THE "DEAN" OF LOCOMOTIVE DRIVERS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 10571, 18 January 1896, Page 3

THE "DEAN" OF LOCOMOTIVE DRIVERS.

(Daily Telegraph, November 22.)

, Railway engine** throughout tho oonntry should have Btewned along thair, lines laat Monday with their funnels swathed in crape, »a a mark of mourning for the death of William Oraggo, who had passed away the day before. For Craggs Kid unchallenged oUim to be the "doan" of enginedrivers, the oldest practitioner of that art, and initiate of that mystery in the world, Though his age was nothing extraordinary—he died at 75—his term of service to the community was coeval with that of the might; locomotive force which he controlled. Steam transport and William Craggs made, in fact, their public appearance at the samo time. He had been 60 yeara on tbe railways, and 55 of those years ago he drove No. 1, the first locomotive on the fiVst English railway, which is to say, the first railway erer laid down on thio now intricately irounokted planet. If Stepheukon's "coo," the animal whose probable opposition to the movement weighed so hsavily on the mind of the Parliamentary Committee man, had made her appeaninctj, the.painfal duty of proving that it would be "so much the worse for the coo" would have devolved 'upou William Oraggs. The peaoeful triumph of soienoe was mirrod by lib such tragedy, and the drivar of No. 1 lived to appear ou tha sanw voaerable locomotive at tha railway jubilee of 1875. It is a long way from Stwphooaon'a "Puffing Billy" to those magnitlcsn!; Tituun ol the present day, beside which it iooked atmoat pathetically we«k and rude, but the ancient obarioteer who had just sorted on Uis last journey had travelled over it ail. He haa " nac by the cradle" of steam locomotion; and who knows but what, if be had lived a little longer in a world which is baiug fa»t conquered by electricity, he might h*ve been able to " follow its hoarse." Aa it ia, tho first engioediiver h&« gone to join the last'sta«e coachman in the Eljrsian fluids vrfthout having to nvike the humiliating confession that he, the aupplautcr, has been himself supplanted.

After all, however, he would only have had in that case to " own up " to a material defeat. No meru supersession of one mecbunic&l motor by another can ever compare in importance with the firot successful application of a gie*t natural force to the purposes of locomotion. If electricity were to take, the place of steam power, what would happen ? We sh.ould travel and despatch our goods from place to place, no duub", in » smoother and cleaner fashion, presumnbly at a cheaper rate, and possibly at a srea-ter" spaed. But the process) of human intercommunication, though is might thereby, for aught we know, be made iutioitoly more agreeable" would only in a much less considerable degree be rendered rooje fftrctiva. It would be i>.n enlargement of existing human capacities, not the creation of new onts. More people might take railway journeys, or the same people miijht take them more often ; a larger quantity of ths earth's products and of tbe commodities of trad* might postiibly reach the market from tbe proouser and the distributor ; persons and places would ba brought into more frequent communication with eacn other. The miracle wrought by steam, however, was to create the mean's of communication where, until then, tboy had never existed or been conceivable, and where, but for teat miracle, they could never have come into existence at all. All the powers of animated nature had been exerted to their uttermost; and tbe combined efforts of tho.'e secular collaborator, mm and horse, had already dem'j all that was possible to tbem to overcome the estranging influence of distance. Bat spuca and time wure too strong for un until steam CMme to our aid. A thousEiud generations of men had ariien and fl.uiisbod, and, "like the leaves," had passed aw>vy, unknown to each C.ber save by hearsay, and as iuaipable of meeting as though thfsy v/ere inhabitants of different p|p.Bet3. At the word of tiiis magician, and at the response of his summoned "gonie of the lamp," they beoanie bo m*ny Alac'dins o? Ba.st.oru fable. Distance dwindled, space was abolished, the bWrrie-s, hitherto impassable, by which earth had divided her children from one another, were overthrown in a moment by water, heat, aud tha nud*cious cumiing of man.

Thnt was a revolution which happened onca for sll in human history, and never can repeat ititelf. To move taster, to raset oftenar, to buy more and sell more, to stretch longer arms scroßS continents and spread wider (iugera among separated cities—all this, of course, is still poiifible to us. Yet iS is as nothing to what hai beea done already. '.Che difference between life and death, between movement and inertia, between contact and severance, between the possible -and the impossible, is not a diffsrenca in degree; it is a transformation in kind. And this is what was effected when steam power was first applied to purpose* of locomotion. It changed the entire aspect of mundane relations between man and man as completely as it altered the surface of the map. The bewildering network of lines with which the modern cartographer has to trellis every country of Western Europe, and our own most thickly of them-all, no mote than aptly symbolises the infinitely increased complexity of modern life. They are not only the signs and traces of that immense development of commerce which steam transport by land sea has brought with it—that pheaomeuon so abiurdly overlooked by the Manchester school in attributing the increase of our wealth exclusively to l'reetrad« legislation—but they mark the complicated reticilabion of human interosts, morsl as well as ojufeerial, which commerce never fails to briug about All thin han beea effected by the silent bat sleepless agency of that force which the old engiuedriver hail the first commission to set upon its wonderworking frisk. That mi;<hty multitude of steam eugiuee by which the world ban been overrun sinca theu were all potentially behind him on that day. Behind them, again, there may be new and unknown battalions of nature, waiting their orders to advance. But they will ouly ba reinforcements—fresh, and it may be more powerful, legions of thu same army. It is more than hilf a «eatury since it first took tha field, and whatever host ma> hereafter reinforce, nothing can now deprive William Craggs of the honour of having ridden at itj head.