Director of the Dublin and Kingstown Railway, and now its Chairman. He
said there was a vacancy on the Kingstown Board; and, supposing the seat
was offered to me, would I be free to accept it? As everybody knows, it
is not usual for a railway manager, so long as he remains a manager, to
be a director of his own or of any other company; so, "I must consult my
Chairman," said I. The Dublin and Kingstown being a worked, not a
working line, the duties of its directors, though important are not
onerous, and my Chairman and Board readily accorded their consent. Such
was my first happy start as a railway director.

[The Gresham Salver: salver.jpg]

The Dublin and Kingstown has the distinction of being the first railway
to be constructed in Ireland. Indeed, for five years it was the only
railway in that country. Opened as far back as 1834, it was amongst the
earliest of the railway lines of the whole United Kingdom. The Stockton
and Darlington (1825), the Manchester and Liverpool (1830), and the
Dundee and Newtyle (1831), were its only predecessors. Soon after its
construction it was extended from Kingstown to Dalkey, a distance of 1.75
miles. This extension was constructed and worked on the _atmospheric
system_, a method of working railways which failed to fulfil
expectations, with the result that the Dalkey branch was, in 1856,
changed to an ordinary locomotive line.

The atmospheric system of working railways found favour for a time, and
was tried on the West London Railway, on the South Devon system, and in
other parts of Great Britain, also in France, but nowhere was it
permanently successful. The reason of the failure of the system on the
Dalkey extension, Mr. Waldron tells me (and he knows all about his
railway, as a Chairman should) was due to the impossibility of keeping
the metal disc airtight. The disc, shaped like a griddle, was edged with
leather which had to be heavily greased to enable it to be drawn through
the pipe from which the air was pumped out, in order to create a vacuum,
and the rats, like nature, abhorring a vacuum, gnawed the greasy leather,
letting in the air, and bringing the train to a standstill!

The Kingstown Railway was also interesting in another respect, as
illustrating the opposition which confronted railways in those early
days. There was a Mr. Thomas Michael Gresham, who was the owner of the
well-known Gresham Hotel in Dublin, and largely interested in house
property in King