"BREATHLESS SPEED"

Evening Post, Volume CXXI, Issue 35, 11 February 1936, Page 16

"BREATHLESS SPEED"

EARLY-DAY TRAINS

ROYAL PASSENGERS

Locomotives had been used in mines from 1802 onwards. In 1814 John Rennie, watching one drawing a ■ weight of twenty tons at the rate of seven miles an hour, said to himself: "Something more will come out of this hereafter," and a year later James, a land agent and surveyor, made the audacious suggestion in a letter to the Prince Regent that locomotives could be used for the conveyance of passengers, writes Mona Wilson in her recent book. For years to come the proposal seemed preposterous to-the general public. "How," it was asked, "would the carriages ever get up hill? How would they ever be able to stop, when going down hill? What would happen if a cow were to come in the way?" It was absurd to suppose that passengers could be carried with any degree of comfort or safety. . . . By 1828 the line between Manchester and Liverpool was sufficiently advanced to make • the choice of locomotives a practical question. A competition, took place at Rainhill, when a speed of eight to ten miles an hour was expected by the makers, but the prodigies performed by the* engines took even their breath away—twentyeight to twenty-nine miles an hour! George Stephenson's "Rocket" was proclaimed winner, and he gave Fanny Kemble a thrilling trip on it. ... PRINCE ALARMED. Lady Hastings complained that a 1 proposed line would be visible from her, windows. One noble lord asked a railway witness what possible difference it could make whether a journey took one hour or eleven. Prince Albert himself was alarmed by the speed at first, sometim.es saying when he alighted: "Not quite so. fast next time, Mr. Conductor, if you please." Queen Adelaide seems to have been the most sporting member of the Royal Family: she was a frequent passenger, and in 1842 did seventy-eight miles from Southampton to Vauxhall in 1 hour 59 minutes. It was not till 1842 that Queen Victoria made her first journey from Windsor to London "in half an hour, free from dust and crowd and heat and I am quite charmed with it." ... In their experimental stage railways were uncomfortable and none too safe. Passengers themselves were reckless in boarding a train when it was going at full speed, or jumping off to pick up their hats, or sitting, contrary to regulations, on the tops of the carriages. An important personage who missed his train would chase it in a special. . . . The guards sat on the outside of the carriages, che\ head guard on the last carriage facing forwards, and the under-guard on the front carriage looking backwards in order to make surs that the train was following, a necessary precaution as it was apt to break loose and get left behind. As the passengers suffered from the same tendency the guards checked them from 3 "way-bill" on which their places of departure and proposed arrival were filled in by the "station clerks."