Liverpool and Manchester Railway

• 1. Introduction

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  The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened on the 15th of September 1830, and almost immediately someone died. William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, stepped off the opening day train at Parkside to greet the Duke of Wellington. The locomotive Rocket was bearing down on him from the opposite direction. Huskisson panicked, grabbed an open carriage door, lost his grip, and fell between the tracks. His last reported words were: "I have met my death - God forgive me!" He became the world's first widely reported railway passenger fatality.

  Yet for all the drama of that opening day, the railway he helped christen changed the world in ways that reach far beyond that single afternoon near Newton-le-Willows. It was the first inter-city railway on earth. The first to rely exclusively on steam power. The first to run on double track for its entire length. The first with a true signalling system. The first to carry mail. And it was built across a bog that engineers said could never be crossed.

  How did a dispute between merchants, canal companies, and two Lancashire earls produce a machine that, in the words of one American engineer, opened the epoch of railways which revolutionised the social and commercial intercourse of the civilized world?

• 2. Canals, Corn, and Cotton

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  Joseph Sandars, a rich Liverpool corn merchant, and John Kennedy, owner of the largest spinning mill in Manchester, are usually credited as the original promoters of the railway. Their grievance was not abstract. During the Industrial Revolution, raw materials flowed into Liverpool from around the world and were hauled inland to the textile mills clustered near the Pennines. The finished cloth then made the reverse journey, back to Liverpool for export.

  The waterways that carried this traffic - the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, the Bridgewater Canal, and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal - dated from the 18th century. Merchants felt they were extracting excessive profits from the cotton trade and throttling the growth of Manchester and surrounding towns. Road conditions offered no relief. The turnpike between the two cities was described at the time as "crooked and rough" with an "infamous" surface. Waggons and coaches regularly overturned.

  The man who connected these frustrations to a solution was William James, a land surveyor who had made a fortune in property speculation. James advocated a national network of railways, inspired by what he had seen of colliery lines and locomotive technology in the north of England. He carried out the first survey for a Liverpool-to-Manchester line in 1822. His influence planted the seed, but his personal story took a darker turn: he subsequently declared bankruptcy and was imprisoned that November, leaving the project without its original champion.

• 3. Politics of the Route

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  The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company was founded on the 20th of May 1824. Henry Booth served as its secretary and treasurer. Charles Lawrence was Chairman, with Lister Ellis, Robert Gladstone, John Moss, and Joseph Sandars as Deputy Chairmen. Share ownership was deliberately broad: in Liverpool, 172 people bought 1,979 shares; in London, 96 people took 844; in Manchester, just 15 investors held 124 shares. The Marquess of Stafford alone held 1,000 shares.

  The company's first bill went to Parliament in 1825, but the survey underpinning it was George Stephenson's work - and under cross-examination by opposing counsel Edward Hall Alderson, Stephenson could not specify the levels of the track or explain how he had calculated the cost of major structures like the Irwell Viaduct. The bill was thrown out on the 31st of May. The engineer Francis Giles argued publicly that running the line through Chat Moss was a serious error and that the true cost would be around £200,000, not the £40,000 Stephenson had quoted.

  For the second attempt, the promoters appointed George and John Rennie as engineers, who selected Charles Blacker Vignoles as their surveyor. They found a diplomatic path through the political opposition: their counsel, W. G. Adam, happened to be related to a trustee of the Marquess of Stafford's estate. The Marquess shifted from implacable opponent to financial supporter. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway Act 1826 received royal assent on the 5th of May 1826, routing the line south of Stephenson's original alignment to avoid properties owned by earlier opponents.

• 4. Building Across the Moss

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  Chat Moss was a problem no one fully understood. The bog sits between the two cities, and the first contracts for draining it were let in June 1826. Draining proved impossible. The engineers turned instead to a design by Robert Stannard, steward for William Roscoe: wrought iron rails supported by timber in a herringbone layout, floating the track atop the saturated ground. About 70,000 cubic feet of spoil was dropped into the bog during construction. At one spot called Blackpool Hole, a contractor tipped soil into the bog for three months without ever finding the bottom. The line was supported across drainage ditches by empty tar barrels sealed with clay and laid end to end.

  The rest of the 31-mile line presented its own scale of challenge. Beneath Liverpool ran the Wapping Tunnel, 2,250 yards long - the world's first tunnel bored under a metropolis. Beyond it, a cutting up to 70 feet deep through rock at Olive Mount, and a nine-arch viaduct over the Sankey Brook valley, each arch spanning 50 feet and rising around 60 feet high. The railway needed 64 bridges and viaducts in total, all built of brick or masonry except one: the Water Street bridge at the Manchester terminus, where a cast iron beam girder bridge was designed by William Fairbairn and Eaton Hodgkinson and cast locally at their factory in Ancoats. Cast iron girders went on to become a fundamental structural material for the expanding rail network - though flawed versions contributed to the Dee bridge disaster of 1847 and, eventually, the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879.

  All the physical work was carried out by navvies using hand tools. The most productive teams could move up to 20,000 tonnes of earth in a single day. The work was dangerous, and several deaths were recorded. The railway over Chat Moss was completed by the end of 1829. On the 28th of December that year, the Rocket crossed the Moss carrying 40 passengers in 17 minutes, averaging 17 miles per hour.

• 5. The Rainhill Question

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  By 1829, the company had not yet committed to steam. Adhesion-worked locomotives were considered unreliable. A section of the Hetton colliery railway had been converted to cable haulage, and the engineer John Rastrick supported that approach for the new line. George Stephenson himself was not hostile to cable haulage - he continued to build such systems where he thought them appropriate - but he knew its fatal weakness: a breakdown anywhere on a cable-worked line would bring the whole system to a standstill.

  The line's gradient had been engineered to concentrate steep sections in just a few places, with the slopes at either side of Rainhill running at 1-in-96. The rest of the line was graded no steeper than 1-in-880. To settle the locomotive question, the directors organised a public competition in October 1829, known as the Rainhill Trials, run over a one-mile stretch of track. Ten locomotives were entered. On the day itself, only five were available to compete. The Rocket, designed by George Stephenson and his son Robert, was the only one to successfully complete the course. Robert Stephenson and Company were awarded the locomotive contract.

  When the line opened, cable haulage was still used on the passenger section from Edge Hill to Crown Street railway station and through the Wapping Tunnel - the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Act 1826 specifically forbade locomotives on that stretch. The rest of the line ran on steam.

• 6. Signals and Policemen

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  Managing trains on a busy double-track line required rules that had never existed before. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway solved this by stationing policemen along the route at intervals of a mile or less. In the beginning, a policeman standing straight with arms outstretched meant the line was clear. If the policeman was absent or standing at ease, a driver knew there was an obstruction ahead.

  Over time, hand-held flags replaced gestures. A red flag stopped a train; green meant proceed at caution; blue told baggage train drivers that new wagons were waiting; a black flag warned of track workers ahead. Any flag waved violently - or at night a lamp swung up and down - meant stop immediately. Trains were managed on a time-interval basis: a policeman would hold a train if less than ten minutes had passed since the previous one went through, give a caution signal if between ten and seventeen minutes had elapsed, and show a clear only beyond seventeen minutes. In fog, handbells served as emergency signals until 1844, when small explosive charges placed on the rails replaced them.

  At Newton Junction, where the Warrington and Newton Railway joined the line, four policemen were kept on constant duty because the converging tracks made the junction particularly hazardous. A gilt arrow initially pointed toward Warrington to show which way the points were set, supplemented at night by a green lamp. Later came fixed signals: red and white chequered boards mounted on 12-foot high posts. In 1837, the London and Birmingham Railway began trials of a Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph for signalling; in 1841 it proposed a uniform national colour system. Despite these developments elsewhere, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway kept its policemen and flags until it merged with the Grand Junction Railway in 1845.

• 7. What Came After

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  The railway paid investors an average annual dividend of 9.5% across the 15 years of its independent existence - a level of profitability no British railway company would match again. Most stage coach companies operating between Liverpool and Manchester closed within weeks of the line opening, unable to compete on price or journey time. Within a few weeks the railway was running excursion trains and carrying the world's first railway mail carriages; by the summer of 1831 it was transporting passengers to the races.

  At first trains ran at 16 miles per hour with passengers and 8 miles per hour with goods, limited by the lightweight track. Drivers who went faster were reprimanded: excessive speed forced apart the fish-belly rails set onto individual stone blocks without cross-ties. In 1837, the original 50-pound-per-yard parallel rail on sleepers began to be replaced. The railway directors decided in 1831 that Crown Street was too remote from the centre of Liverpool and began planning a new terminus at Lime Street. That tunnel opened in January 1835 and the station itself on the 15th of August 1836. An extension from Ordsall Lane to a new Manchester station at Hunts Bank, also serving the Manchester and Leeds Railway, opened on the 4th of May 1844.

  On the 8th of August 1845, the company was absorbed by the Grand Junction Railway, which had itself opened the first trunk railway from Birmingham to Warrington in 1837. John B. Jervis of the Delaware and Hudson Railway later wrote that the Liverpool and Manchester Railway must be regarded as opening the epoch of railways. The track gauge it adopted - 4 feet 8 inches between the rails, settled at a board meeting in July 1826 following a recommendation by George Stephenson - became the standard gauge now used across much of the world. The original route between the two cities still carries passengers today, and the line's electrification at 25 kV AC, completed through to Liverpool on the 5th of March 2015, ensures that Stephenson's corridor remains in active use nearly two centuries after it was first carved through Chat Moss.