Joseph Locke

• 1. Introduction

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  Joseph Locke drove the locomotive "Rocket" on the day a man died beneath its wheels. The 9th of August 1805 marked his birth in Attercliffe, Sheffield, and by the time he climbed into that engine cab for the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, he was still only in his mid-twenties. The man killed that day was William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, struck down in front of an astonished crowd. It was a grim baptism for the railway age, and Locke was at its center.

  Locke would go on to rank alongside Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel as one of the three great pioneers of nineteenth-century railway construction. Yet he is far less celebrated than either of them today. How did a Yorkshire miner's son rise to design railways across Britain and Europe? What made his methods so different from those of his famous contemporaries? And why did he build railways without tunnels when everyone else assumed tunnels were unavoidable? Those questions run through the full arc of his life.

• 2. A Miner's Apprenticeship

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  By the age of seventeen, Locke had already completed two separate apprenticeships. The first was under William Stobart at Pelaw, on the south bank of the Tyne. The second was under his own father, William Locke, who had managed Wallbottle colliery on Tyneside at the same time that George Stephenson worked there as a fireman.

  That connection mattered enormously. In 1823, when George Stephenson was involved in planning the Stockton and Darlington Railway, he and his son Robert traveled to Barnsley to visit the Lockes. The visit ended with an arrangement for young Joseph to join the Stephenson operation. The Stephensons had just established a locomotive works near Forth Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, and Locke, despite his youth, quickly made himself indispensable. He and Robert Stephenson became close friends. That friendship was interrupted in 1824, when Robert left to work in Colombia for three years, but the bond between them would shape and complicate the rest of Locke's career.

• 3. The Falling Out with Stephenson

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  George Stephenson's original survey of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was found to be flawed. A gifted young engineer named Charles Vignoles re-surveyed the line, and the railway directors then asked Locke to examine the proposed tunnel works and write a report. The report was bluntly critical of the work already done, and it reflected badly on Stephenson.

  Stephenson was furious. Relations between the two men turned strained, though Locke kept his job because Stephenson recognized his value. When the bill for the line passed in 1826, Stephenson was appointed chief engineer and made Locke his assistant, alongside Vignoles. A clash of personalities between Stephenson and Vignoles drove Vignoles to resign, leaving Locke as sole assistant. He took responsibility for the western half of the line. One of the major obstacles on that section was Chat Moss, a large bog. Stephenson usually receives credit for the crossing, but the source of the correct method is believed to have been Locke.

  In March 1829, Locke and Robert Stephenson co-wrote a report demonstrating that locomotives were vastly superior to standing engines on a busy railway. That report led the directors to hold an open trial, the Rainhill Trials of October 1829, won by "Rocket".

• 4. The Grand Junction and the Rise

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  The Grand Junction Railway was an 80-mile line planned to link Newton-le-Willows on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway north through Warrington and then south to Birmingham via Crewe, Stafford, and Wolverhampton. In 1829, while still Stephenson's assistant, Locke was given the job of surveying the route.

  Locke is credited with choosing the location for Crewe itself, and with recommending that repair and construction shops for carriages, wagons, and engines be established there. When construction began, the directors split the line between the two engineers, assigning Locke the northern half and Stephenson the southern. Locke estimated his section's costs so meticulously and quickly that every contract for his half was signed before a single contract had been signed for Stephenson's half.

  The company eventually lost patience with Stephenson and proposed making both men joint engineers. Stephenson's pride would not permit it, and he resigned. By autumn 1835, Locke was chief engineer for the entire line. The Grand Junction opened on the 4th of July 1837. The cost came in at £18,846 per mile against Locke's estimate of £17,000, a margin that impressed contemporaries as remarkably close.

• 5. Up and Over

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  The Dutton Viaduct, which carries the Grand Junction line across the River Weaver and the Weaver Navigation between Dutton and Acton Bridge in Cheshire, offered a preview of Locke's engineering philosophy. Its 20 arches each span 20 yards. Locke preferred masonry bridges, avoided tunnels wherever he could, and tried to keep his routes as direct as possible.

  On the Grand Junction, Locke inherited a tender of £26,000 for the Penkridge Viaduct that Stephenson had accepted. After Locke took over, he provided better information to the contractor and agreed a price of £6,000. The Stephensons believed that a slope of 1 in 330 was the steepest a locomotive could manage. Robert Stephenson achieved that limit on the London and Birmingham Railway by driving seven tunnels through hills, adding both cost and delay. Locke exceeded the slope limit for six miles south of Crewe and avoided tunnels almost entirely.

  The principle became most visible on the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway. In 1839, George Stephenson proposed a route that swung all the way round Morecambe Bay and West Cumberland to avoid the Lake District mountains, claiming that a railway across Shap Fell was out of the question. The directors rejected that route and chose Locke's proposal, one that climbed steeply over Shap Fell. The line succeeded. The approach became known as the "up and over" school of engineering, referred to by the writer Rolt as "Up and Down" or Rollercoaster. Locke applied the same logic to the Caledonian Railway from Carlisle to Glasgow, introducing gradients of 1 in 75 in both lines. Even today, Shap Fell tests locomotives severely.

• 6. Death on the Woodhead

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  The Manchester and Sheffield Railway required a three-mile tunnel through the Pennines at Woodhead. Locke joined the project after replacing Charles Vignoles, who had been overtaken by misfortunes and financial difficulties. George Stephenson declared that the Woodhead Tunnel could not be built, reportedly saying he would eat the first locomotive that passed through it.

  More than a thousand navvies worked to prove him wrong. Thirty-two of them died in the building of the tunnel, and another 140 were seriously injured. The line opened on the 23rd of December 1845, after many delays. The Woodhead Tunnel stood as one of the most demanding single undertakings in the railway age, and its human cost was not forgotten.

• 7. Railways Across Europe

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  Locke's commissions extended well beyond Britain. Working with John Milroy, he was actively involved in building railways in Europe, including the Le Havre-Rouen-Paris rail link, the Barcelona to Mataró line, and the Dutch Rhenish Railway. He was present in Paris in 1842 when the Versailles train crash occurred, and he provided a statement on the facts for General Charles Pasley of the Railway Inspectorate.

  His work on the Paris-Le Havre link produced one of the most dramatic failures of his career. The Barentin Viaduct near Rouen was the longest and highest structure on the line: 108 feet tall, 27 arches each 50 feet wide, with a total length of over 1,600 feet. Early one morning, at around six o'clock, a boy hauling ballast on an adjoining hillside watched the fifth arch on the Rouen side collapse. The rest followed. Several workmen in a mill below were injured, but no one was killed. Locke attributed the collapse to frost acting on new lime cement and to premature off-centre loading of the viaduct with ballast. Thomas Brassey bore the cost of rebuilding it, and the rebuilt structure survives to the present. Locke also helped establish the first locomotive works in France.

• 8. Legacy

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  Locke served as President of the Institution of Civil Engineers between December 1857 and December 1859. He also held a seat in Parliament as the Member for Honiton in Devon from 1847 until his death. He had married Phoebe McCreery in 1834, and the couple adopted a child. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1838.

  When Robert Stephenson died in October 1859, Locke was a pallbearer at his funeral. He is reported to have called Robert "the friend of my youth, the companion of my ripening years, and a competitor in the race of life." Less than a year later, on the 18th of September 1860, Locke died apparently from appendicitis while on a shooting holiday. He was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. Rolt observed that Locke, Stephenson, and Brunel all died between the ages of 53 and 56, a fact Rolt attributed to sheer overwork.

  Locke's widow Phoebe dedicated Locke Park in Barnsley to his memory in 1862. It features a statue of him and a folly called Locke Tower. His greatest material legacy is the modern West Coast Main Line, around three-quarters of which follows routes that Locke planned and engineered, formed by joining the Caledonian, Lancaster and Carlisle, and Grand Junction railways to Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham Railway.