H. R. Wilton Hall

In speaking of the roads in the last chapter, we have come right down to the present day and its needs; but we must go back a bit, as far as time is concerned, to say something about one special class of road which has played an important part in the making of England. The story of the roads began before the dawn of written history—ages and ages before. The story of the railways belongs, as we may say, only to yesterday.

When we speak of a railway in these days we picture to our minds a trackway, laid with parallel steel rails, along which long trains of carriages and trucks are drawn by a locomotive engine. The engine, indeed, is the first thing that a boy thinks of in connection with a railway; and no wonder, for the "iron horse" is a marvellous and interesting piece of machinery. But in the history of our modern railways the trackway, or the rail-way proper, comes first. There were railways long before there were locomotive engines; indeed, we shall not be far out if we say that there were railways in England a few centuries before steam-engines of any sort came into use.

It was up in the North, in the colliery districts by the Tyne, that the idea of tramways, along which trains of trucks, drawn by horses or mules, seem to have first come into use; and they can certainly be traced there as far back as the time of King Charles I (about the year 1630). The first railway which Parliament allowed to be laid in the South of England was the "Surrey Iron Railway". This connected Croydon with Wandsworth, and, later on, it was extended to Merstham. That was about the year 1801, and was intended to convey merchandise, not passengers. For a time it was of great service to mills and factories on the River Wandle. That was the first railway in that part of the country, and the trucks were drawn by donkeys!

George Stephenson's Locomotive "The Rocket", which at its trial trip in 1830 ran 29 miles an hour

A writer of that time, who thought that he was a very wise, far-seeing man, gave it as his opinion "that it was not probable that railways would ever come into general use!" Well, it is never very wise to prophesy until you really know.

Nearly every new invention has been scoffed at at first. Even in this present century, when the early experiments in the use of air-craft were being made, thousands of persons gravely shook their heads in disapproval, declaring that man was never intended to "fly". The Great War time has seen wonderful developments in air-craft, and so many "impossible" things have been achieved that we can realize, just a little bit, that air-craft has "a great future" before it, greater than we can as yet grasp.

It would be impossible to give here even a bare outline of the story of the English Railways, but the making of these railways and their use and development brought about rapidly many marvellous changes which have affected the life of the nation.

Seventy and eighty years ago, when railways were first being made, they excited a great deal more attention and interest than they do to-day. Railways were so new then, for one thing, and there were so many of them being made about the same time for another thing. There are hundreds of miles of railway going through quiet country districts, which were made many years ago, and there are thousands of people living in those districts who have been born since the railways were made. To them the railway is as much an everyday thing as the old parish church, the town pump, or the river. So far as they are concerned, the line has been always there—they never saw the country-side before the railway came. But in the years—say between 1830 and 1860—the work was watched with much interest, and it excited much talk, both wise and foolish.

What did the people who lived in a country village see? Long before the navvies came, for years in fact, the coming railway was talked about. The surveyor, with his attendants, carrying theodolite and measuring-chain, as he went about his work "taking levels", was very narrowly watched, and his sayings and doings were noted and discussed, time after time. In fact, not unfrequently the surveyor and his men had some very lively experiences, for there were lots of places in which they were regarded with suspicion, and all sorts of tricks were played upon them. Stephenson, when out surveying, was threatened with more than one ducking in a horse-pond; guns were fired at him, and he had to get through his work at all sorts of odd times. There was one surveyor who took a professional prize-fighter with him as his assistant, and he found work for him to do besides merely helping him in land-surveying. Bulls were sometimes turned loose in the fields in which surveyors were busy, and they had to leave in a hurry. Surveyors were quite used to meeting with all sorts of abuse, and being faced by angry men, armed with brickbats and pitchforks.

Then, when the road was staked out, and carts and men began to arrive, and a whole town of huts for the workers on the railway was set up on the broad hill-side, where the villagers and their fathers before them, time out of mind, had ploughed, and sowed, and harrowed, and reaped, and gleaned—tongues would wag still more, and curiosity would be intensified. When the huts were finished the navvies arrived. Strange folk they were to the villagers, speaking a language of their own, and living by themselves—strong, powerful men, doing great deeds of strength, capable of working hard, and very often of drinking hard, and of fighting hard. The quiet little inns and ale-houses became noisy and busy. The navvies brought change and excitement with them; and also, at times, mischief, strife, confusion, and drunkenness. For miles round the farmers would complain that they could get no labour for farm-work. Young men, attracted by the novelty, the higher wages, and the greater numbers, turned navvies, "learned their works" and left the old agricultural life of their forefathers for ever. Then, when the navvies set to work, the villagers saw them busy, like ants upon the hill-side, cutting a great cleft through it, many feet in depth. As they came along, yard by yard, they saw a rough tramway laid, along which long trains of trucks, drawn by a noisy, fussy little engine, were being drawn, some full of earth and gravel or stone which had been cut away.

Then, after many months' work, the men advanced out on to the open plain. For weeks and months trains of trucks were constantly coming laden with earth, which was tipped on to the lower ground, forming an embankment, which gradually came nearer and nearer the river bank. Down by the river bank, on the far side, and on the near side as well, were men digging for weeks at a time. Then, these made way for an army of brick layers and masons, and loads and loads of brick and stone were brought along the line, or dragged by horses through the old country lanes to the waterside. There, on each side of the stream, what looked like big towers were erected, as tall as the church tower, or taller perhaps, and still the earth day by day was being brought along the way and tipped, adding to the embankment yard by yard. Such earth, too; clay, perhaps, or earth of such kind as the oldest man in the parish had never seen in those parts before, because it had been brought from a place or places many miles away.

Then, when the brickwork on each side of the river was in position, there was the building of a bridge to watch. There were several huge arches of brick, or perhaps of stone, brought from far-off quarries. But what were those queer, lattice-work things, looking something like spiders' webs, which were brought down to the waterside? There was nothing like that ever seen in the village before. What did it mean? They saw these great iron lattice-work sections hoisted in the air by steam cranes and swung slowly up and round till they were placed in position, resting on the piers of masonry. It must have been a wonderful sight to watch the river being spanned by a huge bridge or by these girders, and to see the different sections being fitted and fastened together.

You may be sure that there was much shaking of heads and many prophecies that this sort of thing was a flying in the face of Providence—just as in our own time there has been over cycles, motor-cars, and air-craft. How could those great trains and heavy engines pass safely over such a flimsy-looking bridge as that? It would be sure to snap in the middle. And when an accident happened—and sad accidents did happen—many declared that it was the Almighty's judgment upon men for thinking that they knew better than their fathers before them.

So the work went on, and in time the railway became an accomplished fact and was no longer a wonder, and a race grew up to whom railways became part and parcel of everyday life.

But the railways brought many other changes. Those loads of earth brought from distant parts of the line not only altered the appearance of the country where they were deposited, but caused other alterations as well. Grass soon grew on the slopes of these embankments, but with the grass came up also strange weeds and plants. These seeded, the wind scattered the seeds, and, in the fields on either side of the line, these new weeds showed themselves the next season. For a year or two, probably, nobody noticed this very particularly; but, before very long, whole districts might be overrun with varieties of weeds never seen in that district before.

In some places marshes had to be drained, and, in consequence, many broad, shallow stretches of water disappeared. Such "sedgy pools" in quiet districts were once the haunt of many varieties of wild fowl. As the pools have disappeared the wild fowl which made these their haunt disappeared also, and with them the wild flowers and water-plants belonging thereto have died out as well. In much the same way insects have been imported in the loads of earth and found a home in a new district where they have, so to speak, "settled", and have done in some cases good, and in other cases harm, to the land.

Many cuttings through the beds of gravel and rocks have taught us something of the changes which have taken place in the earth's crust. It has been possible to examine the structure of the soil of many parts of England more thoroughly in the deep railway cuttings and tunnels than could have been done in any other way. Geologists have gathered much most valuable information from the soil and rock dug out in railway excavations.