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.