490 ROBERT STEPHENSON'S NARRATIVE. APPENDIX. 



of the locomotive must depend upon the perfection of the road 

 upon which it was to move. Even at this early date he was in 

 the habit of considering the road and the locomotive as one 

 machine. All railways at that time were laid in a careless and 

 loose manner, and great inequalities of level were permitted to 

 take place without much attention to repairs, the result being 

 that great loss of power and great wear-and-tear of machinery 

 were incurred. 



" My father therefore now began to direct his close attention to 

 the improvement of the road, and to making it more substantial 

 and solid. With that object he applied his mind particularly 

 to removing the inequalities produced by the imperfect junction 

 between rail and rail. The rails were then made of cast-iron, 

 each being three feet long. Care was not taken to maintain 

 the points of junction on the same level with each other ; and 

 the chair or cast iron pedestal into which the rails were inserted 

 being flat on the bottom, it happened that whenever any 

 disturbance took place in the stone blocks or sleepers upon 

 which they were supported, the flat base upon which the rails 

 rested being tilted by unequal subsidence, the end of one rail 

 became depressed, while that of the other was elevated. This 

 was most seriously felt, since, in the condition in which railways 

 were then kept, very little attention was paid to maintaining a 

 uniform surface or permanent way. 



" My father's first improvement in the construction of the rail 

 consisted in this : instead of adopting the butt joint which had 

 hitherto been used in all cast-iron rails, he adopted the half -lap 

 joint, by which means the rails extended a certain distance over 

 each other at the ends, somewhat like a scarf joint ; and these 

 ends, instead of resting upon the flat chair as had hitherto been 

 the practice, were made to rest upon the apex of a curve 

 forming the bottom of the chair. The supports were extended 

 from 3 feet to 3 feet 9 inches or 4 feet apart. These rails were 

 substituted for the old ones on the Killingworth Colliery Railway, 

 and were found to be a great improvement, adding both to the 

 efficiency of the horse-power and to the smooth action of the 

 locomotive, but more particularly adding to the efficiency ol the 

 latter. 



"My father's endeavours having been marked by so much 

 success in the adaptation of locomotive engines to railways, his 

 attention was, about this period, called by many of his friends to 

 the subject of the application of steam to common roads ; but 



