The life of George Stephenson, railway engineer - Lighthouse ...

152 LIFE OF GEORGE STEPHENSON. [chap. xiv.
" I found delight," said Sir Richard, "in witnessing at Wands-
worth the economy of horse labour on the iron railway. Yet a
heavy sigh escaped me as I thought of the inconceivable mil-
lions of money which had been spent about Malta, four or five
of which might have been the means of extending double lines
of iron railway from London to Edinburgh, Glasgow, Holyhead,
Milford, Falmouth, Yarmouth, Dover, and Portsmouth. A reward
of a single thousand would have supplied coaches and
other vehicles, of various degrees of speed, with the best tackle
for readily turning out ; and we might, ere this, have witnessed
our mail coaches running at the rate of ten miles an hour drawn
by a single horse, or impelled fifteen miles an hour by Blenkin-
sop's steam-engine. Such would have been a legitimate motive
for overstepping the income of a nation ; and the completion of
so great and useful a work would have afforded rational ground
for public triumph ift general jubilee."
Although Sir Eichard Phillips's estimate of the cost of con-
structing railways was very fallacious, as experience has since
proved, his estimate of the admirable uses to which they might be
applied—though it was practically impossible for Blenkinsop's
engine to have travelled on cogged rails at fifteen miles an hour
—was sagacious and far-seeing in a remarkable degree.
There were other speculators, who, about the same time,
were urging and predicting the adoption of railways as a mode
railway for public traffic in England was one passing from Merstham to Wands-
worth, through Croydon; a small single line, on which a miserable team of
lean mules or donkeys, some thirty years ago, might be seen crawling at the
rate of four miles an hour, with several trucks of stone and lime behind them.
It was commenced in 1891, 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 in the
hour, and then, with prophetic wisdom, declared that railways could never be
worked profitably. The old Croydon Eailway 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, foodwould
seem to be now-a-days passing through Croydon; for day after day,
more than 100 journeys are made by the gi-eat railroads which pass the place."