Isambard Kingdom Brunel: British Engineer

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His big breaks came when he was dispatched to Bristol, following his parents’ concern at his consorting with actresses in Brighton. Once in Bristol and with help from his father, he entered and eventually won the competition to design the bridge across the River Avon at Clifton. Unfortunately, 1831 was also the year of the Bristol Riots by laboring men that destroyed business confidence in the city, and the bridge construction was postponed.

In 1832 Brunel began a 15-year association with the Bristol Docks Company, improving and modernizing facilities. Then in March 1833, he was appointed chief engineer of the new Great Western Railway (GWR). The merchant venturers of Bristol had suddenly awoken to the ways in which England’s fledgling railways could alter trade routes.Old Bristol Temple Meads Station is a fine legacy of Brunel’s railway exploits and a beautiful example of the grand Tudor Gothic Revival architectural style he loved. Closed in the 1960s, the terminus now houses the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (BECM), while the 1841 Passenger Shed with its pseudo-medieval hammerbeam roof — a wonder of its age — is hired out for banquets and special events.

‘It’s the world’s oldest surviving purpose-built passenger railway terminus,’ BECM head of public relations Feisal Khalif explains. ‘It’s really appropriate to house the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum here because the station formed part of Brunel’s dream for a seamless, integrated transport system connecting London with the empire and America.’

When Brunel was taken on by the GWR Company, he promised with characteristic chutzpah to build not the cheapest railway route between London and Bristol, but the best. He estimated the cost for track, stations and locomotives at a staggering 2.5 million sterling. Just as characteristically, the price would eventually be more than double that figure.

Still in his 20s, Brunel had no railway engineering experience, but he did know how to make astute appointments, like brilliant locomotive engineer Daniel Gooch. Moreover, his confidence persuaded parliamentary committees and skeptical landowners to permit track construction, though coach and canal companies were, unsurprisingly, against it.

Brunel threw his energies into every aspect of the line that he conceived as the strategic spine of a regional railway network reaching out to Oxford, Plymouth and South Wales. Track, stations, tunnels, viaducts, carriages, engines, every detail occupied him as he dashed about in his custom-designed black britzska (a carriage with a folding top, nicknamed the Flying Hearse), a trademark cigar never far from his hand. The pace was punishing and cash flow problematic, but in June 1841 the London-Bristol section of the Great Western Railway opened, strengthening Bristol as a regional hub and gateway to the Southwest. The following year, Queen Victoria boarded the GWR to make her first-ever rail journey, from Slough to London.

In 2006 a campaign is underway to obtain UNESCO World Heritage Site status for the’string of pearls’ that make up Brunel’s route between London and Bristol, each an enduring monument to his technical expertise: Paddington Station, Wharncliffe Viaduct, the Maidenhead Bridge, Swindon Railway Village, Box Tunnel and Temple Meads Passenger Shed. The 2-mile Box Tunnel alone was an epic of construction: Surpassing all previous tunnels, it required the labor of 4,000 men for 30 months and cost more than 100 lives — engineering success could be a bloody business.

Triumphs were also soured by Brunel’s defeat in the ‘Battle of the Gauges’: He had designed his 7-foot-wide tracks from first principles for speed and smoothness, but George Stephenson had already laid his northern rails at 4 feet 8 1/2 inches. After much controversy, commissioners declared the latter to be’standard’ for future building purposes, mainly because more of the narrower track had been completed!

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