Steam Engines for Heavy Haulage on Common Roads — Early Trials and Early Apprehensions: 1856–1861

Abstract

In 1856, a steam-powered traction engine was an exciting spectacle in a public procession. A year later, one travelled 85 miles over English roads, drawing a train of heavily loaded wagons — taking three days but showing what steam haulage could achieve. Engineers, manufacturers and entrepreneurs then vied in developing and deploying traction engines — alongside parallel developments in applying steam power to agriculture. But what were the dangers of massive steam engines working on public roads? Given the presence of very many horses on the roads, a noisy engine might cause one to rear up or bolt, throwing a rider or overturning a horse-drawn carriage. Regulation was needed! This should include equitable toll charges on turnpike roads, especially if heavy engines might cause serious damage. Legislation — eventually passed in 1861, after laborious parliamentary consideration — included speed restrictions and the possibility of banning daytime journeys in some urban localities.

Keywords:

• steam
• traction engine
• road haulage
• legislation

Acknowledgements

Grateful thanks to librarians, archivists and photographic experts at Bishopsgate Institute Library and Archive, Bristol University Library, the British Library, the Museum of English Rural Life, the Parliamentary Archives and Senate House (London) Library. Warm thanks (for access to online databases) to the Library at Birkbeck, University of London; grateful acknowledgement also to the British Newspaper Archive.

Notes

1. J. J. Mechi, ‘Boydell’s Traction Steam-engine for Agricultural Purposes,’ Journal of the Society of Arts, 4 (1855–56, [18 April 1856]), 382–3. A team of horses swerved on seeing the engine, drawing a load of grain into soft ground. The horses could not extricate it; the engine could — and did.

2. Morning Chronicle, 13 October 1856, p. 6. The dinner celebrated Mechi’s very recent appointment as a City of London Sherriff.

3. A later account reveals that Boydell — and Frederick Hemming (Secretary of the Boydell ‘Endless Railway’ Company) — did travel to Russia and were ‘well received’ by the authorities there. The engine had been shipped ‘by a screw steamer from the Thames’ before they themselves set sail. But the whole venture had been left too late in the year. After an anxious fortnight waiting at St. Petersburgh, they heard that the steamer had ‘run ashore in a snow storm’ and was ‘full of water’. Boydell and Hemming returned to England only ‘after a most perilous voyage both in the Baltic and North Sea’. The engine was raised the following spring. Under a new Russian owner’s control, it was then re-assembled (with some missing parts locally replaced) and shown off in Moscow successfully drawing six loaded Russian carts (Evening Standard, 9 November 1857, p. 2).

4. W. J. Hughes, A Century of Traction Engines (London: Percival Marshall, 1959), pp. 37–9.

5. Morning Chronicle, 11 November 1856, p. 5.

6. Daily News, 11 November 1856, p. 3.

7. Morning Chronicle, 11 November 1856, p. 5.

8. Daily News, 11 November 1856, p. 3.

9. ‘The Traction engine & endless railway: Boydell’s patent’, 5 December 1856 (‘Bristol Selected Pamphlet’, accessible via JSTOR), p. 1. Only in its earliest days was the engine operated with ‘shoes’ on its front wheels. The illustration, by courtesy of Bristol University Library, is from a time-worn copy.

10. December 1856 pamphlet, p. 4.

11. National Archives, ‘Traction Engine and Endless Railway Apparatus Company Ltd.’ BT 41/690/3759. [The ‘Boydell Company’].

12. December 1856 pamphlet, p. 4.

13. Ibid.

14. R. H. Clark, ‘The Eastern Counties and its Outstanding Steam Engines,’ Transaction of the Newcomen Society, 27 (1949), 31–42; M. R. Lane, The Story of the St Nicholas Works (Stowmarket: Unicorn Press, 1994), pp. 10–24.

15. The Times, 9 February 1857, p. 5 (and later issues) — the advertisement claimed that, ‘this invention is of national importance’, relevant to traction on ‘common roads and for agricultural purposes.’

16. National Archives, BT 41/690/3759.

17. F. H. Hemming, Cheap Railroads for India and the Colonies, in Connection with the Traction Engine and Endless Railway (London: Effingham Wilson, 1857).

18. Hemming. The illustration is a detail from a larger diagram (facing p. 35).

19. W. McAdam, ‘Boydell’s Traction Engine,’ Engineer, 3 (1857), 442–3 and Railway Record, 14 (1857), 393–4. The Railway Record (same issue, 388) also carried an editorial on ‘Boydell’s Traction Engine’. The wording in the Table is McAdam’s own — with time as 10.3, 11.2 etc. rather than 10.01, 11.02 etc.

20. Parliamentary Paper (hereafter ‘PP’) 1859 Session 2 (116) Minutes of evidence taken before the Select Committee on the Locomotive Bill; with the proceedings of the committee, p. 1. With interspersed questions from committee members, this publication includes 18 pages of McAdam’s evidence; the question and answer format draws out many of the legislators’ apprehensions and anxieties.

21. Railway Record, 14 (1857), p. 393.

22. Ibid., p. 394.

23. South Eastern Gazette, 16 February 1858, p. 5. The newspaper suggests that the load was over 14 tons, but with ambiguity as to whether this includes people who had climbed onto the wagons.

24. Kentish Gazette, 16 February 1858, p. 6.

25. Patent Office, Patents for Inventions, Abridgments of Specifications, Class 79, 1855–1866 (London: HMSO, 1905), p. 19.

26. Hughes, pp. 45–50.

27. D. K. Clark, The Exhibited Machinery of 1862: A Cyclopaedia of the Machinery Represented at the International Exhibition (London: Day & Son, 1864), p. 334.

28. Kentish Independent, 24 July 1858, p. 4.

29. Ibid.

30. National Archives, ‘Company No: 1427; Bray’s Traction Engine Company Ltd.’ BT 31/384/1427. [The ‘Bray Company’]. This ‘incorporated’ Company had ‘bought out’ Bray’s patent rights in exchange for shares.

31. Mr. Sherriff Mechi had, by October 1856, already witnessed one relevant gun-haulage trial.

32. Manuscript in India Office Records, British Library, IOR/L/MIL/5/428; Coll. 412, f. 337, 1 October 1857. Very probably Frederic Hemming would have enthusiastically lobbied the East India Company in pursuit of his scheme for ‘Cheap Railroads for India and the Colonies’ – as set out in his booklet on that subject.

33. Ibid. f. 338.

34. Evening Mail, 18 September 1857, p.7. Some of the country roads traversed had been ‘scarcely passable on account of the late heavy rains.’.

35. IOR/L/MIL/5/428; Coll. 412, f. 339.

36. Ibid. f. 338.

37. PP 1857-58 (249) East India (Boydell’s traction engine).

38. Ibid, p. 2.

39. PP 1857-58 (451) Bray’s traction engine, pp. 1–2.

40. Ibid., p. 2.

41. Ibid., pp. 2–3. By contrast, the Boydell engine had required some repairs.

42. Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 11 October 1858, p. 5. The article also refers to actual or potential orders from Venezuela, Russia and Turkey.

43. The Times, 14 October 1858, p. 10 — and 18 October 1858, p. 10.

44. Mark Lane Express, 19 July 1858, Supplement, p. 9.

45. J. Brown, Steam on the Farm (Marlborough: Crowood, 2008), pp. 70–72.

46. ‘Trial of the Steam Cultivators,’ Farmer’s Magazine, 14 (1858), 131.

47. Mark Lane Express, 19 July 1858, Supplement, p. 9.

48. P. Dewey, Iron Harvests of the Field (Lancaster: Carnegie, 2008), p. 63.

49. Ibid.

50. ‘Trial of the Steam Cultivators.’

51. After the month-long coal-hauling demonstration came a triumphal procession through the streets of Warrington when the engine was en route to Liverpool ready for shipping to Venezuela (Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 23 May 1859, p. 3).

52. Mining Journal, Railway and Commercial Gazette, 29 (1859), p. 419.

53. Daily News, 27 March 1861, p. 3. The report overlooks — or dismisses — earlier engine trials in London streets.

54. Journals of the House of Commons, 114 (1859), p. 235. On the same date, a ‘Tolls on Steam Carriages Bill’ was withdrawn. This, from the same three MPs, had only been ‘presented’ nine days previously (p. 228) and perhaps represented a ‘trial run’ or a ‘false start’. Informal discussions (in the ‘corridors of Parliament’) may have suggested that new legislation must include control over road locomotive use — not just toll payments.

55. Ibid., p. 236.

56. ‘Locomotive Act, 1861’ is an official ‘short title’; the full title is ‘An Act for regulating the use of Locomotives on Turnpike and other Roads, and the Tolls to be levied on such Locomotives and on the Waggons and Carriages drawn or propelled by the same.’ [24 & 25 Vict. c.70.]. The Commons Bills (pre- and post-amendment) can (subject to academic or other access) be consulted online via House of Commons Parliamentary Papers. Copies of the House of Lords Bills were obtained by courtesy of House of Lords — Parliamentary Archives.

57. Morning Advertiser, 11 June, 1859, p. 4. The delegation comprised William Garnett, Frederick Hemming and William McAdam.

58. Hansard: House of Commons, 25 July 1859, 155 cc444-5.

59. These would be restrictions in terms of having to gain formal permission for operation between eight in the morning and twelve midnight (leaving just a few unsocial hours for operation without a permit); the suggested 5 mph speed limit would have been no restriction at all for a slow-moving Boydell engine.

60. Evening Standard, 24 July 1860, p. 6.

61. House of Commons Journal 16, 1861, p. 278, col. 1.

62. Evening Standard, 21 June 1861, p. 7. There were, in fact, no fatal injuries.

63. Hansard 24 June 1861, 163 c1481.

64. Ibid. The Home Secretary also reported that ‘the Superintendent of Police, who reported on the matter, stated his opinion that the employment of such an engine on the public roads was dangerous.’

65. Morning Post, 6 December 1861, pp. 6–7.

66. J. A. Foot, Consolidated Abstracts of the Highways Acts [and] The Locomotive Acts (London: Shaw & Sons, 1879), p. 244; K. Oliphant, ‘Tort Law, Risk, and Technological Innovation in England,’ McGill Law Journal, 59 (2014), 819–45.

67. Morning Post, 6 December 1861, pp. 6–7. William Erle was Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Pleas. Within the judicial hierarchy of the time, he was therefore next in line to the Lord Chief Justice of England.

68. J. Agnew, ‘The 1862 London International Exhibition: Machinery on Show and its Message,’ International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology, 85 (2015), p. 9.

69. London Gazette, 11 April 1862.

70. W. Fletcher, The History and Development of Steam Locomotion on Common Roads (London: Spon, 1891), p. 280.

71. Ibid., p. 171.

72. F. T. Evans, ‘Steam Road Carriages of the 1830s: Why did they fail?’ Transactions of the Newcomen Society, 70 (1998), 1–25.

73. J. A. Clarke, ‘Account of the Application of Steam Power to the Cultivation of the Land,’ Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, 20 (1859), 174–228.

74. Mark Lane Express, 14 June 1858, p. 5.