Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Railway Builders: A Chronicle of Overland Highways
What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous, ' the Quarterly Review had declared in 1825, than the prospect held out of loco motives travelling twice as fast as stage coaches! We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate.' And the Quarterly was not alone in its scepticism. The directors of the new railway had found great difficulty in obtaining a Charter from parliament - a difficulty registered in a bill for parliamentary costs reaching or over $4000 a mile. Canal proprietors and toll-road companies had declaimed against the attack on vested rights. Country squires had spluttered over the damage to fox covers. Horses could not plough in neighbouring fields.
Widows' strawberry-beds would be ruined. What would become of coachmen and coach builders and horse-dealers? Or suppose a cow were to stray upon the line; would not that be a very awkward circumstance?' queried a committee member, only to give Stephenson an opening for the classic reply in his slow Northumbrian speech Ay, verra awkward for the coo.' And not only would the locomotive as it shot along do such varied damage; in truth, it would not go at all; the wheels, declared eminent experts, would not grip on the smooth rails, or else the engines would prove top-heavy.
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