Author: WEALE, John [ed].
Title: Ensamples of Railway Making; which, although not of English practice, are submitted, with practical illustrations, to the civil engineer and the British and Irish public.
Description: London, Architectural Library 1843. Octavo blindstamped cloth (a little worn at the tips); viii,xlii,64,xvi,101pp, litho frontispiece, two maps, 24 folding plates, two folding tables, one engraving in the text. A little misfolding and some browning and spotting but quite a good copy. ¶ R.F. Isherwood supplies an extensive report on the Utica and Syracuse Railroad and E. Dobson likewise reports on the railways of Belgium. Railway building in England in the early 1840s was in poor shape and worse repute - depression and irrecoverable costs of construction being the main problems. The Utica and Syracuse railway is a salutary example of practical and economical building - it was built at a cost of £3,600 per mile whereas the average English railway cost £30,000 per mile. Some of the savings came from a patent excavator which is described and illustrated; more crucial was the use of timber bridges and much of this (and most of the plates) is devoted to various forms of these. Railways in Ireland did not yet exist and Weale saw their necessity as almost a moral imperative: 'it is no less .. than the duty of the gentry, mercantile and trading classes, to encourage a full development of her energies .. as the best means of securing to that portion of the empire a share of advantages to which they are justly entitled, but which they have never yet enjoyed'.

Keywords: civil engineering transport technology railways bridges c19th America Belgium England