engineers. You found also that engineers
shrunk visibly from all patronage that implied
recommendation to the directors of additional
expense. You found the reputation of a railway
engineer with his board, to depend
very much on his economy of management,
and that to recommend additional expense of
only twenty or thirty pounds upon each
locomotive, would be to put a black cross against
his own name in the board-room. Thus,
when you once really got leave to put your
apparatus to a test upon one line, you heard
that the engineer was pre-determined, in any
event, not to recommend you, and you
abstained from using, therefore, his permission
to experiment. One engineer responded to
your urgent putting forth of human life as an
off-set to expense: "Life! now, you talk
continually about life. Go to an Assurance
office, and they will tell you what a few lives
are worth. Not much."

You find that, on one or two lines, the
principle of economy is so distinctly made
paramount, that the line is farmed to its
manager, whose salary depends upon his
keeping down the cost of stock below a
certain maximum. Such managers
immediately say to you, "Granted, your plan is
good; if I adopt it, it will cause immediate
diminution in my income."

So you find that with all these difficulties
to encounter, at the end of five years' battling
your position with the railway public is pretty
much where it was when you began. Strong
influences oppose a rock against you, in addition
to the general idea on the part of directors
and others, that to make experiments upon
the preventibility of collisions would be to
persuade the public that collisions do occur,—
an asserted fact which they pronounce to be
a myth.

Meanwhile, you have embarked everything
in your invention; you know it is a true
one, and you know that you deserve success.
What will you do? We should say,
certainly, that when you found your affairs in
this position, you should come forward and
appeal to us, and those about us who are
travellers. If engineers and directors know
nothing about collisions upon railways,
travellers do; and you may be very well
assured that, if travellers come to perceive
that there is an invention lying stifled which
bids fair to be a real protection to their lives,
they, the said travellers, form a sufficiently
important part of the public to compel railway
managers to give fair-play and an honest
trial to an experiment for which you make
out a sufficient primâ facie case,

Perhaps, M. or N., the above account
of your proceedings is entirely fabulous, a
cunningly devised narrative hatched up for
the occasion, because we are about—as
representing a portion of the travelling public—to
express our unscientific opinion of an invention
intended to prevent accidents by railway,
very similar to that which we have imagined
as the product of your ingenuity. You may
give, then, to the preceding narrative whatever
character you please; the narrative
which follows, you will have the kindness to
accept as true, upon our testimony.

On a sunny day during the present autumn,
that is to say, on the farewell day of our old
friend October, who walked out of the year
1851 with a good-humoured smile upon his
face, there were mysterious doings upon the
line of railway running between the Eastern
Counties Station and North Woolwich.
Rustics who happened, shortly after mid-day,
to be wandering beside that line where it
passes over a spot called the Coke Ovens, not
far from the Barking road, were strangely
puzzled by the spectacle of what might be a
wild steam-engine, tearing up and down the
line, and shrieking frequently. This wild
horse of the railways appeared to be the
victim of a party of gentlemen scattered over
the line, who were intently occupied about the
taming of the animal. Running to some
distance, it would presently return, and at a
certain point would set up a wild shriek when
it felt the tamer's check, and running on a
little way, still more and more slowly, it
would very soon come to a stop. Then many
gentlemen would mount the creature's back,
and back it went, and the same thing was
repeated—at the same place the same shriek,
and once again the stoppage. All this wild
work resulted from the fact that certain
gentlemen had been attracted to the spot to
witness a few experiments with a contrivance
for the mechanical prevention of some of the
chief causes of railway accident.

This contrivance is the patented invention
of a Mr. C. F. Whitworth. It had been tested
for months, fifteen or twenty times a day, upon
a small private line of rail belonging to the
Butterley Company, the manufacturers of the
apparatus, and on this little line at Codnor
Park, it had not failed in one out of more than
a thousand trials—it had not failed once.

What is the apparatus ? Come and see.
Our locomotive has not yet arrived: we have
been dropped upon the line by the last ordinary
train, and here we are at the Coke
Ovens, wandering about upon the rails.

Here is a siding to be guarded. Elsewhere
there might be a junction, or a station, or a
tunnel; here it is a siding. It is only at these
weak points, of course, that it is proposed to
shield the railway with defensive armour.
That these are really the weak points, can be
made manifest by reference to the Railway
Commissioners' Report for 1850. During
that year there were in England thirty-
three serious collisions, and of these—

       23  occurred at stations.
         4            "         junctions.
         2            "         level crossings.
         1            "         in a tunnel.
         3            "        (at distant places unprotected by
       —                     (    signal post or guard.
       33