The Liverpool & Manchester Railway
The LMR was so well-conceived that it laid down many standards for the railways we see today
Nomination: The Liverpool & Manchester Railway is where it all came together. This was the world’s first inter-city railway, and the first railway designed and built with a double-track main line. It was laid out for steam use over the vast majority of its length, and was built with passengers in mind as the major traffic from day one.
The station at Manchester Liverpool Road, now the Museum of Science & Industry, laid out principles of operation that we can still see in stations and airport terminals to this day. Structures such as the Sankey Viaduct were on a scale not seen since Roman times and were built to carry 21st century loads.
Post-Rainhill steam locomotives were almost all built on the principles of the LMR’s famous Rocket, right through to Evening
Star. I always date the start of the railway age to the opening of the LMR on September 15 1830. Andy Savage, Executive Director,Railway HeritageTrust
Palaeontologists consider Archaeopteryx, the famous feathered dinosaur, to be the key link in the evolutionary chain between dinosaurs and modern birds. Railway historians have an equivalent: the Liverpool & Manchester Railway.
Before the Liverpool & Manchester, there were Tyrannosaur and Brontosaur-like plateways and waggonways. What came after the Liverpool & Manchester can be seen today, as clearly as the sparrows and starlings on your bird table - Britain’s rail network.
Early railways were, generally speaking, all about one-way traffic. You owned a coal mine and you needed a quicker way to get your coal to the sea (or canal basin).
Coal would be dug from the ground, trains ran loaded one way, with empty wagons coming back. Others, such as the Surrey Iron Railway, were literally just a railed way. You could pay to use it, just as you would a toll road.
The Liverpool & Manchester Railway (LMR) would be different. Imported textile material would arrive in Liverpool. It would be conveyed to Manchester, be processed, and finished cloth would return to Liverpool for export.
This process was happening anyway, but using canals and turnpikes. The vision for the LMR actually fell to William James, a Warwickshire land agent and solicitor. A railway between Liverpool and Manchester was just one of the main routes he envisaged as part of a national railway network. Others included a line to link the key naval bases at Chatham and Portsmouth, or a Stratford-upon-Avon to London Paddington railway. But it was the line between Liverpool and Manchester that would come to fruition. It nearly didn’t. The Liverpool & Manchester Railway Company was formed on May 20 1824. However, James’ initial route survey was not up to scratch.
Railway pioneer George Stephenson was given the job, but lacking the mathematical input of his son, Robert, the railway’s first bill
was thrown out by Parliament in 1825. The railway company employed John and George Rennie as chief engineers and their proposal received Royal Assent in 1826.
But then the Rennies fell out with the railway company and, once again, George Stephenson found himself in charge. He appointed noted engineer Joseph Locke as his assistant as he set about building a route very different to his own survey.
The resulting 35 miles of railway were quite unlike anything built before. There were 64 bridges and viaducts, many of which would be deemed ‘world firsts’. The nine-arch viaduct that carried the line 21 metres (70ft) above the Sankey Valley, near Newton-le-Willows, is considered to be the world’s first major railway viaduct.
Stephenson perfected the concept of the skew arch on a bridge near Rainhill. This had eluded some of the greatest canal engineers and enabled railway bridges to be built so much more effectively after.
And don’t ignore the first cast iron girder bridge, built on the outskirts of Manchester.
The greatest engineering headache was the miles of bog known as Chat Moss. Stephenson had dismissed using this marshy ground, but the Rennies adopted a route across it in an attempt to placate angry canal owners. Stephenson had no option but to cross it.
Initial thoughts centred on draining the bog. Instead, Stephenson floated the railway across on a bed of wood and heather, weighted down by rocks and stone. If you travel between Liverpool and Manchester today, that’s what’s keeping your train from sinking into the mud! It’s easy to overlook other engineering marvels, such as the 21-metre (70ft) deep rock cutting at Oliver Mount, on the edge of Liverpool or Wapping Tunnel, which gave the railway access to the docks and was the first tunnel dug under an urban settlement.
The Liverpool & Manchester set the standard for coupling configurations and the 4ft 8 ½ in track gauge. Oh, and talking of track, it was the world’s first double-track railway.
The Liverpool & Manchester was a success from the day it opened on September 15 1830 until the day it merged with the Grand Junction Railway just 15 years later.
It was soon forced to expand beyond its initial Oxford Road (Manchester) and Crown Street (Liverpool) and soon sported grand termini in the form of Manchester Victoria and Liverpool Lime Street. It sparked the ‘railway mania’ of the 1840s when every town and city wanted its own railway.
But the Liverpool & Manchester did what no other railway might ever do again: deliver a profit of over 9% to its shareholders.