stances of an Act having been obtained for a coal-waggon way at Leeds in 1758, of the Stockton and Darlington being the first passenger line, and of Stephenson's 'Rocket' being first shown at Manchester, fulfilled the visions of the prophet Ezekiel.

RAILWAYS TWO CENTURIES AGO.

Whether railways are described by anticipation or not in the pages of sacred writ, we are able to claim for them a more respectable antiquity than is perhaps generally imagined. Just two centuries ago, in the Life of Lord Keeper Guildford, we read the following:

"When men have pieces of ground between the colliery and the river, they sell leave to lead coals over their ground, and so dear, that the owner of a rood of ground will expect £20 per annum for this leave. The manner of the carriage is by laying rails of timber from the colliery down to the river, exactly straight and parallel; and bulky carts are made with four rowlets fitting these rails, whereby the carriage is so that one horse will draw down four or five chaldrons of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal-merchants."

easy

the opening of the eighteenth century that the wood came to be protected with iron. In the early part of that century many tramways appear to have been laid down to connect collieries with the ports whence the coal was shipped. One of these has obtained some historical interest; namely, the railway between Tranent colliery and its port of Cockenzie, in East Lothian-a railway still in existence-part of the embankment of which was used as a position for his cannon by "Johnny Cope" in the battle of Prestonpans, in 1745. In the Travels of St. Fond it is mentioned that coals could be imported from England at Marseilles cheaper than French coals of inferior quality, and the facilities for conveying coals to the ports in this country, by the use of the tramways, and the method of shipping direct from the waggons, is believed to have had some share in bringing about this result.

One of the earliest records of the use of iron to protect the wooden trams is in connection with the ironworks at Colebrookdale, in Shropshire, subsequently celebrated for the erection of the first considerable iron bridge, and where, about 1760, iron plates were nailed to the wooden rails, as well to diminish friction as to prevent abrasion. This soon led to the substitution of rails of solid iron, which was attended with rapid success, and adopted in various parts of the country. There was, for instance, a railway five miles long, from the collieries

in the vicinity of Derby into that town; there was another called the Park Forest Railway, about six miles long; and another, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch, in Leicestershire, which had four miles of double and eight miles of single rails. Towards the beginning of the present century, railways had made their way into all coal and mining districts, and their progress was so rapid that in 1811 there were in South Wales not less than 150 miles of railways, of which the Merthyr Tydvil Company possessed thirty miles.

Amongst personal reminiscences of these primitive railways by persons living to our own day, it may be interesting to quote those of Mr. Robert Reid, who was born in 1772. In his interesting memoirs of "Old Glasgow," he says:—

"I remember the Coal Quay, which stood at the present ferry, west end of Windmill Croft. It was built by the Dumbarton Glass Work Company to convey coals from the lands of Little Govan to their works at Dumbarton. The river was then deeper at the Coal | Quay than at the Broomielaw. There was a timber tramway from the Little Govan works to the said quay, which ran through the lands of Kingston, and by the road on the east side of Springfield. I have walked upon this tramroad, which I believe was the first of our Glasgow railways. The Dumbarton Glass Work Company also possessed a tramroad on the north side of the Clyde, from the coal works in the neighbourhood of Gartnavel."

But while in regard to the transit and shipment of coals this considerable advance was made, the other branches of traffic, depending on the wretched country roads of last century, remained for half-a-century longer in the depths of barbarity.

"I observed to-day," says Boswell, in his Tour to the Hebrides, "that the common way of carrying home their grain here is in loads, on horseback. They have also a few sleds or cars, as we call them in Ayrshire, clumsily made and rarely used." An aged East Lothian farmer, recently dead, informed the writer that in his youth the mode of bringing grain to the market at Haddington was on pack horses. This was within recent memory, before there were either made roads or railways!

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VARIOUS FORMS OF RAIL.

The solid iron rails mentioned

having been introduced at Colebrookdale were called "scantlings," and consisted of 5-feet long pieces, 4 inches in breadth, which were laid down under the wheel, simply to decrease friction, as the wooden trams had previously been. The next stage, that of casting rails with an upright flange to keep the wheels on the track, was reached about 1776, in connection with a colliery belonging to the Duke of Norfolk, near Sheffield. Though the flange was subsequently taken from the rail and put on the wheel, the first century of railway history closes

with the adoption of the two chief features of the railway as a travelling track the use of cross sleepers on which to fasten the rails, and the introduction of the flange to keep the cars upon the track.

A quarter of a century brought the invention of the oval rail, with a grooved tire upon the wheels, another step towards the realisation of subsequent success. This 66 edge railway" as it was called, was first used at Lord Penrhyn's slate quarries in Wales. It being found that the oval rail wore into the wheel and caused it to stick, the next step was to make the surface of the rail and the edge of the wheel flat, and, voila tout, the railway as we know it was made. There have been many improvements in the mode of manufacture, in the kinds of sleepers used (stone or wood), in the method of fastening them, in the introduction of steel rails; in the discovery, very recently, that iron rails can be made even more durable and less expensive than steel. But the fundamental condition of the rail remains unchanged, and on the plan thus introduced early in the century all our great progress of to-day has | been made.

FIRST PROJECTORS OF PASSENGER

RAILWAYS.

Mr. R. L. Edgeworth, writing in Nicholson's Journal of the Arts, in 1802, describes a project formed by him many years before for laying iron railways for baggage

waggons on the great roads of England. Objections as to first cost and maintenance had deterred him from promoting it, and to obviate the latter he proposed to use a series of smaller cars-the modern "train "-in order to save the wear of the rails. In 1768 he obtained the Society of Arts' gold medal, for models of his carriages, and twenty years later he made four carriages which were used for some time on a wooden line of rails to convey lime for farming purposes. Besides using his proposed railways for heavy waggons at a slow pace, Mr. Edgeworth thought means might be found of enabling stage-coaches to go six miles an hour, and postchaises and gentlemen's travelling carriages at eight miles an hour, both with one horse. Another proposal he made was that small (stationary) engines placed from distance to distance might by means of circulating chains be made to draw the carriages along roads with a great diminution of horse-labour and expense.

An attempt to take a systematic commercial view of the utility of railways was made in 1800, by Dr. James Anderson, in the fourth volume of his Recreations in Agriculture. He proposed to construct railways by the side of the turnpike roads, so as to follow the ordinary levels and lines of traffic: to commence with the highway from London to Bath. Where the road ascended a hill, the level was to be sought by going round its base, constructing a viaduct, or