CHAPTER X.

THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER RAILWAY PROJECTED.

THE rapid growth of the trade and manufactures of South Lancashire gave rise, about the year 1821, to the project of a tramroad for the conveyance of goods between Liverpool and Manchester. Since the construction of the Bridgewater Canal by Brindley, some fifty years before, the increase in the business transacted between the two towns had become quite marvellous. The steam-engine, the spinning-jenny, and the canal, working together, had accumulated in one focus a vast aggregate of population, manufactures, and trade.

The Duke's Canal, when first made, furnished a cheap and ready means of conveyance between the seaport and the manufacturing towns, for the raw cotton in the one direction and the manufactured produce in the other. During the first thirty years of its existence the traffic was small and easily managed. About the end of last century, for instance, it was considered satisfactory if one cotton-flat a day reached. Manchester by canal from Liverpool. But such was the expansion of business caused by the inventions to which we have referred that, before the lapse of many more years, the navigation was found altogether inadequate to accommodate the traffic, which completely outgrew all the Canal Companies' appliances of wharves, boats, and horses. Cotton lay at Liverpool for weeks together, waiting to be removed; and it occupied a longer time to transport the cargoes from Liverpool to Manchester than it had done to bring them across the Atlantic from the United States to England. Carts and wag

gons were tried, but proved altogether insufficient. Sometimes manufacturing operations had to be suspended altogether, and during a frost, when the canals were frozen up, the communication was entirely stopped. The consequences were often disastrous, alike to operatives, merchants, and manufacturers. The same difficulty was experienced in the conveyance of manufactured goods from Manchester to Liverpool for export. Mr. Huskisson, in the House of Commons, referring to these ruinous delays, observed that "cotton was sometimes detained a fortnight at Liverpool, while the Manchester manufacturers were obliged to suspend their labours; and goods manufactured at Manchester for foreign markets could not be transmitted in time, in consequence of the tardy conveyance."

Expostulation with the Canal Companies was of no use. They were overcrowded with business at their own prices, and disposed to be very dictatorial. When the Duke first constructed his canal, it will be remembered that he had to encounter the fierce opposition of the Irwell and Mersey Navigation, whose monopoly his new line of water conveyance threatened to interfere with. But the innovation of one generation often becomes the obstruction of the next. The Duke's agents would scarcely listen to the expostulations of the Liverpool merchants and Manchester manufacturers, and the Bridgewater Canal was accordingly, in its turn, denounced as a monopoly.

Under these circumstances any new mode of transit between the two towns which offered a reasonable prospect of relief was certain to receive a cordial welThe scheme of a tramroad was, however, so new and comparatively untried, that it is not surprising that the parties interested should have hesitated before committing themselves to it. Mr. Sandars, an influential

come.

1 Lives of the Engineers, vol. i. p. 371.

Liverpool merchant, was amongst the first to broach the subject. He himself had suffered in his business, in common with so many others, from the insufficiency of the existing modes of communication, and was ready to give due consideration to any plan presenting elements of practical efficiency which proposed a remedy for the generally admitted grievance. Having caused inquiry to be made as to the success which had attended the haulage of heavy coal-trains by locomotive power on the northern railways, he was led to form the opinion that the same means might be equally efficient in conducting the increasing traffic in merchandise between Liverpool and Manchester. He ventilated the subject amongst his friends, and about the beginning of 1821 a committee was formed for the purpose of bringing the scheme of a railroad before the public.

The novel project having become noised abroad, attracted the attention of the friends of railways in other quarters. Tramroads were by no means new expedients for the transit of heavy articles. The Croydon and Wandsworth Railway, laid down by William Jessop as early as the year 1801, had been regularly used for the conveyance of lime and stone in waggons hauled by mules or donkeys from Merstham to London.' The sight of this humble railroad in 1813 led Sir Richard Phillips to throw out the following thoughtful observations in his Morning Walk to Kew':-"I found delight," said he, "in witnessing at Wandsworth the

1 This line was purchased by the London and Brighton Railway Company, and has long since been disused, though the traveller to Brighton can still discern the marks of the old tramroad along the hill-side, a little to the south of Croydon. "The genius loci," says Charles Knight, "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 Croydon; for day after day, more than 100 journeys are made by the great railroads which pass the place."

economy of horse labour on the iron railway. Yet a heavy sigh escaped me as I thought of the inconceivable millions of money which had been spent about Malta, four or five of which might have been the means of extending double lines of iron railway from London to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Holyhead, Milford, Falmouth, Yarmouth, Dover, and Portsmouth. A reward of a single thousand would have supplied coaches and other vehicles, of various degrees of speed, with the best tackle for readily turning out; and we might, ere this, have witnessed our mail coaches running at the rate of ten miles an hour drawn by a single horse, or impelled fifteen miles an hour by Blenkinsop's steam-engine. Such would have been a legitimate motive for overstepping the income of a nation, and the completion of so great and useful a work would have afforded rational ground for public triumph in general jubilee."

In the same year we find Mr. Lovell Edgworth, who had for fifty years been advocating the superiority of tram or railroads over common roads, writing to James Watt (7th August, 1813): "I have always thought that steam would become the universal lord, and that we should in time scorn post-horses; an iron railroad would be a cheaper thing than a road upon the common construction." Thomas Gray, of Nottingham, was another speculator on the same subject. Though he was no mechanic nor inventor, he had an enthusiastic belief in the powers of the railroad system. Being a native of Leeds, he had, when a boy, seen Blenkinsop's locomotive at work on the Middleton cogged railroad, and from an early period he seems to have entertained almost as sanguine views on the subject as Sir Richard Phillips himself. It would appear that Gray was residing in Brussels in 1816, when the project of a canal from Charleroi, for the purpose of connecting Holland with the mining districts of Belgium, was the subject of discussion; and, in conversation with Mr. John Cockerill

and others, he took the opportunity of advocating the superior advantages of a railway. He occupied himself for some time with the preparation of a pamphlet on the subject. He shut himself up in his room, secluded from his wife and relations, declining to give them any information on the subject of his mysterious studies, beyond the assurance that his scheme "would revolutionise the whole face of the material world and of society." In 1820 Mr. Gray published the result of his studies in his Observations on a General Iron Railway,' in which, with great cogency, he urged the superiority of a locomotive railway over common roads and canals, pointing out, at the same time, the advantages to all classes of the community of this mode of conveyance for merchandise and persons. In this book Mr. Gray suggested the propriety of making a railway between Manchester and Liverpool, "which," he observed, "would employ many thousands of the distressed population of Lancashire." The treatise seems to have met with a ready sale, for we find that, two years later, it had already passed into a fourth edition. In 1822, Mr. Gray added a diagram to the book, showing a number of suggested lines of railway connecting the principal towns of England, and another in like manner connecting the principal towns of Ireland.

The publication of this essay had the effect of bringing the subject of railway extension prominently under the notice of the public. Although little able to afford it, Gray also pressed his favourite project of a general iron road on the attention of public men-mayors, members of Parliament, and prime ministers. He sent memorials to Lord Sidmouth in 1820, and to the Lord Mayor and

1 'Observations on a General Iron Railway (with Plates and Map illustrative of the plan); showing its great superiority, by the general introduction of mechanic power, over all the present methods of conveyance by

turnpike-roads and canals; and claiming the particular attention of merchants, manufacturers, farmers, and indeed every class of society.' London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy,

1820.