Evolution of the Railway 209 



not regarded as a matter of any importance. Colliery managers 

 were quite satisfied with a steady three miles an hour. 



Although the general conditions of the pioneer railways 

 were, apparently, so primitive, some of the lines were more 

 ambitious and more costly than might, at first, be supposed. 

 Among them were lines from five to ten miles in extent which 

 served the double purpose of (i) enabling collieries in, for 

 example, the Hinterland of the Tyne to benefit from the ever- 

 expanding trade in coal ; and (2) providing them with the 

 means of discharging direct into the colliers below Newcastle 

 bridge, thus saving the preliminary transport in, and trans- 

 shipment from, the coal barges on the river. In these five- or 

 ten-mile distances there were often considerable declivities to 

 overcome, in order that the ideal of a gradual descent should 

 be secured, and the cuttings, embankments, bridges and other 

 works thus carried out were often closely akin to much of the 

 railway construction with which we are familiar to-day. 

 Thus Dr. Stukeley, in his " Itinerarium Curiosum," says in 

 describing the visit he paid to the Tanfield Collieries, Durham, 

 in 1725 : 



" We saw Col. Lyddal's coal-works at Tanfield, where he 

 carries the road over valleys filled with earth, 100 foot high, 

 300 foot broad at bottom : other valleys as large have a 

 stone bridge laid across : l in other places hills are cut through 

 for half a mile together ; and in this manner a road is made, 

 and frames of timber laid, for five miles to the river-side." 



Arthur Young, also, who visited the Newcastle-on-Tyne 

 district in 1768, says in his " Six Months Tour through the 

 North of England " : " The coal waggon roads from the 

 pits to the water are great works carried over all sorts of 

 inequalities of ground so far as the distance of nine or ten 

 miles." 



The staiths at the river end of the Tyne railways are de- 

 scribed in the " Commercial and Agricultural Magazine " as 

 " solid buildings, two stories high ; into the upper story the 



1 The stone bridge here referred to allowed of an easy transport across 

 the valley from the collieries to the Tyne. Constructed by a local mason, 

 the bridge soon fell down, and was rebuilt in 1727, the architect thereupon 

 committing suicide to spare himself the anxiety of any possible further 

 collapse of his work. In Brand's " History and Antiquities of Newcastle " 

 (1789) it is stated that the span of the bridge was 103 feet, that the height 

 was 63 feet, and that the cost of the structure was 1200. 



