The "Iron Road" The Robert Built (24 November 1978)

I wonder how many people who travel regularly on the main railway line, or who pass over or under it, appreciate that it represents the greatest feat of purely manual construction achieved since the building of the Great Wall of China or the pyramids?

Yet such is the case. And the man who engineered it, and who steered it through all the preliminaries as well, Robert Stephenson, was under 30 years old when it began.

How he came to be appointed to what every civil engineer agreed would be a plum, but gigantic task, would make a story in itself. Nothing quite like it had ever been attempted.

The thrusting of a railway through from London to Birmingham in as short a time as was consistent with sound construction posed unique engineering problems which would require unique solutions, while costing would be little better than a sheer gamble.

Suffice it to say that Robert was the remarkable son of a remarkable father, George, the great developer, but not the inventor, of steam locomotion. There was a big difference between the two. George could not write his own name until he was 18. And Robert, as a better-educated teenager, had to do all the figuring for him as well.

But I have space here for only the actual building, which was all “by pick and shovel”.

The staking out of the line was begun in November 1833, and although the weather was atrocious that winter, it was completed in February 1834.

At that time, there were no civil engineering contractors with enough capital to do more than a small part of such a vast undertaking. So Robert divided into lengths averaging six miles each and let each length to a different contractor. There were also special contracts for major works like the Kilsby tunnel.

In all, there were 29 separate contracts. But many of the contractors, including those on major works, soon found they had over-reached themselves and their work had to be taken over by Robert himself.

The job was intended to be done practically simultaneously over the whole line, but whereas some of the work was started in 1834, it was not until the autumn of 1835 that the last contract was let. Until the whole job was very nearly completed there were never fewer than 12,000 engineers and navvies at work on it and at times there were up to 20,000.

The contract had been let for £120,000 on Robert’s assumption that the tunnel would not need an invert, but it did, and by the time he himself had completed it the cost had risen to £280,000.

In the Milton Keynes section, so to speak, there was big trouble north of Wolverton in December 1834. To construct the long embankment across the Ouse valley he intended using spoil from the Loughton cutting. To do this a temporary wooden bridge would first have to be built over the canal. “Oh no, you don’t. We’re not having piles driven into our canal banks,” replied the canal company. Robert’s whole scheme threatened to break down. He decided on main force.

On December 23 he gathered a large contingent of engineers and navvies on the site and they had completed the timber bridge by noon on Christmas Day, the whole job having been done while everybody else, especially the canal people, were enjoying Christmas. Naturally the canal company were furious and decided to hit back. On December 30, they gathered their own army of engineers and canal employees and completely destroyed Robert’s bridge!

The matter came to a head in the Court of Chancery in January, where, to Robert’s intense relief, the railway company were granted an injunction restraining the canal company from destroying any of their works.

More trouble at Wolverton followed. A very serious slip occurred on the embankment on the south side of the viaduct and had to be made good. Then, totally unbargained for, that same embankment caught fire owing to the spontaneous combustion of alum shale containing sulphuret of iron.

All this was as nothing compared with the big snags which were encountered at the Road cutting and Kilsby Tunnel. The delay caused by those snags led to the temporary arrangement whereby passengers from London to Birmingham were met by horse-drawn coaches at Denbigh Hall, where the railway crosses the main road, and taken from there to a similar temporary railway terminus at Rugby, where they re-trained for Birmingham. This arrangement should have come into operation at the end of January 1838 but a six weeks’ frost prevented work being completed at the Rugby end and it was not until the spring that the arrangements came into effect.  It lasted only a few months, for on September 17 of that year the line was officially opened, with a double track all the way.

The whole job cost £5,500,000 as against an original estimate of £3,400,456, or £50,000 a mile as against an estimated £21,736.  Robert explained this to the not-altogether-happy directors as being due to important work having been abandoned by contractors and needing costly expedients to make up lost time; and also to some jobs having to be done by means without precedent in engineering and involving expense which no experience could indicate.

On the whole, they must have been satisfied, for on the completion of the construction they retained Robert as consultant. He took his appointment seriously. He ordered that at first no passenger traffic should move after dark and that as much repair work as possible should be done at night.  He also imposed a speed limit of 15 mph between Denbigh Hall and Rugby until he was sure the earthworks were firm.  As late as 1844 he was still reporting on various repair work – including some at Wolverton – that needed doing along ”his” line.

For this remains the iron road that Robert built, and if inter-city expresses now travel along it at speeds which he himself could hardly have envisaged, it is largely due to the long sweeps and gentle slopes which he insisted upon from the start.