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

CHAP. XX.] THE DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED. 235
and his invariable answer was— " "We must persevere."
opinion ;
And so he went on ; but still the insatiable bog gaped for more
material, which was emptied in truck-load after truck-load with-
out any apparent effect. Then a special meeting of the board
was summoned, and it was held upon the spot, to determine
whether the work should be proceeeded with, or abandoned.
Mr. Stephenson himself afterwards described the transaction at a
public dinner given at Birmingham, on the 23d of December,
1837, on the occasion of a piece of plate being presented to his
son, the engineer of the London and Birmingham Railway. He
related the anecdote, he said, for the purpose of impressing
upon the minds of those who heard him the necessity of per-
severance.
" After working for weeks and weeks," said he, " in filling in
materials to form the road, there did not yet appear to be the
least sign of our being able to raise the solid embankment one
single inch ; in short we went on filling in without the slightest
apparent effect. Even my assistants began to feel uneasy, and
to doubt of the success of the scheme. The directors, too, spoke
of it as a hopeless task ; and at length they became seriously
alarmed, so much so, indeed, that a board meeting was held on
Chat Moss to decide whether I should proceed any further.
They had previously taken the opinion of other engineers, who
reported unfavourably. There was no help for it, however, but
to go on. An immense outlay had been incurred ; and great
loss would have been occasioned had the scheme been then
abandoned and the line taken by another route. So the direc-
tors were compelled to allow me to go on with my plans, of the
ultimate success of which I myself never for one moment
doubted. Determined, therefore, to persevere as before, I
ordered the work to be carried on vigorously ; and, to the sur-
prise of every one connected with the undertaking, in six months
from the day on which the board had held its special meeting on
the Moss, a locomotive engine and carriage passed over the very
spot with a party of the directors' friends on their way to dine
at Manchester."
The idea which bore him up, in the face of so many adverse
opinions, in assuming that a safe road could be formed across the