00 



RAILWAY. 



RAILWAY. 



910 



means the railway system hag been perfected. The fibrous character 

 of the wrought-iron makes it far less likely to break under concussions 

 than east-iron would be ; and the sectional form generally given to 

 the H or double-headed rail, offers a very great resistance to deflec- 

 tion. It is remarkable that rails which are constantly travelled over 

 do not rust ; but it is important that they should be made of a metal 

 as crystalline as it possibly can be, consistently with the retention of 

 its malleability ; soft, fibrous iron is, in fact, not suited for the manu- 

 facture of rails. Wrought-iron rails are made about 1 5 or 21 feet in 

 length, instead of 3 or 4 feet, as in the case of the cast-iron rails. 



When the projectors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway were 

 engaged in the design and execution of that great work in the year 

 1825, and the following years, the capabilities of the locomotive engine 

 were still so little known that it was for a long time a matter of dis- 

 cussion whether or not that description of motive power should be 

 adopted. The directors were soon convinced that horse-power would 

 not enable them to attain the speed they considered necessary ; but 

 the result of the experiment upon the Stockton and Darlington line 

 had not been sufficiently decisive to induce them at once to try the 

 new locomotives. They therefore consulted some of the most eminent 

 engineers of the day, and after carefully examining the reports of 

 Messrs. Rastrick and Walker in favour of fixed engines, and those of 

 Messrs. Stephenson and Locke in favour of locomotives, the directors 

 wisely determined to use locomotives, and to offer a premium for the 

 best engine of that description which should fulfil certain conditions. 

 The history of this competition is so well known that it would be 

 useless to repeat it here ; and it may suffice to observe that the pre- 

 mium j was won by Messrs. Stephenson and Booth, who produced the 

 Rocket engine, of which an illustration is given (fg. 8) ; and thus 



inaugurated the most important revolution in the means of material 

 civilisation which any age has witnessed. [SiErnENSOS, GEOHOK, in 

 Bioo. Dry.] 



The French mining interest had not neglected to avail themselves of 



the advantage offered by the edge rails in diminishing the cost of their 



heavy traffic ; and they had constructed about 1826, the railways from 



;. Etienne, and from St. Etienne to Lyon and to 



Andrezieux. M. .Soquin, the engineer of one of these linea, had also 



constructed some locomotive engines for the purpose of drawing the 



waggons; and in them he first introduced the use of small tubes 



passing from the fire-box to the chimney. Messrs. Stephenson and Bury 



this plan in constructing the boiler of the Rocket, and thus 



increased in a notable manner the evaporating power of their engine ; 



Fig. 9. 



and they increased the draught l>y '"- waste steam to escape 



by the funnel. The cylinder* of the Rocket were fixed externally ; a 



system to which after many trials some engine-makers seem disposed 



;rn ; and the early locomotives invariably were heated by coke. 



The Rocket had four wheels, not coupled, and its weight was only 4 

 tons 5 cwt. ; it attained with a gross load of 17 tons, an average speed 

 of 14 miles, and in some instances it attained a speed of 17 miles 

 per hour. It is curious to contrast these figures with the ones 

 connected with the more recent locomotives. Thus, the weight of 

 some of the passenger engines on the North Western line (without 

 their supplies of coke and water) is not less than 27 tons ; the weight 

 of some of those on the Great Western line is not less than 31 tons ; 

 and some of the engines used on the Soemering line are even of 48 

 tons weight and have six coupled wheels. The various considera- 

 tions connected with the weight and the dimensions of locomotives 

 belong however to the records of the subsequent history of the 

 railway system ; its general (or perhaps rather its preliminary) history 

 was closed by the triumphant success of the Rocket. 



On the modes of designing rind executing the works upon railways. 

 (Organisation.) It would serve little good purpose to discuss here the 

 question as to whether or not it would be desirable to charge the 

 central administration of a country with the duty of laying out the 

 lines of railway communication ; because the peculiar circumstances of 

 every nation will, generally speaking, render the solution of that 

 question independent of any abstract reasoning. No doubt the 

 absence of anything like administrative control has led in England to 

 a fearful waste of money, and to the establishment of a ruinous com- 

 petition in many instances ; but if we had waited until the government 

 had decided upon the merits of railways in the first instance, or until 

 it should have decided the precise routes to be followed by the new 

 lines of intercommunication in the second, it is tolerably certain that 

 we never should have possessed the marvellous instruments of 

 civilisation we actually do. The results of the intervention of the 

 state authorities in other countries do not seem to warrant the belief 

 that, in the end, they manage things better than is done here ; and 

 practically it has been shown that the " laisser aller, laissez faire " 

 system conduces the most surely, not only to a nation's greatness, but even 

 to the extent and the perfection of its railways. At any rate our trunk 

 railways are made, and it would be useless now to attempt to retrace 

 our steps. In our colonies there may be reason, and there still is time, 

 for the government to interfere, to guide the efforts of capitalists, and 

 to spare them from the robbery and extortion they certainly have been 

 exposed to in England. But the author of this notice, who has had a 

 long practical experience in foreign countries, feels it at once to be his 

 duty to record his conviction, that no more mischievous course can be 

 adopted than for the government of any country to execute, or to 

 work a railway; either when the question is considered from a 

 structural and engineering point of view, or from a political, or moral 

 one. Perfect freedom of private industry may lead to abuses ; the 

 creation of a number of places of pay and profit must do so, however 

 honest the chiefs of an administration may be. 



However the management of the general system of the railways of a 

 country may be settled, the first questions which require consideration, 

 when it has been determined to execute a line between any two 

 important termini are, whether or not it should be made to deflect a 

 little, in order to accommodate the local traffic ; or whether it would 

 be preferable to serve that traffic by means of branch lines. The 

 relative importance of the intermediate towns and the, so to speak 

 locomotive habits of their inhabitants, must be taken into account in 

 arriving at the decision on this subject ; as must also be considered 

 the pecuniary circumstances of the local travellers, inasmuch as the 

 latter materially affect the relative proportions of the persons taking 

 the various classes of carriages. On short railways the local traffic 

 will be found to vary between from 60 to 90 per cent, of the whole 

 receipts ; on long railways the through traffic bears a larger proportion 

 to the total receipts, and this probably as much on account of the 

 increased number of first-class passengers, as on account of the increased 

 total number of passengers. The usual relative proportions of the 

 travellers in the various descriptions of carriages is in England as 

 follows : in the first class there are about 13-2 per cent., in the second 

 there are 31-2 per cent., and in the third 55'6 per cent. ; in Germany 

 these proportions do not hold, for the first class passengers are fewer, 

 and the second-class ones have a much greater relative importance ; 

 these differences may to some extent be explained by the character of 

 the accommodation given, but the comparative wealth of the popula- 

 tion to bo served must also influence them. The probable amount 

 of the local goods traffic must be taken into account likewise in 

 estimating the influence of any particular place on the prosperity of 

 a line ; and above all things an estimate of the cost a passage through 

 it would entail must be made. It would appear that the average 

 distance traversed by a ton of goods on lines of considerable length 

 is about double the distance travelled by ordinary passengers, and 

 that goods travel a relatively greater distance on long lines than 

 they do upon short ones. As a general rule, the result of the 

 most careful investigations of the traffic returns of railways haa 

 been to show that it is not desirable to sacrifice local traffic to the 

 ts of the termini ; and the history of some of our " direct lines " 

 proves that whenever the communication between the termini is 

 sufficiently important to justify a direct railway, the want will very 

 soon be supplied. There are some curious statistics on this subject in 

 Lardner's ' Railway Economy,' and in Perdonnet's ' Traite" EMmentaire 

 des Chemins de Fer." 



The principal points through which a railway is to pass being thus 



