Railways
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Railways’
In Charles Dickens’s tale set around Mugby Junction, a man sees his life flash by like a ghostly train.
At the start of his railway-themed story ‘Mugby Junction’, Charles Dickens wants to tell us about the lead character, whom we know thus far only as a man with two black cases labelled ‘Barbox Brothers’. He is standing with the station’s sole member of staff on the otherwise deserted, rain-soaked platform at three o’clock in the morning.
Sixteen-year-old John Wesley Hackworth brought a locomotive over to St Petersburg, and Russia’s railway revolution was ready for the off.
British engineers and a sixteen-year-old boy played a key part in helping Imperial Russia begin her own railway revolution. In one respect, however, Russia failed to learn from the example the United Kingdom set for her: private enterprise.
Samuel Smiles explains why the London and Birmingham Railway was an achievement superior to the Great Pyramid of Giza.
When the London and Birmingham Railway opened in 1838, it was an engineering marvel. But progress from the era of the Great Pyramids to Britain’s railways did not lie in engineering alone. It lay in the fact that the industrial revolution was an achievement not of servants gratifying a political elite, but of free men pursuing their own advantages.
To prove that steam power was the future of railways, George Stephenson held a truly historic competition.
The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, was the first passenger-carrying line to be operated exclusively by steam locomotives (horses were still sometimes used on the Stockton and Darlington). Initially, there was some hesitation among investors over safety and reliability, so the matter was put to the test near St Helens, at the Rainhill Trials.
Samuel Smiles reminds us that until we brought the railways to India, we had little to boast about as an imperial power.
Samuel Smiles’s biography of George and Robert Stephenson opens with a heartfelt appreciation of the social and economic progress brought by the railways. He describes how this peculiarly British invention had by the 1870s already reached most European countries and beyond, and of course he could not fail to mention the railways of India.
The opening of the Bombay to Thane line was the real beginning of British India.
Just twenty-three years after the Liverpool and Manchester Railway hosted the world’s first regular steam-hauled passenger service, British entrepreneurs began running the first trains in India. The ‘Illustrated London News’ described it as an event more important than all Britain’s battles on Indian soil.