From Natchez to Mobile
From Memphis to St. Joe
Wherever the four winds blow...
Old clickety clack is echoing back
the blues in the night
The railways are so deeply grooved in our collective conscious. Motion, movement, the elation and sadness of adventure and dislocation. But, in the beginning, the railways sang to us of speed -- raw, hurtling, thundering speed. And here rises a syndrome that dogs us down through the speed-obsessed nineteenth century. Many accounts of Trevithik's Catch-me-who-can claim that it ran, not twelve miles-an-hour, but twenty. Those claims obviously reflect the hope that it could've gone even faster.
Now, as developers began promoting and building rail systems, they exposed all kinds of new questions. Try this one: Will friction alone provide enough traction between iron wheels and rails? For a while, some builders felt they needed to use rack and pinion arrangements -- a toothed wheel engaging a toothed rail. But don't laugh; you can find rack and pinion systems in use today, on very steep rails -- the Mount Washington Cog Railway, for example.
Loose-fitting gears were ill suited for speed, but it took a real act of faith in iron-to-iron friction to abandon them. Companies also had to be assured that it made sense to use a traveling engine. Maybe rail service was best served by a fixed engine driving towropes.
Detail of the rack-and-pinion drive still in use in New Hampshire, on the Mt. Washington cog railway today. (from the Mt. Washington museum; photo by JHL)
Then one engine builder finally emerged from the pack. He was Robert Stephenson. In 1825, he built a complete steam-powered railway system -- twelve miles long. Two years later, he unveiled his locomotive Royal George -- far better than anything yet. Now the debate sharpened. Speed wasn't yet a major concern. After all, a horse still had no trouble keeping up with the first trains. Indeed, many rail systems still used horses interchangeably with engines.
It all came to a head in 1829. The new Liverpool and Manchester Railway sought to resolve questions with a contest. They held the so-called Rainhill Trials, with a £500 purse. There were tests for hauling capacity, negotiating grade -- and speed.
Only three entrants made it into the trials, including Stephenson's next locomotive, The Rocket. Was he thinking of celebratory fireworks? Was he thinking of Congreve's war rockets whose red glare gave us such trouble in America during the War of 1812? We can only be certain that he was thinking of speed.
And, if speed had not been much of an issue before, it became one now. In the end, Stephenson's Rocket was the only engine to finish the trials, and it was a very clear winner.
Still, Braithwaite and Ericcson's small engine, Novelty, turned heads when it was reported to've reached over thirty miles-an-hour. But here we encounter the daemon of hyperbolæ that makes it so hard to know nineteenth-century railway speeds. A locomotive, especially running on a slight downgrade, can go very fast for a while. Combine those spurts with wishful thinking, and reports seriously outrun hard data. The hard fact was, Novelty's boiler burst and it never finished the trials.
Only the Rocket passed all the trials. And it sustained 24 miles-an-hour. No horse could keep that pace for any distance. After the Rainhill Trials, speed was a reality, and railways had found a new role in the nineteenth-century.
The contrast between Stephenson and Trevithick was huge. Trevithick, came from the mining regions of Cornwall. He had minimal education, but he showed an unparalleled genius for making things. He built every kind of steam engine for every purpose. He was tall, strong as an ox, brash -- and, as it happened, unlucky in business.
Stephenson's Rocket as represented by Smiles in his 1859 biography of Stephenson's father.
On the other hand, Robert Stephenson's father, George, was already a successful mechanic and builder of rail equipment. He saw to it that Robert got the education he didn't have. So Robert carried himself like a gentleman -- a handsome charmer. Where Trevithick made enemies, he had an instinct for smoothing things over. And he built very well on the work of others.
Right after his success with the Rocket, Stephenson built a still better locomotive, the Northumbrian. Here, for the first time, he put the firebox directly under the boiler, the way they were mounted ever after. The Northumbrian set the pattern of future locomotive design. It made the Liverpool-Manchester run at sixteen miles-an-hour in 1831. But here's that daemon of hyperbolæ again, and it comes from an unexpected quarter.
Typical locomotive firebox on a locomotive, Silverton Durango Railway (photo byJHL)
A beautiful young actress, Fanny Kemble was playing in Liverpool. She'd been invited to make this record-breaking train ride with both Stephensons. Later in life, Kemble left a remarkable account of the trip -- a wonderful picture of the visceral excitement. In it, she says, she went 35 miles-an-hour. Perhaps they did go that fast -- but only in brief in downhill stretches.
As a sidebar, Nicholas Faith includes a brief section in his book on rail, titled Fanny Kemble in Love. He quotes her claim that she'd been terribly taken, not with the dapper young Robert Stephenson, but with his craggy father George. "... his face is fine, though careworn, and bears an expression of deep thoughtfulness," she writes: "He certainly turned my head."
What exactly was she was in love with? So much was all rolled together on that day. The intoxication -- the excitement -- is contagious. Here was movement, speed, personal magnetism, and of course the obvious beginning of a new era in human transportation.
In any case, Stephenson's role in the evolution of railroads was similar to Fulton's with the steamboat. Stephenson opened the floodgates of the new transportation technology. After him, rail would spread across Great Britain, then America, like ivy across a wall.
And, before rail settled back into its clickety clack -- echoing back blues in the night, we needed to disgorge ourselves of the daemon that'd ridden in with it -- our daemon of speed.
- For background on the Stephensons, see S. Smiles, The Story of the Life of George Stephenson, Railway Engineer. (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859); or M. R. Bailey and J. P. Glithero, The Stephenson' Rocket: A history of a pioneering locomotive. (London & York: National Railway Museum, York, and Science Museum, London, 2002).
- The Rainhill Trials are described by: C. McGowan, Rail, Steam, and Speed: The Rocket and the Birth of Steam Locomotion. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
- The Fanny Kemble story is told by: N. Faith, (see Track 10, Note 3).