Liverpool and Manchester Railway: Chat Moss, Rainhill and Huskisson's Death

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In the 1820s cotton landing at Liverpool had to reach Manchester's mills over rutted turnpikes or the costly, slow Bridgewater Canal, so corn merchant Joseph Sandars, mill owner John Kennedy and surveyor William James formed a railway company in 1824. Opposed by the Earls of Derby and Sefton and the canal owners, engineer George Stephenson was torn apart in Parliament in 1825 over a survey that critics said underestimated costs by a factor of five. The Rennie brothers rerouted the line and won the 1826 act, then lost the job by insisting on their own men, and the board rehired Stephenson to build the 31 miles.

To cross nearly five miles of the Chat Moss bog, Robert Stannard's design floated the track on a mattress of timber, brushwood and sealed tar barrels, and by December 1829 a test train carried 40 passengers over it at 17 mph. The Wapping Tunnel ran under Liverpool and the Olive Mount cutting sank 70 feet through sandstone. The Rocket won the Rainhill Trials in October 1829. On opening day, September 15, 1830, Liverpool MP William Huskisson stepped onto the line at Parkside to greet the Duke of Wellington and was struck by the Rocket, dying later that day. The journey fell from a full day by stagecoach to two hours.

• Workers dumped spoil into Blackpool Hole on Chat Moss for three months without finding a bottom.
• Board members backed by engineer John Rastrick favored stationary engines hauling trains by cable before Rainhill settled the debate.
• Stephenson set the gap between the two tracks equal to the gauge, so a carriage door swung straight into the path of a passing train.
• Policemen controlled traffic by time interval, stopping trains if fewer than ten minutes had passed since the last one and using detonators on the rails in fog.
• The line paid an average 9.5 percent dividend for 15 years, and its Liverpool Road terminus in Manchester survives at the Science and Industry Museum.