A new survey was then made, avoiding the Duke's fox cover; and in 1819 a renewed application was made to Parliament for an Act. But George III. dying in January, 1820, while Parliament was still sitting, there was a dissolution, and the bill was necessarily suspended. The promoters, however, did not lose sight of their project. They had now spent a considerable sum of money in surveys and legal and parliamentary expenses, and were determined to proceed, though they were still unable to enlist the active support of the inhabitants of the district proposed to be served by the railway.

As an instance of the opposition on the part of the local authorities, which the promoters had to encounter, we may mention that, in 1819, while the bill was before Parliament, the road trustees, perhaps secretly fearing the success of the railway, which openly they denied, got up an alarm, predicting the total and immediate ruin of the turnpike road trusts in event of the bill becoming law. On this Mr. Pease published a notice intimating that, if any of the creditors or mortgagees of the road between Darlington and West Auckland were apprehensive that the proposed rail or tramway would be prejudicial to their interests, the promoters would, through their solicitors (Raisbeck and Mewburn), purchase their securities at the price originally paid for them. This measure had the salutary effect of quieting the road interests for a season, though they afterwards displayed an active hostility to the railway when it came to be formed.

The energy of Edward Pease, backed by the support of his Quaker friends, enabled him to hold the company together, to raise the requisite preliminary funds from time to time for the purpose of prosecuting the undertaking, and eventually to overcome the opposition raised against the measure in Parliament. The bill at length passed; and the royal assent was given to the first Stockton and Darlington Railway Act on the 19th of April, 1821.

The preamble of this Act recites, that "the making and maintaining of a Railway or Tramroad, for the passage of waggons and other carriages" from Stockton to Witton Park Colliery (by Darlington), " will be of great public utility, by facilitating the conveyance of coal, iron, lime, corn, and other commodities" between the places mentioned. The projectors of the line did not originally contemplate the employment of locomotives; for in the Act they provide for the making and maintaining of the tramroads for the passage upon them "of waggons and other carriages ""with men and horses or otherwise," and a further clause made provision as to the damages which might be done in the course of traffic by the "waggoners." The public were to be free "to use, with horses, cattle, and carriages," the roads formed by the company, on payment of the authorised rates, "between the hours of seven in the morning and six in the evening," during the winter months; "between six in the morning and eight in the evening," in two of the spring and autumn months each; and "between five in the morning and ten in the evening," in the high summer months of May, June, July, and August.

From this it will be obvious that the projectors of this line had themselves at first no very large conceptions as to the scope of their project. A public locomotive railway was as yet a new and untried thing; and the Darlington men merely proposed, by means of their intended road, to provide a more facile mode of transporting their coals and merchandise to market.

Although the locomotive had been working for years successfully at Killingworth, its merits do not seem to have been fairly estimated, even in the locality itself; and it was still regarded rather in the light of a mechanical curiosity, than as the vital force of the railway system.

Thomas Gray, of Nottingham, was a much more sanguine

and speculative man. He was not a mechanic, nor an inventor, nor a coal-owner, but an enthusiastic believer in the wonderful 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. For some years after, he pondered the subject more carefully, and at length became fully possessed by the grand idea on which other minds were now at work. 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

The Railway System and its Author, Thomas Gray, now of Exeter. A Letter to Sir Robert Peel. By Thomas Wilson. 1845. In this very eloquent and generous tribute to the memory of his friend, Mr. Wilson has endeavoured to make it appear that Thomas Gray was the inventor, originator, creator, and founder of the Railway Locomotive System, forgetting that railways had been at work before Mr. Gray was born, and that the locomotive had been invented while he was yet a boy. The true "founder of the railway system' certainly was not Thomas Gray, though he wrote a clever and far-seeing treatise about railways. The true founder of the railway system was the man who invented such a locomotive as made railway locomotion practicable and profitable. And this had been done long before Mr. Gray turned his attention to the subject.

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 of this mode of conveyance for merchandise and persons, to all classes of the community. That Mr. Gray had obtained his idea from Blenkinsop's engine and road, is obvious from the accurate engraving which he gives in his book of the cogwheeled engine then travelling upon the Middleton cogged railroad.

The Treatise seems to have met with a ready sale; for we find that, two years after, it had already passed into a fourth edition. In 1822, Mr. Gray added to the book a diagram, 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. In his first edition, 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 publication of this essay must have had the effect of bringing the subject of railway extension more prominently under the notice of the public than it had been brought before. 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 Corporation of London in 1821. In 1822, he addressed the Earl of Liverpool, Sir Robert

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.

Peel, and others, urging the great national importance of his system. In the year following, he petitioned the ministers of state to the same effect. He was so pertinacious, that public men pronounced him to be a "bore," and in the town of Nottingham, where he then lived, those who knew him declared him to be "cracked."

William Howitt, who frequently met Gray at that time, has published a lively portraiture* of this indefatigable and enthusiastic projector, who seized all men by the button, and would not let them go until he had unravelled to them his wonderful scheme. With Thomas Gray, "begin where you would, on whatever subject- the weather, the news, the political movement or event of the day-it would not be many minutes before you would be enveloped with steam, and listening to an harangue on the practicability and immense advantages, to the nation and to every man in it, of ' a general iron railway.""†

While Thomas Gray was thus agitating the general adop

*People's Journal, August 1st, 1846. Art. "A word for Thomas Gray, the author of the General Railway System."

†Thomas Gray never got beyond his idea of Blenkinsop's cogged wheel and cogged rail. Probably he was not aware that Blackett and Stephenson had both, as early as 1814, demonstrated the cogs to be not only unnecessary, but positive impediments to the working of the locomotive engine, through the jo'ting and friction which they caused. Notwithstanding the triumphant success of the smooth-wheeled locomotive and the smooth rail on the Liverpool and Manchester line in 1830, we find Thomas Gray, in the following year (Mechanics' Magazine, May 14th, 1831), declaring it to be an expensive blunder. He urged the adoption of a greased road, with his favourite device of cog-rails and racks placed outside the smooth rails. Had the advice of this "founder of the railway system," as his friends have styled him, been adopted, the modern railway system would have been simply impracticable. But Thomas Gray himself never claimed to be the inventor or discoverer of railways. He laboured under the disadvantage of not being a mechanic. His engraving of a railway train, prefixed to his book, shows that, if once set in motion, it could not have been pulled up without going to pieces.