Page:Inland Transit - Cundy - 1834.djvu/75

 engines; and improvements which extend to every part of their operation, as well as the consumption of fuel, the wear and tear of materials, the cost of manufacture, &c. The expenses of the Company have hitherto been also increased by the circumstance of the engines being started with loads inferior to their power. This disadvantage has been lately, in a certain degree, remedied, by their combining loads of passengers and goods, in each cargo.

The name of a high-pressure engine was long in this country a bugbear, and a sound connected with some undefined and unintelligible notion of danger. It would be very easy to show that the causes which produce the explosion of boilers are not confined in their operation to high pressure engines; that they depend upon circumstances altogether unconnected with the temperature or pressure at which the steam is raised; and, consequently, that such accidents when they do occur, which is very rarely, are as likely to happen in the one class of engines as the other. But the best and most intelligible proof which can be given of the groundlessness of this apprehension, is the fact, that for a period of nearly three years, during which travelling and traffic have continued on the railway, and numerous high-pressure engines have been constantly at work upon it, no accident has ever yet occurred from explosion or from any cause depending on the pressure of the steam. Boilers have burst, it is true; but in bursting they have been attended with no other effect than that of extinguishing the fire, and suspending the journey. Two or three accidents to passengers have occurred, but in every case they have been produced by the want of the most ordinary care on the part of the sufferer, and in only one instance have