Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the Great Western Railway

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Britain now lavishes the same care on its industrial heritage as it once reserved for its castles and cathedrals. Honour, too, is now paid to its creators. Telford, a ‘new town’ in Shropshire, records the name of the founding father of modern civil engineering. But Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) is honoured, not by the name of a town but of a university, a unique distinction in Britain. Fittingly, Brunel University is renowned for its technological departments. Also fittingly it is located on the western edge of London, for one of Brunel’s most significant achievements was to link the Capital with the West.

Historians disagree about when we should date the first ‘true’ railway but most accept it to be the Liverpool and Manchester, which opened in 1830, linking one of Britain’s biggest ports with the nation’s largest textile manufacturing centre. The Surrey Iron Railway (1803) and the Stockton and Darlington (1825) might vie for this title, but the Liverpool and Manchester was the first to carry passengers and freight solely by the of steam power. The practical and financial success of this venture plunged the country into a railway mania that by 1850 had established a national network covering more than 6,000 miles and joining together all the major cities and ports.

Britain was unified as never before. The tyranny of distance had been smashed. A cheap national system of postage, national daily papers and the general adoption of Greenwich Mean Time (essential for the co-ordination of timetables) were unlooked-for benefits of this revolutionary new form of transport. National unification may have been the outcome of the establishment of Britain’s railway system. But profit rather than unity was the aim of the railway promoters and there was precious little system about their methods. If it was an age of bold engineers and even bolder capitalists it was also an age of bogus ‘experts’ and unscrupulous speculators. Fortunes were lost as well as made as bands of railway promoters jostled one another parliamentary committees whose approval was essential for the construction of any new line.

Liverpool was one of England’s great Atlantic ports. Bristol was the other. And the merchants of Bristol feared permanent eclipse at the hands of their upstart rival unless they too could obtain the benefits of the new technology. But they looked not to a link with the nearby manufacturing centre (there was none nearby comparable to Manchester) but with London itself, which would mean building a railway some four times as long as the Liverpool and Manchester, a feat of construction on a scale never attempted since the age of the pyramids. They sought an engineer to oversee this stupendous task. They found him — Isambard Kingdom Brunel, not yet 30 years old.

Brunel the engineer was the son of Brunel the engineer. Brunel senior, a royalist, had fled the French Revolution to become, briefly, official engineer to the city of New York, and then, having settled in London, a consultant engineer to the Royal Navy. Educated and trained in both French and English schools and workshops, Brunel junior served his practical apprenticeship assisting his father in the building of the first tunnel under the Thames. (It now carries the Underground between Wapping and Rotherhithe.) Twice the young engineer came within seconds of death when the workings collapsed and hundreds of tons of debris and water came crashing down on the construction gangs. The second collapse brought an end to all work on the tunnel for seven years. Convalescing, Isambard dreamed of the day when he would ‘at last be rich, have a house built, of which I have even made the drawings…be the first engineer and an example for future ones.’ What he feared most was what he thought most likely: ‘a mediocre success — an engineer sometimes employed, sometimes not–£200 or £300 a year and that uncertain.’

Years of frustration were to follow as Brunel busied himself with a bewildering variety of projects, from an experimental chemical engine to supercede steam power to supervision of routine coastal drainage works. Public recognition came at last with dramatic success in the competition to design a bridge to span the mighty Avon river gorge at Bristol. Ironically, the bridge was not to be completed until after Brunel’s death but the commission brought him into contact with the promoters of the projected Bristol to London railway and thus set him on the road to his first great work.

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