Appointed in March 1833, Brunel was required to complete a preliminary survey of the route by May. With characteristic ingenuity he designed what he called his ‘Flying-Hearse,’ a streamlined carriage with built-in drawing-board and extending seats which doubled as office and bedroom — and also housed a monster case for 50 cigars. But even the demonic Brunel confessed to an assistant: ‘It is harder work than I like. I am rarely much under twenty hours a day at it.’

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Six months later final plans were completed and in March 1834 the bill needed to incorporate the company which would build the new railway was referred to a parliamentary committee for scrutiny and approval. Here the promoters would be required to do battle with all those vested interests who opposed the venture. Some were landowners who either objected to railways for the simple reason that they were new or because it was alleged that they would terrify their livestock; others hoped to bid up the price of the land the railway would need. But the most vociferous opposition came from rival transport interests: coach companies, the Kennet and Avon Canal, and rival groups of railway promoters. The contest lasted for an epic 57 days and ended in defeat for Brunel and his backers.

Undeterred, the directors of the Great Western Railway submitted another bill in 1835 and entrusted the youthful surveyor with the task of presenting their case. His cross-examination went on for 11 days. An eye-witness later paid tribute to what can only be called the performance of a lifetime.

He was rapid in thought, clear in his language and never said too much or lost his presence of mind. I do not remember ever having enjoyed so great an intellectual treat as that of listening to Brunel’s examination.

The enquiry lasted 40 days and ended, in August 1835, in final victory for the G.W.R. — at the cost of £90,000 in legal fees and ‘parliamentary expenses.’ On 26th December 1835 Brunel sat alone in his London office, recording his reflections in the diary which two years of frantic work had obliged him to abandon:

When I wrote last in this book I was just emerging from obscurity. I had been toiling most unprofitably at numerous things…. The Railway is now in progress. I am their Engineer to the finest work in England — a handsome salary–£2,000 a year — on excellent terms with my Directors and all going smoothly….

When Brunel began to work on the G.W.R. he was 30 years old, had no previous experience of railway construction, and no trained assistants to guide him or rely on. His achievement therefore was to be as much a managerial as a technical one. But technical challenges intrigued him and his solution to one of them was to have consequences that would endure for a generation after his death. He was determined to build not just a railway, but the railway. Once while traveling on the Liverpool and Manchester, he had written prophetically:

I record this specimen of the shaking of the Manchester railway. The time is not far off when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 m.p.h. — let me try.

The route surveyed by Brunel from London to Bristol is one of the flattest in England. There are few gradients and those mostly gradual ones. Determined to take best advantage of this Brunel rejected the already-established gauge of 4 feet 8 ½ inches worked out pragmatically in the hilly north-east by George Stephenson, the ‘father of Britain’s railways.’ Instead he opted for a ‘broad gauge’ of 7 feet, which would accommodate larger, more powerful engines, traveling at unprecedented speeds but also with greater stability than ever before. Brunel was certain that the technical superiority of his system — proved in numerous trials — would eventually lead every other line to convert to it. He was wrong. The ‘battle of the gauges’ was to be temporarily resolved by laying a third rail inside the broad gauge tracks from lines running on the standard gauge. The G.W.R. only completed its full conversion to standard gauge in 1892.

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