The railways of England Author:James Gilbert Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 67 . CHAPTER III. THE AOCESSARIES AND CONSTITUENTS OF A RAILWAY. Experience evinced soon after their first establishment, that in the accomplishment of ... more »railways of magnitude, considerable skill was requisite to render the work permanent and useful. The attention which had been drawn to the subject led men of science, both practical and theoretic, among others, to consider what was necessary in order to make a railway of any considerable length, and so well had the matter been considered, that when the time arrived for carrying an extensive design into effect, the art of civil engineering was found fully competent to the execution of its novel tasks. These were neither few nor slight, for in a country so variable in its surface as England, almost every contingency that could be imagined had to be provided against. Did we possess the almost uninterrupted flats by which Holland and Belgium are distinguished, or those extensive plains which form the prairies of the American continent, common powers would have been adequate to the fulfilment of every duty which the necessity of the circumstances created; but such is not the case. Within the compass of a district barely equal to a fourth of the extent of one of the transatlantic plains almost every variety of surface is to be met with. Hills have to be levelled, vallies raised, rivers to be crossed, waters to be turned, marshes to be made firm, tunnels to be formed, excavations dug, and every accident provided against that could either affect the labour of the machinery, increase the wear of the engines or the rails, or interfere with the safety of the way. To effect such a variety of important purposes much skill of course, and many expedients were requisite. These have been supplied with an abundance and sufficiency whi...« less