Page:Report from the Select Committee on Steam Carriages.pdf/201



Mr. J. McAdam. 25 August, 1831. practically carried in Waggons, or such like Carriages, with wheels as described.

You do not mean that the Committee should infer weight is of no consequence, but that the power of the horse will be your guard against an overweight being drawn?—Yes; the toll being laid per horse. I consider that the penalty in the shape of toll per horse, more than compensates for the injury done by the weight. Before those regulations took place, the roads in truth sustained an equal pressure, from the well known fact that the weighing Engines were universally compounded for by all the carriers, and that the roads, after these regulations, had no greater but even less weights to sustain than before that took place, and it was observing that fact, which induced the Commissioners of the Metropolis Roads to do away with all the Weighing Engines.

Do you know whether the Holyhead Road Commissioners are trying to do away with the necessity of Weighing Engines?—Upon the Trusts, on that line of which I am Surveyor, the Trustees have done away with all the Weighing Engines, and the happy result of compelling the Waggons to set out and arrive upon the Metropolis Roads with properly constructed wheels, has had the effect of enabling the Trustees upon all the roads within a circle of fifty to eighty miles, to dispense with the Weighing Engines; also, because if the Waggons set out and arrive in the Metropolis District with a properly constructed wheel; it was not worth their while to alter it, but to travel throughout to Cambridge. Newmarket, &c, with the same wheel; and the benefit of the metropolis wheel has extended itself in consequence.

Then supposing a broad wheel waggon with dished wheels was to pass through your turnpike, what rate would be charged?—It would be charged the highest rate of a narrow-wheeled Waggon.

Have you heard any complaints from the Waggon masters of the regulation of the form of the wheel? On the contrary, a few days since we had a Petition most numerously signed by the Waggon masters from Norwich. Cambridge. Newmarket, &c., requesting