07 



RAILWAY. 



RAILW.U. 



the roadway; an account of the usual modes of working a line of 

 railway ; and ft few of the statistics of the railway* already executed at 



'.r abroad, 



Jiutvry. In the cities of Northern Italy the practice of laying 

 Miiouth tradu of hard marble in the ordinary paving of the street*, 

 which prevail* in thow citio* to the present day, appear* to have been 

 applied for many centuries ; but the use of railways, property Awaking, 

 cannot be traced farther back than to about the year 1660, when, in 

 the neighbourhood of Newoaitle-upon-Tyne, nouic roada with wooden 

 rail* were hud down (tigt. 1 and 2), for the purpose of facilitating the 



W. 1. 



Fif. I. 



transport of coal* from the pita to the landing stages. For many 

 yean this imperfect system of rood making continued in use without 

 improvement, and it was not until about the year 1716 that a raised 

 rail, protected by flat iron on its upper surface, was introduced iu 

 those parts of the road where the traction was the heaviest. The 

 next improvement consisted in the substitution of the edge rail for 

 the flat band screwed down to the wood, and the durability of these 

 rails was further increased by the use of cast- instead of wrought-irou, 

 The waggons which ran upon these rails were usually loaded to the 

 extent of from two to three tons, and the traction was performed 

 almost entirely by horses, unless, in a few cases, wherein the carriages 

 were allowed to descend some inclined planes by the effect of gravity. 

 The introduction of the cast-iron edge rail appears to have taken 

 place about the year 17C7, at the suggestion of Mr. Reynolds, the 

 engineer of the first cast-iron bridge erected in England, in the Cole- 

 brook Dale. 



The next step iu the history of railways was made by the applica- 

 t ' on " l a coftt-irci plate m a kind of _i form, instead of 

 the straight cast-iron edge rail (Jit/. 3) ; this alteration 

 was said to have been suggested by the manager of the 

 Duke of Norfolk's collieries near Sheffield, in 1776, and 

 the system itself is still retained in mining operations. 

 The rails, in all the forms originally applied, were laid 

 upon wooden sleepers (fg. 4); but about 1793, stone blocks were used 



Fig 3. 



to support the rail, and this apparently unimportant change, by render- 

 ing the first cost of an edge railway, and its subsequent repairs, less 

 expensive than before, tended greatly to facilitate the introduction 

 of the new system. Very shortly after the substitution of the stone 

 Mock* for the wood sleepers, the coalownera of Northumberland and 

 Durham introduced the use of cant iron edge rails in short lengths, 

 bat fastened to chairs let into the stone blocks ; and in this manner 

 they succeeded in obtaining a roadway upon which the traction was 

 comparatively easy, at a very trifling expense (.tins. 5 and 6). The 

 rails were cast in lengths of from 3 to 4 feet, and they were mnclo in 

 what is called the JUh-beliifd form, or with their greatest depth in the 

 middle ; a represents (fig. 6) the section of the rail in the middle, and 

 4 the section at the ends ; the latter were made with a half-lap joint, 

 and through this joint a key was passed to fasten them to the chairs. 

 The friction apon these edge rails was further diminished by making 

 the tires of the wheels slightly conical. Many of the mine railways 

 are even at the present day made precisely in this manner ; and so 

 great was found to be the advantage the cast-iron edge rails pro- 

 duced, that several roads were laid down in various parts of the king- 



dom, about the beginning of this century, in which they were 

 employed. The old Croydon railway, and the tramway laid down in 



''I 



Fig. C. 



the Commercial Road, London, may indeed be referred to as illustra- 

 tions of the importance attached by our immediate- predecesaon to the 

 necessity for diminishing the cost of goods traffic, and of the earnest- 

 ness of their efforts to att.ua such results. Animal power was, how- 

 ever, the only one used until about 1810 ; so that the rapidity of inter- 

 communication could hardly have been much affected by any of the 

 systems applied up to that period. 



Although the application of steam, as a motive power to the car- 

 riages running upon railways, has been of a comparatively -speak ing 

 recent introduction, the efforts of mechanicians had long been turned 

 towards that object. Watt, Symington, Trevithick, Hlenkiuaop, Cbap- 



Trevithick's Engine. 



man, Brunton, and others, had striven for more than forty years to 

 discover the means of propelling carriages by steam upon common 

 turnpike roads, or upon railways; but after numrnm* failures, the 

 whole class of machine-makers seem, about the year 1812, to have 

 arrived at the conviction that a simple band wheel could not exercise 

 a sufficient amount of friction upon a road surface to cause the ca 

 to advance. For many years the eSbrta of steam-carriage builders 

 were directed to obviating this imaginary difficulty, and rachet v 

 jointed levers, mechanical legs of < and form, wen intro- 



duced, to the detriment of the roadway, and to the diminution 

 useful power of the engine. About 181 4, however, Georg* - 

 constructed for the Killuigworth Colliery, Durham, a M 

 bearing two cylinders seated upon a boiler mounted on wheels, and 

 immediately above the axles of those wheels, which bore cranks con- 

 nected with the piston beads of the cylinders, and wen m ad,- to 

 revolve in unison by means of vaucanson elmins working over barrels 

 on the respective axles. The engines made upon Stephens. .H'H prin- 

 ciples were not at first much esteemed, and it was long before they 

 became of general use ; but gradually they were adopted in the colliery 

 districts; and about the year 1826, Stephenson even applied one of 

 them for passenger traffic on the Stockton and Darlington line. The 

 i '.y these engines was not more than about nine miles 

 an hour, when used for passenger traffic; or than five miles per hour 

 for goods. 



One of the great inconveniences felt in the early days of the 

 the locomotive, arose from the number and the insecurity of the joints 

 of the rails when the cast-iron fish-bellied ones were employed, and 

 from the brittle nature of the iron itself. The discovery by Mr. 

 liirkenshaw of a mode of efficiently and cheaply rolling malleal'i 

 rails, which was patented by him in 1820, constituted, therefore, a 

 most important link iu the chain of mechanical invention, by whose 



