; in the softest places rude gates or hurdles, some eight or nine feet long by four feet wide, interwoven with heather, were laid in double thicknesses, their ends overlapping each other; and upon this floating bed was spread a thin layer of gravel, on which the sleepers, chairs, and rails were laid in the usual manner. Such was the mode in which the road was formed upon the Moss.

It was found, however, after the permanent road had been thus laid, that there was a tendency to sinking at some parts where the bog was the softest. In ordinary cases, where a bank subsides, the sleepers are packed up with ballast or gravel; but in this case the ballast was dug away and removed in order to lighten the road, and the sleepers were packed instead with cakes of dry turf or bundles of heath. By these expedients the subsided parts again floated up to the level, and an approach was made towards a satisfactory road. But the most formidable difficulties were encountered at the centre and towards the edges of the Moss; and it required no small degree of in

genuity and perseverance on the part of the engineer successfully to overcome them.

The Moss, as has been already observed, was highest in the centre, and there presented a sort of hunchback with a rising and falling gradient. At that point it was found necessary to cut deeper drains, in order to consolidate the

Moss between them on which the road was to be formed. But, as at other parts of the Moss, the deeper the cutting the more rapid was the flow of fluid bog into the drain, the bottom rising up almost as fast as it was removed. To meet this emergency, a number of empty tar-barrels were brought from Liverpool; and as soon as a few yards of drain were dug, the barrels were laid down end to end, firmly fixed to each other by strong slabs laid over the joints and nailed; they were then covered over with clay, thus forming an underground sewer of wood instead of

bricks. This expedient was found to answer the purpose intended, and the road across the centre of the Moss was thus successfully prepared, and then laid with the permanent materials.

The greatest difficulty was, however, experienced in forming an embankment upon the edge of the bog at the Manchester end. Moss as dry as it could be cut, was brought up in small waggons, by men and boys, and emptied so as to form an embankment; but the bank had not been raised to three or four feet in height, ere the stuff broke through the heathery surface of the bog and sunk overhead. More moss was brought up and emptied in with no better result; and for many weeks the filling was continued without any visible embankment having been made. It was the duty of the resident engineer to proceed to Liverpool every fortnight to obtain the wages for the workmen employed under him; and on these occasions he was required to colour up, on a section drawn to a working scale, suspended against the wall of the directors' room, the amount of excavations, embankments, &c., executed from time to time. But on many of these occasions, Mr. Dixon had no progress whatever to show for the money expended upon the Chat Moss embankment. Sometimes, indeed, the visible work done was less than it had appeared a fortnight or month before!

The directors now became seriously alarmed, and feared that the evil prognostications of the eminent engineers were about to be fulfilled. The resident himself was greatly disheartened, and he was even called upon to supply the directors with an estimate of the cost of filling up the Moss with solid stuff from the bottom, as also the cost of piling the roadway, and in effect, constructing a four mile viaduct. of timber across the Moss, from twenty to thirty feet high. But the expense appalled the Directors, and the question then arose, whether the work was to be proceeded with or abandoned!

Mr. Stephenson himself afterwards described the transaction at a public dinner given at Birmingham, on the 23rd

of December, 1837, on the occasion of a piece of plate being presented to his son, the engineer of the London and Birmingham Railway. He related the anecdote, he said, for the purpose of impressing upon the minds of those who heard him the necessity of perseverance.

"After working for weeks and weeks," said he, "in filling in materials to form the road, there did not yet appear to be the least sign of our being able to raise the solid embankment one single inch; in short we went on filling in without the slightest apparent effect. Even my assistants began to feel uneasy, and to doubt of the success of the scheme. The directors, too, spoke of it as a hopeless task; and at length they became seriously alarmed, so much so, indeed, that a board meeting was held on Chat Moss to decide whether I should proceed any further. They had previously taken the opinion of other engineers, who reported unfavourably. There was no help for it, however, but to go on. An immense outlay had been incurred; and great loss would have been occasioned had the scheme been then abandoned, and the line taken by another route. So the directors were compelled to allow me to go on with my plans, of the ultimate success of which I myself never for one moment doubted."

During the progress of this part of the works, the Worsley and Trafford men, who lived near the Moss, and plumed themselves upon their practical knowledge of bogwork, declared the completion of the road to be utterly impracticable. "If you knew as much about Chat Moss as we do," they said, "you would never have entered on so rash an undertaking; and depend upon it, all you have done and are doing will prove abortive. You must give up altogether the idea of a floating railway, and either fill the Moss up with hard material from the bottom, or else deviate the line so as to avoid it altogether." Such were the conclusions of science and experience.

In the midst of all these alarms and prophecies of failure, Mr. Stephenson never lost heart, but held to his purpose. His motto was "Persevere!" "You must go on filling in,"

he said; "there is no other help for it. The stuff emptied in is doing its work out of sight, and if you will but have patience, it will soon begin to show." And so the filling in went on; several hundreds of men and boys were employed to skin the Moss all round for many thousand yards, by means of sharp spades, called by the turf-cutters "tommyspades ;" and the dried cakes of turf were afterwards used to form the embankment, until at length as the stuff sank down and rested upon the bottom, it gradually rose above the surface, and slowly advanced onwards, declining in height and consequently in weight, until at length it joined. the floating road already laid upon the Moss. In the course of forming the embankment, the pressure of the bog turf tipped out of the waggons caused. a copious stream of bog-water to flow from the end of it, in colour resembling Barclay's double stout; and when completed, the bank looked like a long ridge of tightly pressed tobacco-leaf. The compression of the turf may be understood from the fact that 670,000 cubic yards of raw moss formed only 277,000 cubic yards of embankment at the completion of the work.

At the western, or Liverpool end, there was a like embankment; but, as the ground was there solid, little difficulty was experienced in forming it, beyond the loss. of substance caused by the oozing out of the water hold by the moss-earth.

At another part of the Liverpool and Manchester line, Parr Moss was crossed by an embankment about a mile and a half in extent. In the immediate neighbourhood was found a large excess of cutting, which it would have been to necessary 66 put out in spoil banks" (according to the technical phrase), but for the convenience of Parr Moss, into which the surplus clay, stone, and shale, were tipped, waggon after waggon, until a solid but concealed embankment, from fifteen to twenty-five feet high, was formed; although to the eye it appears to be laid upon the level of the adjoining surface, as at Chat Moss.

The road across Chat Moss was finished by the 1st of