CHAP. XI.

ALARM OF THE DIRECTORS.

185

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

186

THOUGHTS OF ABANDONING THE SCHEME. CHAP. XI.

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,"

CHAP. XI.

66

PARR MOSS.

187

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 held 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 necessary to "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

188

ROAD ACROSS CHAT MOSS COMPLETED.

دو

CHAP. XI

January, 1830, when the first experimental train of pas sengers passed over it, drawn by the " Rocket; and it turned out that, instead of being the most expensive part of the line, it proved about the cheapest. The total cost of forming the line over the Moss was 28,000%., whereas Mr. Giles's estimate was 270,000l.! It also proved to be one of the best portions of the railway. Being a floating road, it was smooth and easy to run upon, just as Dr. Arnott's water-bed is soft and easy to lie upon the pressure being equal at all points. There was, and still is, a sort of springiness in the road over the Moss, such as is felt when passing along a suspended bridge; and those who looked along the Moss as a train passed over it, said they could observe a waviness, such as precedes and follows a skater upon ice.

During the progress of these works the most ridiculous rumours were set afloat. The drivers of the stage-coaches who feared for their calling, brought the alarming intelligence into Manchester from time to time, that "Chat Moss was blown up!" "Hundreds of men and horses had sunk in the bog; and the works were completely abandoned!" The engineer himself was declared to have been swallowed up in the Serbonian bog; and "railways were at an end for ever!"

In the construction of the railway, Mr. Stephenson's capacity for organising and directing the labours of a large number of workmen of all kinds eminently displayed itself. A vast quantity of ballast-waggons had to be constructed for the purposes of the work, and implements and materials had to be collected, before the mass of labour to be employed could be efficiently set in motion at the various points of the line. There were not at that time, as there are now, large contractors possessed of railway plant, capable of executing earthworks on a large scale. The first railway engineer had not only to contrive the plant, but to organise the labour, and direct it in person. The very labourers themselves had to be trained to their work by him; and it was on the Liverpool and Manchester

CHAP. XI.

COMPELLED DEVIATIONS.

189

line that Mr. Stephenson organised the staff of that formidable band of railway navvies, whose handiworks will be the wonder and admiration of succeeding generations. Looking at their gigantic traces, the men of some future age may be found ready to declare, of the engineer and of his workmen, “that there were giants in those days.”

Although the works of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway are of a much less formidable character than those of many lines that have since been constructed, they were then regarded as of the most stupendous description. Indeed, the like of them had not before been executed in England. Several of the heaviest and most expensive works were caused by the opposition of Lords Derby and Sefton, whose objections to the line passing near or through their properties forced it more to the south, and thereby involved much tunnelling and heavy stone cutting. It had been Mr. Stephenson's original intention to carry the railway from the north end of Liverpool, round the red-sandstone ridge, on which the upper part of the town is built, and also round the higher rise of the coal formation at Rainhill, by following the natural levels to the north of Knowsley. But the line being forced to the south, it was then rendered necessary to cut through the hills, and go over the high grounds instead of round them. The first consequence of this alteration in the plans was the necessity for constructing a tunnel under the town of Liverpool a mile and a half in length, from the docks at Wapping to the top of Edgehill; the second was the necessity for forming a long and deep cutting through the red-sandstone rock at Olive Mount; and the third and worst of all, was the necessity for ascending and descending the Whiston and Sutton hills by means of inclined planes of 1 in 96. The line was also, by the same forced deviation, prevented passing through the Lancashire coal-field, and the engineer was compelled to carry the works across the Sankey valley, at a point where the waters of the brook had dug out an excessively deep channel through the marl-beds of the district.