Skip to main content

The Railways in 19 Century

The 1840s was a time of railway madness. Railway companies sprang up like mushrooms.

Railways were built by navvies (or navigators).  With pick, shovel, wheelbarrow and dynamite, they blasted tunnels and built embankments and bridges. They wore fancy waistcoats and moleskin trousers and had names like 'Fighting Joe' and 'Gypsy Jack'. they had a terrible reputation for boozing and brawling.

Traveller's handbooks advised men to guard their wallets in tunnels. They even suggested that women put pins in their mouths to avoid being kissed in the dark!

The first Railway accident happened in 1830. Many important people were invited to go on the first journey of the new Liverpool to Manchester railway, including actress Fanny Kemble and Member of Parliament, Charles Huskisson. There were about eight hundred people aboard. This is Huskisson's story, as told by Fanny Kemble:

"The engine had stopped to take on a supply of water and several of the gentlemen in the director's  carriage jumped out to look about them, when an engine on the other line, which was parading up and down merely to show its speed, was seen coming down upon them like lightning. The most active of those in peril sprung back into their seats. Mr Huskisson, less active from the effects of age and ill-health, bewildered too by the frantic cries of  'Stop the engine!' and 'Clear the track!' which resounded on all sides, completely lost his head, looked helplessly to the right and left, and was instantanously prostrated by the fatal machine, which was dashed down like a thunderbolt upon him, and passed over his leg, smashing and mangling it in the most horrible way."

They bandaged Huskisson up and took him in the engine to Manchester, but he died the same day, the first victim of a pessenger rail accident.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Does pearls reproduce by itself through time

At the request of several families he and Mrs Legge gave a home for some months to a young Dutch girl, a granddaughter of the first Dutch governor of the Straits Settlements. She had several pearls of which the Dutch residents were great collectors, got from oysters found in a river of the Malay Peninsula, when she left them she gave Mrs Legge a small box containing a large pearl the size of a pea, with a blue spot on it, and two others not so large. This box was then put away and locked up. Several weeks later he took it out and on opening it discovered more than a dozen pearls, most of them very small. Astonished at the phenomenon he called his chief servant, a Portuguese, who happened to enter the room and who expressed no surprise but declared it to be a common occurrence. On enquiry he found that many of the Dutch people had jars of pearls, large and small, which had accumulated in this way. Some years later he related the incident at dinner on board ship. The captain was a cautio

Bidmas, Bedmas, Bodmas, Pedmas And Christmas

This BBC GCSE Bitesize post says, BODMAS stands for 'brackets', 'other', 'division', 'multiplication', 'addition' and 'subtraction'. It's the order in which we carry out a calculation. But another article says, the order of operations in Maths called BIDMAS. BIDMAS stands for Brackets, Indices, Division and Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. The difference is that the second substitute 'o' with 'i', and we can understand that teacher normally chooses easy way to explain whose pupils can understand, exponent or power or indices are out of reach of foundation students, so teachers uses 'other' instead. And in this article , 'o' actually stands for 'order', as far as my memory can go, my English teacher never teach me 'order' actually means 'Powers and Square Roots, etc.' In United States, the mnemonic fo Order of Operation is PEMDAS, because brackets are called pa

Panic or panick

There is only one spelling for panic ; the verb is inflected 'panic, panics, panicked, and panicking’. The form panick is used for progressive tense, past tense and past participle. We don't write panick today, though English speakers from a few hundred years ago might have (in the same way they might have written musick). When the alternate spelling “panick” is used for the past participle: "I panicked last night at the disco." When it’s use for progressive tense: “Invariably, when markets are panicking, they sell the stocks quickly.” It's the rule for root words ending in "c" is that you have to add “k”, so the spelling is related with the pronunciation. If we don't add the <k>, it looks as if the <c> has to be pronounced /s/. If the "k" was not there, “panicing” would look like the word which is supposed to be pronounced as if it is ended in "sing," while “paniced” would be pronounced like “panised”. The same