on filling in," he said; "there is no other help for it.
The stuff emptied in is doing its work out of sight, and if you will but
have patience, it will soon begin to show." And so the filling in went
on; several hundreds of men and boys were employed to skin the Moss all
round for many thousand yards, by means of sharp spades, called by the
turf cutters "tommy-spades;" and the dried cakes of turf were afterwards
used to form the embankment, until at length as the stuff sank and rested
upon the bottom, the bank gradually rose above the surface, and slowly
advanced onwards, declining in height and consequently in weight, until
it became joined to the floating road already laid upon the Moss. In the
course of forming the embankment, the pressure of the bog turf tipped out
of the waggons caused a copious stream of bog-water to flow from the end
of it, in colour resembling Barclay's double stout; and when completed,
the bank looked like a long ridge of tightly pressed tobacco-leaf. The
compression of the turf may be imagined from the fact that 670,000 cubic
yards of raw moss formed only 277,000 cubic yards of embankment at the
completion of the work.

At the western, or Liverpool end of the Chat Moss, there was a like
embankment; but, as the ground there was solid, little difficulty was
experienced in forming it, beyond the loss of substance caused by the
oozing out of the water held by the moss-earth.

At another part of the Liverpool and Manchester line, Parr Moss was
crossed by an embankment about 1.5 mile in extent. In the immediate
neighbourhood was found a large excess of cutting, which it would have
been necessary to "put out in spoil-banks" (according to the technical
phrase); but the surplus clay, stone, and shale, were tipped, waggon
after waggon, into Parr Moss, until a solid but concealed embankment,
from fifteen to twenty-five feet high, was formed, although to the eye it
appears to be laid upon the level of the adjoining surface, as at Chat
Moss.

The road across Chat Moss was finished by the 1st January, 1830, when the
first experimental train of passengers passed over it, drawn by the
"Rocket;" and it turned out that, instead of being the most expensive
part of the line, it was about the cheapest. The total cost of forming
the line over the Moss was 28,000 pounds, whereas Mr. Giles's estimate
was 270,000 pounds! It also proved to be one of the best portions of the
railway. Being a floating road, it