Both Dixon and Joseph Locke were required to act as engineers on the Liverpool & Manchester, which was by far the largest enterprise attempted so far in railway construction. The engineering challenges were immense. At the Liverpool end, there were eventually to be three tunnels under the city and the 70-foot deep cutting at Olive Mount that would have to be carved and blasted out of solid sandstone. There was to be an immense viaduct over the Sankey Navigation and a somewhat more modest one across the Bridgewater Canal. Both these waterways had led the fight against the railway and now they would have to endure the humiliating prospect of seeing the railway soaring high above them. There were large embankments to be built including one over a mile long across the valley of the Dilton Brook and a 2-mile-long cutting near Newton-le-Willows. There were to be 63 bridges across the line, one of which at Rainhill carried a road that had to cross the lines at an angle, not at 90°. It was said that building such a bridge caused Stephenson a lot of trouble, and he only solved how to do it by experiments: in this case by carving up a turnip. It hardly seems likely as skew bridges had already been built across several canals, and the engineer needed to go no further than the nearby Lancaster Canal to see examples. The story does, however, show that railway construction was in its infancy and that engineers such as Stephenson were largely self-taught with no formal training.
The actual construction of the line was to be entrusted to four assistants, Joseph Locke, John Dixon and William Allcard, with Daniel Gooch as chief clerk. At the ends of his unpaid apprenticeship, Locke had been offered and accepted a post as Stephenson’s assistant at an increased salary of £100 per annum. Now he was employed directly by the Liverpool & Manchester Company at an altogether more handsome rate of £400, equivalent to around £30,000 at today’s prices. It was a big step forward both in terms of his personal responsibilities and fortune.
Civil engineering offered many challenges, and no one had yet come up with a solution of how to build a line across Chat Moss. But that was not the only unresolved question. There was a serious disagreement over how the railway was to be run. The Stephenson faction had no doubts: the answer lay with steam locomotives. Others favoured a system of cable haulage, in which carriages and trucks would be pulled along between a series of stationary steam engines. It might seem that this was a question that answered itself, but at that time the only locomotives at work were slow, lumbering and generally unreliable to a greater or lesser degree. The railway committee decided to call in two independent experts to examine the alternatives. The men chosen for the job were both distinguished engineers: James Walker had established his reputation in the first place by building lighthouses, while John Urpeth Rastrick was among the select few with experience of railways. The two investigated existing lines and based their decision largely on the economics of the two systems. They concluded that though it would cost more to build and erect stationary engines than it would to supply locomotives, the running costs of the latter would be far higher. They came down, with no great show of enthusiasm, on the side of the cable-haulage system.
Robert Stephenson was recently returned from South America, and he wrote in disgust to Timothy Hackworth, the engineer now responsible for running the Stockton & Darlington, who had also begun manufacturing and designing locomotives:
They have increased the performance of fixed engines beyond what practice will bear, and, I regret to say, that they have deprecated the locomotive engines below what experience has taught us. I will not say whether these results have arisen from prejudice, or want of information or practice in the subject.
The Stephenson camp decided that they needed to produce a report of their own and the task was entrusted to Joseph Locke and Robert Stephenson. The report, Observations on the Comparative Merits of Locomotives and Fixed Engines, set out to refute the arguments in the Walker report. Necessarily much of it is taken up with a detailed examination of costs, since that was the basis of the Walker Rastrick recommendation. It is a lengthy report, but right in the middle is what would seem to be the crucial argument, a review of the problems of working with fixed engines:
Who can look upon 30 miles of Railways, divided into equal stages, with 40 trains of carriages, running at the rate of 12 miles an hour, drawn by 20 different steam engines (a delay in any one of which would stop the whole), without feeling that the liability to derangement alone is sufficient to render the stoppages extremely uncertain? And in considering this long chain of connected power, with the continual crossings of the trains from one line to the other and subject to the government of no fewer than 150 men, whose individual attention is required to preserve the communication between two of the most important towns in the kingdom. We cannot but express our decided conviction that a system which necessarily involves by a single accident, the stoppage of the whole, is totally unsuited to a Public Railway.
It was a well thought-out and well-written document, but it had an unfortunate and unexpected side effect. The two young engineers had done all the work but as it was being got ready for publication, George Stephenson suddenly demanded that it should be put out under his name on the grounds that it was all based on his findings. Robert would have been happy to go along with this, but Locke felt the injustice of the request. He was, it seems, rather more of his father’s man than had first appeared and he stuck firmly to the position that he and Robert must be named as authors. Eventually a compromise was reached and the title page contained the wording ‘Compiled from the reports of George Stephenson.’ The matter had been resolved, but it was the first time that Locke had refused to agree with his old master.
In the event neither side won the argument over which system should be adopted. There remained a feeling that even though the locomotive might be a better alternative, there was still a lingering suspicion that the machine was not yet ready to run a successful railway over such a distance. It was decided to put the matter to the test. Henry Booth, the Company Secretary, put an advert in several newspapers: ‘The Directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway hereby offer a Premium of £500 (over and above the cost price) for a Locomotive Engine, which shall be a decided improvement on any hitherto constructed.’
The rules specified the requirements the entrants had to meet. Weight must not exceed six tons if on six wheels and four and a half tons on four wheels, while boiler pressure was limited to 50 pounds per square inch. A six-wheeled engine had to be capable of hauling a train of carriages, together with the tender of 20 tons at 10 miles per hour: smaller engines having proportionally smaller loads.
Robert Stephenson was now in charge of preparing what was initially known simply as ‘the premium engine’, and it was decided to go for the smaller, four-wheeled version. By the time the closing date for entry into the competition arrived there were five contestants. One, built in Scotland, never made it to the test site and another could scarcely be said to meet the requirements of the competition. It was worked by a horse on a treadmill. The other two were serious competitors. Timothy Hackworth from the Stockton & Darlington built his contender, Sans Pareil at his Soho works at Shildon, Durham. It was a sound, sturdy machine, based very much on existing locomotives, with a return flue boiler, a pair of vertical cylinders and two pairs of coupled drive wheels. A replica of this and the other contesting engines was built for the 150th anniversary of the event and I was fortunate enough to be present when Sans Pareilwas first fired up. It was an impressive and powerful engine, but it represented no form of new thinking.
The same could not be said of the next entrant, Novelty, designed by the team of John Braithwaite and John Ericsson, based not on early locomotives but on Braithwaite’s design for a fire engine. It was very lightweight, with a vertical boiler and two cylinders driving down through a bell crank to a cranked axle; water for the boiler was held in a tank below the platform. It certainly lived up to its name and was the pre-contest favourite. It looked fast and sporty, but George Stephenson took one look and summed it up very differently: no guts.
The premium engine itself soon developed some wholly new features. The most important was suggested to Robert by the railway Company Secretary Henry Booth, who had correctly identified the major fault of earlier locomotives as poor steaming. He suggested that instead of just a return flue in the boiler, there should be a large number of tubes that would carry the hot gases from the firebox that would itself be enclosed by a water jacket. To ensure there was sufficient heat from the fire, the exhaust steam, instead of being simply released into the atmosphere, would be turned up the chimney. This would draw more air through the firebox, increasing the temperature. This device of blast-pipe exhaust was not new: Trevithick had used it many years before. This raises an intriguing possibility.
After his failure to interest anyone in his steam locomotives, Trevithick had accepted an offer to set up his high-pressure engines at a silver mine in Peru. He sent over the machinery and a working party, but when they had difficulties he resolved to go and sort things out himself. He left England in 1816. It was originally intended to be a short visit, but due to a number of different circumstances, including the appropriation of the mine and of the engineer’s promised payment of bullion, by Simon Bolivar’s army, he was to stay for years not months. After many adventures, the engineer had finally arrived at Cartagena in 1827, hoping to make his way home. He had been mining gold in Mexico and, in the hope of finding a route for his bullion to the coast, he had set off on foot and had suffered a series of mishaps and accidents, so that he had arrived virtually penniless. Robert Stephenson also came to Cartagena from his mining experience in South America and the two met. Robert loaned the older engineer the money to pay his fare home. The two must have talked about what had happened in the world of railways and it is tempting to think that Trevithick mentioned his own experiments with exhaust blast.
The third novel feature of the premium engine was the setting of the cylinders, no longer vertical but sloping at an angle of 45°. They supplied the drive via a connecting rod to the front wheels. Once it was completed it was given a name, Rocket. The actual trial was held on the line at Rainhill in October 1829. The locomotives were required to make runs with their loads up and down a length of track, equivalent to the return journey between Liverpool and Manchester. The crowd’s favourite was still Novelty, which looked slick and speedy, but Stephenson’s early judgement proved accurate. It was never able to complete the course. Interestingly, the replica of this engine proved equally unreliable. Sans Pareil suffered from a series of technical problems and had to be withdrawn. The Hackworth camp always claimed that the fault was all due to a cracked cylinder that had been cast at the Stephenson works in Newcastle. There were dark mutterings of espionage but even if the locomotive had completed the course, it would have been unlikely to match Rocket’s performance. That engine sailed through the trials and on the final day achieved not just the ten miles an hour stipulated in the rules but an unprecedented thirty. It was just as well that this was the locomotive that won, for with its new features it represented the way forward. Future steam locomotives would be developed from this prototype. Robert Stephenson himself would at once begin developing locomotives designed not just to pass the requirements of a trial but to run a main-line service. They would evolve to become the efficient Planet Class. Meanwhile work was proceeding on building the line.
Locke must have been delighted with his new responsible position in this great undertaking, which involved him working on many different parts of the line. He was involved in the construction of the immense Broad Green embankment, which, on his own calculations, involved the removal of 600,000 cubic yards of material. There were other major obstacles to be overcome, not least the crossing of Chat Moss. He was initially put in charge of the work on this part of the line. a start was made by digging drainage ditches, but as fast as they were dug, the black, slimy mud oozed back in again. working on the site was difficult, local farmers crossed the Moss by fastening planks to their feet to spread the load. However, before the work could be completed, Locke was sent to look after the work at the Liverpool end. John Dixon, another trusted Stephenson man, was brought down from darlington. He did not make the ideal start. Plank walkways were laid, dixon slipped off early in his period on site and began disappearing into the bog and had to be hauled out by the navvies. Stephenson noted that the tough, coarse plants that spread over the surface of the morass seemed like miniature rafts. He reasoned that if he did build a raft, eventually an equilibrium point would be reached, when it would be stable. He piled on brushwood and heather and loaded his rafts with spoil, but the material kept on sinking out of sight. As Stephenson himself noted, even Locke and dixon began to doubt the scheme would work. But eventually the bank remained above the surface and by New Year’s Day 1830 a single track could be laid and Chat Moss had been conquered.
Meanwhile, there were troubles with tunnelling at the Liverpool end. There were to be two tunnels from Edgehill: one to the docks, the Wapping tunnel, and the other to Crown Street station: it was the former that had been surveyed by Charles Vignoles. The first shaft was sunk in September 1826 and, two months later, Stephenson informed the directors that there was a serious misalignment in the headings and found it convenient to blame Vignoles. Stephenson was perhaps fortunate, in that in his earlier dealings, when assistants had been found to make serious errors, he as the Chief Engineer had been forced to shoulder the blame. This time he achieved exactly what he wanted: Vignoles went and Joseph Locke took charge. In later evidence to the Brighton line Parliamentary Committee, he gave details of the tunnelling. The tunnel was a mile and a quarter long, 16ft high and 22ft wide, driven through a mixture of sandstone, blue shale, rock clay and newly formed earth. Locke wrote to Robert Stephenson on 28 February 1827, reporting on progress and telling him that his father’s reputation was held in high esteem:
On the Tunnel we are going very well, and I hope very correctly – at least I spare neither pains in watching every part of it. I assure you I have had a busy time of it since I came here – and that present prospect is even more busy…I have strove to assist and advance the interest of your father which in return has advanced mine and has ever placed that confidence in me of which I am proud…I know not how the manufacture goes on at Newcastle, I fear not so briskly as has done – I believe Mr. Longbridge wishes to decline the Engine business until your return. Thos Nicholson has left and is now at college in Edinburgh???… I understand the Darlington railway is doing very well, and gives great satisfaction; they are just contracted for another Locomotive Engine. I have recently been joined in my labours by your friend J. Dixon, who has taken the Manchester end of the line.
Things were indeed going well with Locke and he must have felt settled in to his very prestigious work as Resident Engineer for the Liverpool end of the railway, but a disagreement broke out between the railway committee and Stephenson. The engineer had more than one project on the go and regarded Joseph as his personal assistant who could be sent to wherever he was needed. The committee, not unreasonably, felt that as they were paying a handsome salary to the young man they should have exclusive use of his services. Things came to a head when Stephenson directed Locke to go and attend to matters on the line under construction between Manchester and Stockport. Stephenson insisted that Locke’s presence on that line was crucial and that the interests of the Liverpool & Manchester would not suffer in his absence. The directors disagreed, and neither side was prepared to compromise. It left Locke in a most uncomfortable position. He had huge respect for George Stephenson who had been his mentor, as the letter quoted above makes clear, and had no wish to antagonise him. On the other hand, the job of assistant on the Liverpool & Manchester was both well paid and highly prestigious. In the event, he felt he had only one option: he resigned and left for the Stockport line. There really was no choice: he could hardly have opted to stay on and opposed Stephenson, who was not a man to take disloyalty lightly. It was not, however, to be the end of his involvement with the
line.
After he had left the Liverpool & Manchester, he was called back by the directors and asked to look at the other tunnel under construction to what would eventually become the main Liverpool passenger station at Lime Street. There had been alarming reports of inaccuracies. Locke was forced to report that there were, indeed, serious inaccuracies. According to his biographer Joseph Devey, ‘several portions of the tunnel would never have formed a straight line; and, in one instance, two parts of the tunnel, instead of meeting, would have given each other the go-by altogether.’ He showed his report first to his successor, overlooking the works, who agreed it was a fair assessment, and it was duly passed on to the Board. Devey excused the errors, on the grounds that ‘the accurate use of delicate instruments, such as spirit-levels, theodolites, and miners’ compasses, is not intuitively understood by any, and only mastered by a few.’ The argument hardly stands up to scrutiny, given the huge advances made over the previous half-century or more on constructing canal tunnels. There is no doubt that the report would have been a huge embarrassment to Stephenson, while writing it and, in effect, criticising work for which his old mentor was responsible, must have been no less uncomfortable for Locke. Fortunately it was possible to rectify the mistakes in the tunnel survey and the line moved steadily towards completion. One of the men engaged in constructing the tunnel was the contractor William Mackenzie. Railway work was as new to him as to most engineers and contractors at that time, but he showed remarkable enthusiasm for the job. His enthusiasm was not always shared by an unwilling companion, the young engineer David Stevenson:
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