KAKLY TRAMROAPS. CHAP. T. 



ilaid, a single horse was capable of drawing a large 

 pleaded waggon from the coal-pit to the shipping staitli. 

 Roger North, in 1676, found the practice had become 

 extensively adopted, and he speaks of the large sum 

 then paid for way-leaves, that is, the permission granted 

 by the owners of lands lying between the coal-pit and 

 the river-side to lay down a tramway for the purpose 

 of connecting the one with the other. A century later, 

 I Arthur Young observed that not only had these roads 

 become greatly multiplied, but formidable works had 

 been constructed to carry them along upon the same 

 level. " The coal-waggon roads from the pits to the 

 water," he says, " are great works, carried over all sorts 

 of inequalities of ground, so far as the distance of nine 

 or ten miles. The tracks of the wheels are marked with 

 pieces of wood let into the road for the wheels of the 

 i waggons to run on, by which one horse is enabled to 

 I draw, and that with ease, fifty or sixty bushels of coals." 

 Saint-Fond, the French traveller, who visited Newcastle 

 in 1791, spoke of the colliery waggon-ways in the 

 neighbourhood as superior to anything of the kind he 

 had seen. He described the wooden rails as formed 

 with a rounded upper surface, like a projecting mould- 

 ing, and the waggon wheels as being " made of cast-iron, 

 and hollowed in the manner of a metal pulley," that they 

 might fit the rounded surface of the rails. The economy 

 with which the coal w r as thus hauled to the shipping 

 places was urged by him as an inducement to his own 

 countrymen to adopt a similar method of transit. 2 



Similar waggon-roads were early laid down in the 

 coal districts of Wales, Cumberland, and Scotland. At 

 the time of the Scotch rebellion, in 1745, a tramroad 

 existed between the Tranent coal-pits and the small 

 harbour of Cockenzie in East Lothian ; and a portion 



1 ' Six Months' Tour,' vol. iii. 9, 



" ' Travels in England, Scotland, and the Hebrides,' vol. i. 142. 



