CHAPTER III.
FIFTEEN MILES AN HOUR.
Fivehundred pounds for the best locomotive engine!
So ran the announcement one day in the year 1829. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was nearly completed, but yet the directors had notfully decided what power they would employ to haul along their waggons.
Horse-power had at length been finally abandoned, and numbers of schemes had been poured in upon the managers. But the contest seemed at last to resolve itself chiefly into a rivalry between fixed and locomotive engines. Principally, if not entirely, swayed however by the arguments of George Stephenson, the directors yielded to the hint of a Mr. Harrison, and offered a £500 prize.
The engine was to satisfy certain conditions. Its weight was not to be above six tons; it was to burn its own smoke, haul twenty tons at a rate of ten miles an hour, be furnished with two safety valves, rest on springs and on six wheels, while its steam pressure must not be more than fifty lbs. to the square inch. The cost was not to exceed £550.
Stephenson, who was the engineer of the Railway, decided to compete. He was now in a very different position from that which he occupied when he built his second locomotive in 1815. His appointment as engineer to the Stockton and Darlington Railway had greatly aided his advancement, and when it was decided to build a railway between the two busy cities of Manchester and Liverpool it was not unnatural that he should take part in the undertaking.
The idea of constructing rail, or tram ways, was not new. Railways of some kind were used in England about two hundred years before, that is, about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thus Roger North writes:—“The manner of the carriage is by laying rails of timber from the colliery to the river, exactly straight and parallel; and bulky carts are made with four rollers fitting those rails, whereby the carriage is so easy that one horse will draw down four or five chaldron of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal merchants.”
It is said that the word tramway is derived from tram, which was wont to mean a beam of timber andalso a waggon. In any case, such rough ways were introduced in mining districts, for, as may be readily believed, one horse could draw twenty times the load upon them that it could on an ordinary road.
The old ways were first made of wood, then of wood faced with iron, then altogether of iron.
Now, in making his railway between Liverpool and Manchester, Stephenson had many difficulties to encounter. He decided that the line should be as direct as possible. But to accomplish this, he would have to pierce hills, build embankments, raise viaducts, and, hardest of all, construct a firm causeway across a treacherous bog called Chat Moss.
“He will never do it,” said some of the most famous engineers of the day. “It is impossible!”
Impossible it certainly seemed to be. Chat Moss was like a sponge, and how was an engineer to build a solid road for heavy trains over four miles of soppy sponge! A person could not trust himself upon it in safety, and when men did venture, they fastened flat boards to their feet, something after the fashion of snow-shoes, and floundered along upon them.
Stephenson began by taking the levels of the Moss in a similar manner. Boards were placed upon the spongy moss, and a footpath of heather followed. Then came a temporary railroad. On this ran the trucks containing the material for a permanent path, which were pushed by boys who learned to trot along easily on the narrow rails.
Drains were dug on either side of the proposed road, and tar-barrels covered with clay were fitted into a sewer underneath the line in the middle of the Moss. Heather, hurdles, tree branches, etc., were spread on the surface, and in some parts an embankment of dry moss itself was laid down. Ton after ton of it disappeared until the directors became alarmed, and the desperate expedient of abandoning the works was considered.
But Stephenson was an Englishman out and out. He never knew when he was beaten. “Keep onfilling,” he ordered; and in spite of all criticism and all alarm, he kept his hundreds of navvies hard at work, pouring in load after load of dry turf.
It must be borne in mind, however, that Stephenson did not continue blindly at his task. He had good reason for what he did. His persistence was a patient, intelligent perseverance, and not a stupid obstinacy. His main arguments seem to have been two. He judged that if he constructed a sufficiently wide road, it would float on the moss, even as ice or a raft of wood floats on water and bears heavy weights; and secondly, he seems to have been animated by the idea, that, if necessary, he could pour in enough solid or fairly solid stuff to reach the bottom and rise up to the surface in a hard mass.
Both ideas seem to have been realised in different parts of the bog. Joy took the place of despair, and triumph exulted over discouragement, as at length the solid mass appeared through the surface. Furthermore, the expense was found to be none so costly after all. No doubt any quantity of turf could be obtained from the surrounding parts of the Moss and dried.
At another part of the railway called Parr Moss an embankment about a mile and a-half was formed by pouring into it stone and clay from a “cutting” in the neighbourhood. In some places twenty-five feet of earth was thus concealed beneath the Moss. The eye of the engineer had as it were pierced through the bog and seen that his solid bank was steadily being built up there.
Before, however, the road across Chat Moss was fairly opened, the trial of locomotives for the prize of £500 had taken place. The fateful day was the 1st day of October, 1829, and the competition was held at Rainhill. A grand stand was erected, and the side of the railway was crowded. Thousands of spectators were present. The future of the locomotive was to be decided on this momentous occasion.
Now, hitherto the difficulty in the locomotive hadbeen to supply a steady and sufficient supply of steam to work the engine quickly and attain high speed and power. Partly, this had been accomplished by Stephenson’s device of the steam-blast in the funnel. But something more was needed.
That requirement was found in the tubular boiler. If the long locomotive boiler were pierced with tubes from end to end, it is clear that the amount of heating surface offered to the action of the fire would be greatly increased. It was this idea which was utilised in the “Rocket,” the engine with which Stephenson competed at Rainhill, and utilised more perfectly than ever before.
Trevithick himself seems to have invented something of the kind, and M. Seguin, the engineer of the St. Etienne and Lyons Railway utilised a similar method. But Henry Booth, the secretary of the railway which Stephenson was then building, invented a tubular boiler without, it is said, knowing anything of Seguin’s plan, and Stephenson who had already experimented in the same direction, adopted Booth’s method.
At first it was a failure. The boiler, fitted with tubes through which the hot air could pass, leaked disastrously, and Stephenson’s son, Robert, wrote to his father in despair. But again George said “persevere,” and he suggested a plan for conquering the difficulty. Again, it was a simple, but as the event proved, an effective plan.
The copper tubes were merely to be fitted tightly to holes bored in the boiler and soldered in. The heat caused the copper to expand and the result was a very strong and water-tight boiler. There were twenty-five of these tubes, each three inches in diameter, and placed in the lower portion of the boiler, leading from the furnace to the funnel. Water also surrounded the furnace. Further, the nozzles of the steam-blast pipes were contracted so as to increase the power of the blast, and consequently raise the strength of the draught to the fire.
“THE ROCKET.”
“THE ROCKET.”
The cylinders were not placed at the top of the boiler, but at the sides in a slanting direction, one end being about level with the boiler roof. They occupied a position mid-way between the old situation upright on the roof and their present position below, or at the lower portion. The pistons acted directly on the driving wheels by means of a connecting rod, and the entire weight of the engine with water supply was but 4½ tons.
On the day of trial only four engines competed. Many had been constructed, but either were not completed in time, or for various reasons could not be exhibited. The famous four were:—The “Novelty” by Messrs. Braithwaite and Ericsson; The “Rocket” by Messrs. R. Stephenson & Co.; The “Perseverance” by Mr. Burstall; and The “Sanspareil” by Mr. Timothy Hackworth. Each engine seems to have run separately, and the length of the course was two miles. The test was that the engine should run thirty miles, backwards and forwards, on the two mile level course, at not less than ten miles an hour, dragging three times its own weight.
The “Novelty” at first appears to have beaten the “Rocket,” for she ran at times at the rate of twenty-four miles an hour; while the first trip of the “Rocket” covered a dozen miles in fifty-three minutes. The engineers of the “Novelty” used bellows to force the fire, but on the second day these bellows gave way, and the engine could not do its work. The boiler of the “Sanspareil” also showed defects, but Stephenson’s “Rocket” calmly stood the strain. Practicable as usual, Stephenson’s work was as good in its results, nay, even better than before, for he hooked the “Rocket” to a carriage load of thirty people, and rushed them along at the then surprising speed of between twenty-four to thirty miles an hour. Mr. Burstall’s “Perseverance” could not cover more than six miles an hour.
The competitions continued, but the “Novelty,”although running at the rate of twenty-four and even twenty-eight miles an hour, broke down again and yet again; its boiler plates appear to have gone wrong on one occasion; while the “Sanspareil” also failed, and furthermore blew a good deal of its fuel into the air because of the arrangement of its steam-blast.
But the more the “Rocket” was tried, the more practicable and reliable the engine appeared to be. On the 8th of October it gained a speed of 29 miles an hour, its steam pressure being about 50 lbs. to the square inch, and its average speed was fifteen miles an hour—that is, five miles an hour over the conditions required. These results appear to have been accomplished with a weight of waggons of thirteen tons behind it. When detached it ran at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour.
In short, the “Rocket” was the only locomotive which fulfilled all the conditions specified for the competition, and the prize was duly awarded to Stephenson and Booth.
The battle of the locomotive was won. Men could see that the machine was feasible and practicable; that it was a new force with immense possibilities before it.
How have those possibilities been realised?