lington coal line,
it is true, had carried passengers by steam power as early as 1825,
but I think we may look upon the Manchester and Liverpool as being the
beginning of the passenger and mercantile railway system of the
present day. At that time the locomotives weighed from eight to ten
tons, and the speed was about 20 miles per hour, with a pressure of
from 40 to 50 lb. The rails were light; they were jointed in the
chairs, which were generally carried on stone blocks, thus affording
most excellent anvils for the battering to pieces of the ends of the
rails--that is to say, for the destruction of the very parts where
they were most vulnerable. The engines were not competent to draw
heavy trains, and it was a common practice to have at the foot of an
incline a shed containing a "bank engine," which ran out after the
trains as they passed, and pushed them up to the top of the hill.
Injectors were then unknown, and donkey-pumps were unknown, and
therefore, when it was necessary to fill up the boiler, if it had not
been properly pumped up before the locomotive came to rest, it had to
run about the line in order to work its feed-pumps. To get over this
difficulty, it was occasionally the practice to insert into a line of
rails, in a siding, a pair of wheels, with their tops level with that
of the rails so that the engine wheels could run upon the rims. Then,
the locomotive being fixed to prevent it from moving off the pair of
wheels thus endways, it was put into revolution, its driving wheels
bearing, as already stated, upon the rims of the pair of wheels in the
rails, and thus the engine worked its feed-pumps without interfering
(by its needless running up and down the line) with the traffic. It
should have been stated, that at this time there was no link motion,
no practical expansion of the steam, and that even the reversal of the
engine had to be effected by working the sides by hand gear, in the
manner in use in marine engines. When the British Association
originated, although the Manchester and Liverpool Railway had been
opened for a year, there is no doubt that the 300 members who then
came to this city found their way here by the slow process of the
stage-coach, the loss of which we so much deplore in the summer and in
fine weather, but the obligatory use of which we should so much regret
in the miserable weather now prevailing in these islands.

In 1881, we know that railways are everywhere inserted. Steel rails,