both floundered on until they reached the further edge of the moss, wet and plastered with bog sludge. Mr. Dixon's brother residents endeavoured to comfort him by the assurance that he might in future avoid similar perils, by walking with boards fastened to the soles of his feet, as they had done when taking the levels, and as the workmen did when engaged in making drains in the softest parts of the Moss. Still, the resident engineer could not help being puzzled by the problem of how to construct a road for a heavy locomotive, with a train of passengers or goods, upon a bog which he had found to be incapable of supporting his single individual weight!

Mr. Stephenson's idea was, that such a road might be made to float upon the bog, simply by means of a sufficient extension of the bearing surface. As a ship, or a raft, capable of sustaining heavy loads floated in water, so, in his opinion, might a light road be floated upon a bog, which was of considerably greater consistency than water. Long before the railway was thought of, Mr. Roscoe of Liverpool had adopted the remarkable expedient of fitting his plough horses with flat wooden soles or pattens, to enable them to walk upon the Moss land which he had brought into cultivation. These pattens were fitted on by means of a screw apparatus, which met in front of the foot and was easily fastened. The mode by which these pattens served to sustain the horse is capable of easy explanation, and it will be observed that the rationale alike explains the floating of a railway train. The foot of an ordinary farm horse presents a base of about five inches diameter, but if this base be enlarged to seven inches—the circles being to each other as the squares of the diameters-it will be found that, by this slight enlargement of the base, a circle of nearly double the area has been secured; and consequently the pressure of the foot upon every unit of ground upon which the horse stands,

has been reduced one half. In fact, this contrivance has an effect tantamount to setting the horse upon eight feet instead of four.

Apply the same reasoning to the ponderous locomotive, and it will be found that even such a machine may be made to stand upon a bog, by means of a similar extension of the bearing surface. Suppose the engine to be twenty feet long and five feet wide, thus covering a surface of a hundred square feet, and, provided the bearing has been extended by means of cross sleepers supported upon a matting of heath and branches of trees, covered with a few inches of gravel, the pressure of an engine of twenty tons will be only equal to about three pounds per inch over the whole surface on which it stands. Such was George Stephenson's idea in contriving his floating road, something like an elongated raft, across the Moss; and we shall see that he steadily kept it in view in carrying the work into execution.

The first thing done was, to form a footpath of ling or heather along the proposed road, on which a man might walk across without risk of sinking. A single line of temporary railway was then laid down, formed of ordinary cross-bars about three feet long and an inch square, with holes punched through them at the end and nailed down to temporary sleepers. Along this way ran the waggons in which were conveyed the materials requisite to form the permanent road. The waggons carried about a ton each, and they were propelled by boys running behind them along the narrow bar of iron; and they 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 between the drains was left untouched, and upon that 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 ingenuity and perseverance on the part of the engineer successfully to overcome them.

The Moss, as has already been 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 finished and 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 fortnight or a month before!

The directors now became seriously alarmed, and feared that the evil prognostications of the eminent engineers was

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 of the cost of filling 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