Page:The Working and Management of an English Railway.djvu/19

 every large business, often from circumstances that no foresight could control.

Such are a few of the advantages which have resulted to the community from the invention of railways, but the list might be multiplied indefinitely.

The first dawn of the idea of a railway was, no doubt, about the beginning of the seventeenth century, when some inventive genius hit upon the plan of laying down parallel blocks of timber to form tram-roads in the vicinity of mines, to enable the mineral products to be drawn more easily by horses to the riverside. More than a hundred years later (about the year 1768), as we are told by Mr. Francis in his admirable "History of the English Railway," cast-iron rails were substituted for the wooden blocks, and this was a distinct step in advance. By the commencement of the nineteenth century, the application of steam as a motive power was no longer unknown, for it had been applied to the working of stationary engines in mines and elsewhere, and, in fact, as early as 1804, a machine had been constructed at a Welsh ironworks, which moved upon rails, drawing after it a load of ten tons of bar iron, and which was, to all intents and purposes, a locomotive engine. The construction of the Stockton and Darlington Railway followed in 1821, but the first railway made with public money, and for the public benefit, and which marks the birth of the railway system as we know it to-day, was the Liverpool and Manchester. The conflict which was sustained by the promoters of that undertaking with the forces of ignorance and prejudice was really the decisive one, and when the struggle was over and the battle had been won, the floodgates of enterprise