![]() To stop a car travelling at speed requires a distance proportional to that speed. Those of us used to driving cars are familiar with the concept of ‘stopping distance’. One can well imagine Stephenson’s feelings as Huskisson stumbled into the Rocket’s path, but consideration of the reasons why he was unable to stop in time brings us back to the theme of Signalling and its development. Despite Stephenson himself driving a special train conveying the unfortunate man to obtain medical attention, at a speed reported to be nearly 40 miles per hour, Huskisson died later the same day. There is an irony in the fact that its opening is now remembered not so much as the dawn of the railway era but because there occurred during the celebrations Britain’s first public railway accident, in which the local MP, William Huskisson, was run down and severely injured by a train hauled by the ‘Rocket’, driven by George Stephenson. The opening of the L&MR can therefore be considered as marking the beginning of the ‘Railway Signalling Age’, a good point at which to start a survey of signalling and its development. In September 1830, the Duke of Wellington opened the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world’s first purpose- built passenger-car rying railway with haulage by locomotives. ![]() In North-East England, the much-celebrated Stockton and Darlington Railway opened in 1825 as a freight-carrying railway, using both rope and locomotive haulage for its goods traffic, although passenger coaches pulled by horses were provided later as an af terthought. Cast iron rails fastened to wooden sleepers in the now familiar pattern first appeared at the Duke of Newcastle’s Colliery near Sheffield in 1776, and the Middleton Colliery Railway, constructed to transport coal to Leeds, was the scene in 1812 of the first recorded commercial use of steam locomotives. Track using plain wooden rails quickly wore out and evolved into the ‘plateway’ with iron plates fixed to wooden bearers (track maintenance workers often used to be referred to as ‘platelayers’). In Britain, the earliest record of a ‘waggonway’, using wooden rails, dates from 1630, when one was laid down near what would become the cradle of both railways and coal- mining, Newcastle upon Tyne. It is likely that the earliest railways existed in or about mine workings – the concept of a prepared way would have been most useful in conditions unsuitable for ordinary wagons or pack-horses, where heavy loads in quantity would have to be carried over rough ground from a mine to a road, or a canal. ![]() To give a History of Railway Signalling some sort of context, it is useful to start with a summary of the history of ‘the railway’ itself.
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