1841. 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT S JOURNAL. 



313 



REMARKS ON RAILWAYS REPORT AND EVIDENCE.— 1841. 



Sir — The report of the " Select Committee appointed to consider 

 whether it is desirable for the public safety to vest a discretionary 

 power of issuing Regulations for the prevention of Accidents upon 

 Railways, in the Board of Trade: and if so, under what conditions 

 and limitations;" together with the evidence upon which such report 

 has been founded, has fallen under my notice, and with the view of 

 adding my experience and reflections to the general fund of infor- 

 mation upon railways, I request the favour that you will lay the fol- 

 lowing observations before the public at your earliest opportunity. 



I am an engineer of 18 years' experience in my profession, and for 

 the last G years have been'intimately connected with railways, princi- 

 pally in endeavouring to introduce into the system various contri- 

 vances by which the public safety will be increased. 



It has' occurred to me as a matter of great regret that the Com- 

 mittee was not assisted, during its deliberation, by a practical engi- 

 neer fully versed in the various railway details which were brought 

 under its consideration, a practice which is quite usual in the Admi- 

 ralty Courts, by which the testimony of the various witnesses would 

 have been checked ; for it is just evident, had such been the case, the 

 extraordinary opinions and assertions advanced by some of them, 

 would never have been broached, as it is clear, when the questions of 

 the Committee were directed in such a way as to convict a witness 

 from his own testimony, the party never failed to take refuge behind 

 some technical det^iils, into the peculiarities of which the Committee 

 could not follow. A striking instance of this occurs in (Question 5G7) 

 Mr. Brvnel's evidence, who states as the probable cause of accident, 

 " that perhaps a pair of wheels upon a train is slightly out of gauge, 

 being too narrow, that in passing some guard-rail they get strained, 

 and that when they come to a part of the line which is rather wide in 

 gauge, they get off, and the train is delayed." Now every technical 

 man of experience knows that if a pair of wheels be out of gauge, 

 the fault is in the construction of the spindle, for if every spindle is 

 made with a collar or shoulder, so that the b:ick of the boss of the 

 wheel butts against it, a method I invariably practice, if the 

 wheel run round upon its axle it could never get out of gauge, so that 

 a re^ida/ion providing that every axle should be made with shoulders 

 would be a very wise and proper regulation, and would apply to all 

 railways whatever. 



In another part of his evidence !\Ir. Brunei states th,it amongst 

 other causes of accident, "a policeman immediately runs up, and stands 

 right in the way of the tail-lamp of the train, and the next train runs 

 into it. Now the majority of persons W'Ould say, that if the police- 

 man had done his duty, and showed a red light, and if the engine-man 

 had seen the red light, there would have been no accident." If 

 the policeman, in the case of accident, received positive instructions 

 to run back 50U yards and hold his red light, so that the engineer of 

 the succeeding train should not fail seeing it, this precaution, one 

 which I have invariably insisted upon, under whatever case or form of 

 accident, is, and would always be, an efficacious and proper regulation. 



Mr. Brunei states, amongst other minor improvements, it would be 

 better for the wheel not to touch the guard-rail; a man who knew 

 any thing of a railway would then have inquired th^ use of the guard- 

 rail, because, this being placed purposely to guard the wheel from the 

 point on the opposite rail, if the wheel was not governed by it, it is 

 useless — and there is no secondary use for it, as Mr. Brunei endea- 

 vours to make it a]ipear in Ques. G04, and so far as the use and prin- 

 ciple of the guard-rails go, it is the same in all cases on all raihcays. 



There is another observation in the same answer, so palpably in the 

 teeth of experience, that I cannot fail here to notice it, and that is the 

 denial on the part of Mr. Brunei that railway improvements can be 

 made by any parties excepting by those connected with railways. It 

 would have been a proper question following this assertion, if Mr. 

 Brunei had been asked whether his own father was originally a block 

 maker, and whether the fact of his not being so would have been a 

 proper reason for Sir Jeremy Bentham declining the encouragement 

 due to Sir I. Brunei's very admirable machinery for making blocks by 

 machinery — or whether the illustrious Watt was an engine driver, or 

 before his improvements in steam engines he was actually accustomed 

 to the management of steam engines — or whether Arkwright was a 

 cotton spinner — or Mr. James, the fatlier of railways, previously to 

 his conception of railway extension, was intimately and exclusively 

 connected with railway matters — and lastly the inquiry might have 

 been made, wdiat improvements have been introduced, I will not say 

 invented, by railivay engineers since the formation of the Liverpool 

 and Manchester Railway, and in what respect this last mentioned 

 railway differs essentially from a colliery railway that had been 

 formed half a century before it. 



And whence does it arise that the improvement of railways, con- 

 trasts so essentially with the advances made by the great branches of 

 trade, and manufactures, since their fir^:t introduction, but from the fact 

 of the monopoly of the companies on the one hand, and the disincli- 

 nation of railway engineers to introduce any contrivance wdiich does 

 not emanate from themselves, on the other; had a liberal spirit pre- 

 vailed amongst engineers, and had they the judgment to select fiom 

 the mass of crude suggestions offered to them, railways would have 

 been bv this time not only safe by contrast with stage coaches, 

 but absolutely so, there is no reason why the system should not 

 have been so formed as that, by no chance or design could an injury 

 happen to passengers, and no one contrivance would conduce to this 

 result more certainly and more directly than the adoption of the 

 low carriage, upon the ]ninciple of those invented by myself, and 

 in use upon the Greenwich Railway, and although Mr. Entwistle takes 

 credit for the arrangements upon the Greenwich line, inasmuch as 

 G,SOO,0'JO passengers have been carried without the loss of life or limb 

 to any one, he had not the candour to admit that this gratifying result 

 is to be attributed mainly to the construction of the carriages, for the 

 accidents from broken axles, &c., have been much greater upon the 

 Greenwich line than upon any other in the country, and but for the 

 low carriages, some most awful accidents would have resulted. I may 

 here mention that the Board of Directors to which Mr. Entwistle be- 

 longs, have not only done their worst to disgust the public by the 

 manner in wdiich their carriages are kept, but they would have been 

 long since abolished by the Directors but for the resistance made to 

 that measure by the parties who are in the habit daily of using the 

 line. This fact is one more in proof of the necessity of some super- 

 vising power to control the measures of railway managers. 



The mode in which Mr. Brunei attacks the recommendation of Sir 

 F. Smith that an engine should not be loaded beyond a certain amount, 

 proves again the necessitv that a technical judge should have been in 

 communication with the Committee ; in that case I can scarcely be- 

 lieve Mr. Brunei would have indulged in the same arguments. The 

 power of a locomotive is resolvable into two elements, the quantity 

 of water evaporated by it, and the gradients it passes over ; therefore, 

 instead of appealing to one of these elements, viz. the gradients, had 

 Mr. Brunei included both, the proposition of Sir F. Smith would have 

 proved a most reasonable one. Had Sir F. Smith's proposition been 

 that the load behind an engine should bear a certain ratio with the 

 area of the cylinders, multiplied by a certain constant, having a ratio 

 with the average gradients of the line, it would have amounted to the 

 very rule of every-day pvactice upon any railway whatever, and by 

 making either of these ratios fully within the average working con- 

 dition of an engine, he could have so defined his object as to have 

 ensured the punctual observance of his rule by the railway companies, 

 a rule to which no reasonable objection could be made. 



The advantage resulting from massing the trains, by the average 

 power being thus obtained from the engines connected together, is, in 

 my opinion, a very questionable one : supposing a very heavy train 

 has tuo engines a head, and that the last engine runs so dry as to be 

 useless ; supposing, likewise, that the train is at a considerable dis- 

 tance from a siding or watering place, or a station whence another 

 engine can be obtained, the power of the engine in good order will be 

 almost entirely absorbed in dragging the defective en^iue behind it, 

 and thus, the entire load will be retarded, and perhaps dangerously so. 

 Had each engine taken its own load, the defective engine with its 

 load would 'have been alone delayed : and, talking of expense, it 

 would have been much better economy that a disabled engine and a 

 small load should have been left at the first siding out of Bristol, than 

 that a good engine should be strained and worked violently, and a 

 heavy train delayed a considerable time throughout its journey to 

 London, deranging all the arrangements, and endangering the line 

 throughout. As to the maximum velocity, that could be disposed of 

 in the way before mentioned, for the word power is resolved into the 

 same elements, whether it be employed for draught or flight. 



Mr. Brunei states "that with the best assistance of professional 

 men, and others whose whole time asd pecuUar capabilities are ap- 

 plied to the system, we find it difficult enough to make our regulations 

 sufficiently general to apply even upon our own line, and that the 

 great diffi'culty in drawing up auy code of regulations always is, to 

 make a good regulation which is sufficiently applicable in all cases 

 even on our own line of railway." I will prove that this very de- 

 sirable svstem of uniformitv can be easily accomplished as regards 

 statiou?,'and that is, to form them in such way that neither trains nor 

 passengers shall ever cross the line. Fig. 1 will explain this method, 

 by which it will be perceived that sidings must be placed on both 

 sides of the line, and the crossings in such way that a train enters and 

 departs from the siding without backing, backing into a siding being 

 uuquestionablv most gothic and unskilful, the only apology for it being 



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