The first completed section of the G.W.R., from London to Maidenhead on the Thames, opened on 4th June, 1838. By March 1840 the route had been extended to Reading. The Bristol end involved major technical challenges, with Temple Meads Station being built 15 feed above ground level and requiring an arched wooded roof span of 72 feet, four feet wider than Westminster Hall, the largest medieval roof-span in England. Bath station, similarly elevated, required a 73-arch viaduct approach. And between the two stations it was necessary to build another viaduct, four bridges and seven tunnels. Nevertheless this section was opened on the last day of August 1840. All that remained was the most difficult section of all, from Chippenham to Bath, which would involve more viaducts, a crossing of the river Avon, the diversion of the Kennet and Avon Canal and the construction of the Box Tunnel, which Brunel’s critics were to call ‘monstrous and extraordinary, most dangerous and impracticable.’

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At two miles long it was by far the longest tunnel ever attempted. Every week for two and a half years it accounted for a ton of candles and a ton of gunpowder. It also accounted for the lives of more than 100 men of the 4,000 who worked on it. In December 1840, four months after the tunnel should have been completed, Brunel took personal charge of the site. By June 1841 the entire route was completed. It had cost £6,500,000, more than double the original estimate but it was indeed ‘the finest work in England’.

The ultimate accolade came just one year later when, for the first time ever, the young Queen Victoria graciously assented to travel by rail. Ensconced in a magnificent Royal Saloon, specifically built at Swindon on the orders of the directors of the G.W.R., and with Brunel himself and Daniel Gooch, the 26-year-old Superintendent of the Locomotive Department, riding on the foot-plate, the Queen travelled the dozen or so miles from Slough, near Windsor, to Paddington in just 25 minutes. Railways had now, in a social sense, finally come of age.

But it was to be another decade before the London terminus was to acquire a full-fledged station building worthy of its importance. Brunel wrote to the architect Matthew Digby Wyatt to invite his collaboration on the project. The letter reveals a curious mixture of impatience, decisiveness and sensitivity so characteristic of the man:

’I am going to design, in a great hurry, and I believe to build a station after my own fancy . . . such a thing will be entirely metal …it is a branch of architecture of which I am fond, and, of course, believe myself fully competent for; but for detail of ornamentation I have neither time nor knowledge . . . I trust your knowledge of me would lead you to expect anything but a disagreeable mode of consulting you . . . If you are disposed to accept my offer, can you be with me this evening at 9 1/2 p.m.? It is the only time this week I can appoint, and the matter presses very much. . . .

After the Great Western Railway came the Great Western, a steamship intended to link Bristol and America as the railway had linked Bristol and London. The Great Western was followed by the Great Britain, the first all-iron, screw-driven steamship, which can still be seen in its home port of Bristol. Not that Brunel’s interest in ships meant any lack of interest in other projects, which included a vastly expensive and ultimately abortive series of experiments to develop a railway run on compressed air, the construction of a bridge over the 1,100-foot-wide river Tamar and the design of a standardised prefabricated hospital for use in the Crimean war. His last and greatest project was the construction of the Great Eastern which, at 20,000 tons, was six times larger than any ship ever previously built. Brunel lived just long enough to see it launched. Daniel Gooch extolled his former master in a most fitting epitaph:

’By his death the greatest of England’s engineers was lost, the man with the greatest originality of thought and power of execution, bold in his plans but right. The commercial world thought him extravagant; but although he was so, things are not done by those who sit down and count the cost of every thought and act.’

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