Page:Inland Transit - Cundy - 1834.djvu/28

 Enterprise, capital, and skill have, of late years, been directed with extraordinary energy to the improvement of inland transport, and this important instrument of national wealth and civilisation has received a proportionate impulse. Effects are now witnessed, which, had they been narrated a few years since, could only have been admitted into the pages of fiction, or volumes of romance. Who could have credited the possibility of a ponderous engine of iron, loaded with several hundred passengers and goods, in a train of carriages of corresponding magnitude, and a large quantity of water and coal, taking flight from Manchester, and arriving at Liverpool, a distance of above thirty miles, in little more than an hour? And yet this is a matter of daily and almost hourly occurrence. Neither is the road on which this wondrous performance is effected the most favourable which could be constructed for such machines. It is subject to undulations and incurvations, which reduce the average rate of speed much more than similar inequalities affect the average rate on common roads. The speed of transport thus attained, is not less wonderful than the weights which this power is capable of transporting. Its capabilities in this respect far transcend the exigencies even of the two greatest commercial marts in Great Britain. Loads, varying from fifty to seventy tons, are transported at the average rate of fifteen miles an hour; but the engines would appear to be in this case loaded below their power; and in a recent instance, a load—I should rather say a cargo—of waggons, conveying merchandise to the amount of 230 tons gross, transported from Liverpool to Manchester, at the average rate of twelve miles an hour.

The astonishment with which such performances