and Trafford men, who lived near the Moss, and plumed themselves upon their practical knowledge of bog-work, 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; the Moss was skimmed all round for many thousand yards, until at length, as the stuff poured in for the purpose rested upon the bottom, the embankment gradually stood above the surface, and slowly advanced onwards into the Moss, declining in height and consequently in weight, until at length it joined the floating road already laid upon the Moss. In the course of its formation, the pressure of the Moss tipped out of the waggons caused a copious stream of bog-water to flow from the end of the embankment, in colour resembling Barclay's double stout; and when completed, the bank looked like a long ridge of lightly pressed tobacco-leaf. The compression of the Moss 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. The embankment so formed was found in no way liable to slips, like London or Oxford clay; and when completed, it formed one of the best parts of the road.

At the western, or Liverpool end, there was a like embankment; but, as the ground was there solid, little difficulty was experienced in forming the embankment, 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, was 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 January, 1830, when the first experimental train of passengers 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,-its cost being only about 7,000l. per mile, or considerably under the average. The total cost of forming the line over the Moss was 28,000l., whereas Mr. Giles's estimate was 270,0007.! 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 uponthe 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

S

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!"

Although the other works of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway are of a much less formidable character than those of many lines which 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. There were sixty-three bridges over and under the line at different points. The great Sankey viaduct, consisting of nine arches of fifty feet span, was a noble structure, rising to a height of nearly seventy feet above the level of the Sankey canal. The skew bridge at Rainhill, the bridge at Newton, and the bridge over the Irwell at Manchester, are still looked upon as good specimens of railway work, and at the time of their formation were regarded with high admiration by engiThe tunnel under part of the town of Liverpool, and the Olive Mount excavation — a deep cutting through solid sandstone rock, extending for upwards of two miles — were formidable works, occupying much time in the quarrying and removal of the stone. Some idea of the extensive character of the cuttings may be formed from the fact that upwards of three millions of cubic yards of stone, clay, and soil, were removed and formed into embankments at various parts of the line.

neers.

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 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."

These navvies were men drawn by the attraction of good wages from all parts of the kingdom; and they were ready for any sort of rough work. Many of the labourers employed on the Liverpool line were Irish; others were from the Northumberland and Durham railways, where they had been accustomed to similar work; a few were from the Fen districts of Lincoln and Cambridge, where they had been trained to execute works of excavation and embankment; the best and most powerful came from the neighbouring hilly districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, where men of the finest physical development in England are to be found; and some were drawn from the loose and unemployed population of the surrounding counties. Working together, eating, drinking, and sleeping together, and daily exposed to the same influences, they soon began to assume a distinct and well-defined character, strongly marking them from the population of the districts in which they laboured. Reckless alike of his life as of his earnings, the navvy worked hard and lived hard. For his lodging, a hut of turf would content him;

but he required large quantities of flesh meat, and what remained of his wages was often spent in drink. With few or no domestic ties to bind him, or family affections to soften his nature, wanting in moral and religious training, and placed suddenly in the receipt of high wages, paid at unusually long intervals,― the navvy shortly became distinguished by a sort of savage manners, which contrasted strangely with those of the surrounding population. His pay-night was often a saturnalia of riot and disorder, dreaded by the inhabitants of the quiet villages along the line of works. Yet these brawny labourers, with their powerful bones and muscles, ignorant and violent though they might be, were usually good-hearted fellows in the main,-frank and open-handed with their comrades, and ready to share their last penny with those in distress. As for their As for their powers of endurance, probably no class of labourers in the world can compete with them: they have been toiled after in vain by French and German workmen, who have failed to justify the claim to be paid a similarly high rate of wages. pluck is wonderful, and their contempt for danger almost proverbial. Indeed the most dangerous sort of laboursuch as working horse-barrow runs, in which accidents are of constant occurrence has always been most in request amongst them, the danger seeming to be one of its chief recommendations.

Their

It was some time, however, before Mr. Stephenson could, out of the raw material of labourers attracted to the Liverpool and Manchester line, form an efficient body of workmen of this sort. The principal difficulty was experienced in pushing on the works connected with the formation of the tunnel under Liverpool, 2200 yards in length. The blasting and hewing of the rock was vigorously carried on night and day; and the engineer's practical experience in the collieries here proved of great use to him. Many obstacles had to be encountered