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All but forgotten today, the RCH was one of the most important steps forward in British industrial history.
The humble Railway Clearing House (RCH) brought real co-operation to Victorian Britain’s many different private railway companies, and gave yet further impetus to the country’s accelerating industrial revolution. Its success should be a reminder to private companies that they and their passengers actually share very similar interests.
John Bright dismissed fears that digging a tunnel under the English Channel would encourage a French invasion.
In the 1880s, when the idea of a Channel Tunnel was being seriously considered in Parliament, senior ministers warned anxiously and apparently seriously of the dangers of encouraging a French invasion. John Bright, who as President of the Board of Trade had been strongly in favour of the project, made no attempt to conceal his scorn when he spoke to constituents in Birmingham on June 15th, 1883.
Once railway engineer Thomas Brassey made a promise he kept it — even if he wasn’t aware that he’d made one.
Railways came to Belgium when the Brussels to Mechelen line opened on May 5th, 1835. In 1848, the first stage of the Sambre and Meuse line opened at Charleroi, with British engineers in charge of construction, and six years later it reached Vireux. At Olloy-sur-Viroin the company had erected a smithy at no small expense, and employed a local blacksmith. One day, Thomas Brassey arrived to inspect progress on the line.
For George Stephenson, the motto of the Stockton and Darlington Railway was a code to live by.
However pure Science may be, a scientist’s head may be turned by ambition, politics or gain, resulting in great harm to social and economic progress. Happily, George Stephenson was not such a man, as Michael Longridge of Bedlington Iron Works testified in a letter (here abridged) to Edinburgh engineer George Buchanan in January 1832.
A gentleman travelling home from London by train reached his destination carrying more than he set out with.
In 1830, the world’s first intercity passenger line began running steam-hauled trains between Liverpool and Manchester. Half a century later, Richard Pike compiled a collection of vignettes about life on the ever-growing railway network, some about engineers and locomotives, others about the surprising things that could happen in a railway carriage.
William Murdoch and Samuel Clegg brought warmth and light into the country’s streets, factories and homes, but the public didn’t make it easy.
Before natural gas there was coal gas, which warmed living rooms and lit streets all over the United Kingdom until the 1960s. Coal gas does not occur naturally, and Archibald Cochrane (1748-1831), 9th Earl of Dundonald, discovered it only by chance, while making coal tar near Culross Abbey in the 1780s. It fell to another Scotsman to make coal gas commercially viable.
When it opened in 1901, the Uganda Railway still wasn’t in Uganda, and Westminster’s MPs were still debating whether or not to build it.
Two years after Uganda became a British Protectorate in 1894, work began at Mombasa in British East Africa (Kenya from 1920) on a railway inland to Uganda. Thanks to African terrain and British bureaucracy, when Winston Churchill published the following assessment of it in 1908 the meandering line terminated at Kisumu, 660 route-miles away but still short of the Ugandan border.