Free George Stephenson by Hunter Davies Page B

developments had failed to produce any real national interest. His work was known locally to the colliery public in the north east but nationally only to those few interested in colliery engineering.
    The growing band of writers on the subject were looked upon as dotty as the engineers themselves. Thomas Gray devoted twenty years of his life to writing about railways but was considered slightly touched and died in poverty. None of his ideas were ever put in practice, though we now realise that most of them were eminently sensible. The idea of these funny colliery engines covering the whole country came to him suddenly in 1816 and he rushed to put pen to paper, shaking with the brilliance of his own genius. ‘He shut himself up in his room, secluded from his wife and relatives, declining to give them any information on the subject of his mysterious studies, beyond assurance that his scheme “would revolutionise the whole face of the material world”. The result was a pamphlet which came out in 1820. Amongst other things, he drew a rail map of Britain with the big towns connected which looks little different from today’s rail maps, and schemed out six lane tracks on the main lines and created turntables.
    One of his motives was to relieve the suffering of horses on the fast postchaise routes. He quoted a coach proprietor as saying that on average one horse was lost every two hundred miles. It was very common, so he stated, for the legs of horses to be snapped in two while being whipped on to keep up the timetables and beat the rival coach proprietors. This cruelty to horses was immediately to be forgotten once railways did take over and the old coach era was instantly glamorised and enshrined for ever. The romance lives on in Christmas cards. The reality of the horsedrawn coach was cruel, uncomfortable, slow, cumbersome and expensive. In his pamphlet, Gray worked out that the upkeep of the 500,000 horses then employed on the turnpike roads cost a total of £173 million over a twelve-year period. By comparison he estimated that 10,000 steam engines could be run on the same routes for only £35 million.
    Gray’s plans for national railways were good, but unfortunately when it came to deciding which type of locomotive engine should pull them he picked a loser. He was a fan of Blenkinsop and his racked engine long after Stephenson had proved that his engines were much more efficient. He couldn’t believe, along with so many others, that smooth wheels could run on smooth rails.
    The trouble with most of the literary advocates of railways was that they could well see the benefits of railways – reducing unemployment was always mentioned, plus bringing fresh vegetables to the big towns – but they all differed, or were very hazy, about the precise mechanical means. They waxed romantic about locomotives easing the strain on horses and hay caused by the long drawn out Napoleonic wars, but they argued as to which locomotive would bring about the miracle. The miracle was needed because sending goods by the new canals, the only form of bulk transport, was proving slow and crowded. One minor advantage of locomotives over canals, which was seriously put forward in the 1820s, was that railways would cut down the pilfering. Apparently there was fiddling on a mammoth scale from the bales of wool as they lay in the barges. The trick was to steal half a bale and then let in some water which would be absorbed to make up the original weight.
    One writer who did pick the winner, and for many years was at the forefront of railway promotion, was William James. He was a solicitor from Henley-in-Arden who became a highly successful London land agent and entrepreneur. He was forever setting up schemes for bridges, canals and railways and toured the country giving speeches, looking at sites, meeting engineers. He came to see Stephenson at Killingworth in 1821, having been to see Blenkinsop’s racked engine at Leeds