Liverpool and Manchester Railway

node · earth · Lancashire, England

Opened on 15 September 1830 between the port that landed the raw cotton and the city that spun it, and the first railway anywhere to be worked entirely by steam locomotives, to carry passengers and goods to a timetable as its ordinary business, and to run in both directions on a double track under signal control. It exists because the canal companies between the two cities had become a monopoly charging what they liked; the railway was a shippers' revolt as much as a technical project. Its engineering was severe — the crossing of Chat Moss, a peat bog, was achieved by floating the line on brushwood and heather — and its choice of traction was settled competitively at the Rainhill trials in 1829, won by Robert Stephenson's Rocket. The opening day also produced the first widely reported railway death of a public figure, the MP William Huskisson, struck by a locomotive at Parkside while the ceremonial trains were halted, which put both the promise and the danger of the technology into every newspaper in the country on the same morning.