In today’s post Tarquin O’Flaherty continues his exploration of the building of railways in Great Britain (and the Colonies and the Crimea). See the preceding Man as Machine post here.
The Industrial Revolution in England created miracles, profound change, great wealth and, turned the world upside down. At the same time it created deliberate, industrial scale poverty. There were so many people desperate to feed their families that employers exploited the situation mercilessly. As we have noted previously, the social experiments carried out by Robert Owen at New Lanark and elsewhere proved beyond a doubt that treating workers humanely actually increased production in every factory where it was tried. Despite this evidence, workers were exploited to such an extent that legislation became necessary, not to ensure that exploitation was minimized, but merely to ensure that the workers earned enough to eat just enough to be strong enough to go on working!
Whilst ‘The Workshop of the World’ was developing, companies were forming to build the railways. A newly formed company, The Great Western Railway Co., for instance, first appointed an engineer whose job it was to work out the best route, decide what needed to be done, and be responsible for the whole shebang from beginning to end. The company then asked for tenders, and a principal contractor was appointed. The contractor then appointed agents who would take responsibility for the work on a particular section of the route. The agents could then appoint sub-contractors to make cuttings, build bridges, drive tunnels and whatever else the work required. The sub-contractors, in their turn, appointed an overseer or foreman, more commonly referred to as a ‘ganger’. It then became the ganger’s job to hire the people who would actually do the physical work, the pick and shovel men, the navvies.
The work required of the navvies was difficult and dangerous. It also required an astonishing degree of physical strength, an attribute noticeably lacking in the malnourished wretches who clamoured for work whenever a new railway was being built. Gradually gangs of individuals, ex canal digging ‘navigators’, farm labourers and men with natural strength formed the legendary gangs of men who would scandalize Victorian England for the best part of the next eighty years.
England’s first railway, the Stockton to Darlington (1820) did not present its builders with an entirely new set of engineering problems. The Romans, after all, had conducted water from A to B, through tunnels, along viaducts and cuttings nearly 2000 years earlier. When English canal building began, the channels, tunnels and cuttings involved followed precisely the same principles as those used by the Romans. They were simply much bigger!
In their turn, when the railways arrived, steam locomotives were so underpowered that the rails they travelled on had to be almost as level as water. Hence Brunel’s ‘billiard table.’
To be continued . . .