Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

THE CONQUEST OF CHAT MOSS. A Notable Feat of Railway Engineering. WHEN, in 1821, George Stephenson and his friends projected the second rail- way ever built—that from Manchester to Liverpool—they had to overcome the opposi- The Moss Power^u^ f°rces banded against them—the owners of stage-coaches, canal companies, great land- lords—and to spend large sums of money before a Parliamentary Act sanctioning the construction of the railway was obtained. The route surveyed by Stephenson and finally- adopted ran across a large peat-bog on the right bank of the river Irwell, a few miles west of Manchester. Like other bogs, the Moss had a surface of an exceedingly treacher- ous character, over which a man could not walk with safety. In fact, one of the sur- veyors nearly lost his life while using his instruments on the Moss. This particular morass extended for miles, and had a depth in places of thirty feet or more. In wet weather thø mass of decayed vegetation sucked in water like a sponge, and swelled until the surface at the centre stood several feet above that at the edges, while in dry seasons it became slightly basin-shaped. Opponents of the railway were not slow to make full use of the help given to their case by the existence of the bog. “ The making of an embankment out of this pulpy wet moss,” urged counsel for the opposition while the Bill was in Com- mittee, “ is no very easy task. Who but Mr. Stephenson would have thought of entering into Chat Moss, carrying it out almost like wet dung ? It is ignorance almost inconceiv- able. It is perfect madness, in a person called upon to speak on a scientific subject, to propose such a plan.” A civil engineer of twenty-two years’ experience gave it as his opinion that no railway could be carried across the Moss without going to the bottom, unless a solid embankment were built up from its bed, at an estimated cost of £270,000. Stephenson, however, thought quite other- wise. As snow-shoes will prevent a man sink- ing into soft snow by distributing his weight over an area much larger than that of his feet, so, he argued, would a railway track be borne up on the bog if it rested on A Huge Mattress. a platform of sufficient size. What the, conditions required was to cast into the morass large quantities of heath and branches of trees to form a huge mattress which should practically float on the quaking mass beneath. He had not the least intention of building an embankment up from solid ground. His faith in his own method seems all the more remarkable when we re- member that railway building was then in its earliest infancy, and that he had no precedents to follow, such as exist in plenty for the engineer of to-day. The first operation in connection with the creation of the projected raft was to form a footpath of heather across the Moss on the line of the route selected, for the convenience of the workmen. This was added to until sufficiently buoyant to bear a light, temporary