Trevithick London Railway and Locomotive 1808

Trevithick London Railway and Locomotive 1808

Richard Trevithick

More than twenty years before the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the celebrated engineer Trevithick constructed, not only a locomotive engine, but also a railway, that the London public might see with their own eyes what the new high pressure steam engine could effect, and how greatly superior a railway was to a common road for locomotion.  The sister of Davies Gilbert named this engine “Catch me who can.”  The following interesting account in a letter to a correspondent was given by John Isaac Hawkins, an engineer well known in his day.

Trevithick London Railway and Locomotive 1808

“Sir,—Observing that it is stated in your last number under the head of ‘Twenty-one Years’ Retrospect of the Railway System,’ that the greatest speed of Trevithick’s engine was five miles an hour, I think it due to the memory of that extraordinary man to declare that about the year 1808 he laid down a circular railway in a field adjoining the New Road, near or at the spot now forming the southern half of Euston Square; that he placed a locomotive engine, weighing about ten tons, on that railway—on which I rode, with my watch in hand—at the rate of twelve miles an hour; that Mr. Trevithick then gave his opinion that it would go twenty miles an hour, or more, on a straight railway; that the engine was exhibited at one shilling admittance, including a ride for the few who were not too timid; that it ran for some weeks, when a rail broke and occasioned the engine to fly off in a tangent and overturn, the ground being very soft at the time.  Mr. Trevithick having expended all his means in erecting the works and enclosure, and the shillings not having come in fast enough to pay current expenses, the engine was not again set on the rail.”

The First Railway Bill 1801

THE FIRST RAILWAY BILL.

FIRST RAILWAY BILL.

The first Railway Bill passed by Parliament was for a line from Wandsworth to Croydon, in 1801, but a quarter of a century elapsed before the first line was actually constructed for carrying passengers between Stockton and Darlington.  People still living can remember the mail coaches that plied once a month between Edinburgh and London, making the journey in twelve or fourteen days.  The Annual Register of 1820 boasts that “English mail coaches run 7 miles an hour; French only 4½ miles; the former travelling, in the year, forty times the length of miles that the French accomplish.”  These coaches were a great improvement on the previous method of sending the mails.  In 1783 a petition to Parliament stated that “the mails are generally entrusted to some idle boy, without character, mounted on a worn-out hack.”

This is an account by Charles Knight -

The earliest railway for public traffic in England was one passing from Merstham to Wandsworth, through Croydon; a small, single line, on which a miserable team of donkeys, some thirty years ago, might be seen crawling at the rate p. 17of four miles an hour, with several trucks of stone and lime behind them.  It was commenced in 1801, opened in 1803; and the men of science of that day—we cannot say that the respectable name of Stephenson was not among them, (Stephenson was then a brakesman at Killingworth)—tested its capabilities and found that one horse could draw some thirty-five tons at six miles an hour, and then, with prophetic wisdom, declared that railways could never be worked profitably.  The old Croydon railway is no longer used.  The genius loci must look with wonder on the gigantic offspring of the little railway, which has swallowed up its own sire.  Lean mules no longer crawl leisurely along the little rails with trucks of stone through Croydon, once perchance during the day, but the whistle and the rush of the locomotive are now heard all day long.  Not a few loads of lime, but all London and its contents, by comparison—men, women, children, horses, dogs, oxen, sheep, pigs, carriages, merchandise, food,—would seem to be now-a-days passing through Croydon; for day after day, more than 100 journeys are made by the great railroads which pass the place

The following announcement was published in a London periodical, dated August 1, 1802 -

The Surrey Iron Railway is now completed over the high road through Wandsworth town.  On Wednesday, June 8, several carriages of all descriptions passed over the iron rails without meeting with the least obstacle.  Among these, the Portsmouth wagon, drawn by eight horses and weighing from eight to ten tons, passed over the rails, and did not appear to make the slightest impression upon them.