BRUNEL, BUILDER OF THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY

Bristol, which had been the premier port in England for over two centuries, viewed the growing power of Liverpool as a direct challenge. In response, the leading citizens planned in 1835 a railway line to extend from London to Bristol, and beyond to Exeter. In 1833 they took the bold step of appointing the 28-year old Isambard Brunel as chief engineer. He personally surveyed the whole route on horse-back, determined to keep it level, and wide enough to accommodate his wide gauge of 7 feet 1/4 inch (2.14m), chosen by him to increase the carrying capacity of his wagons and coaches, improving their stability, and hence allowing for much higher speeds.

In spite of the operating advantages of Brunel's 'Broad Gauge' the capital costs for his new lines were much higher; all the other lines in Britain were using the original 'Stephenson' narrow gauge, contemptuously called by Brunel the 'coal-wagon gauge'. The consequent delays and upheavals where the two gauges met were unacceptable, and in 1846 the Government standardized on the narrow gauge.

On this route Brunel used daring construction for the Maidenhead bridge (left). This bridge had to comply with the constraint that the towpaths and river navigation must remain unobstructed. He used shallow brickwork arches with a span of 128 feet (38.9m), rising only 24 feet (7.3m). Like Perronet's earlier Neuilly bridge, critics said that the shallow arches would collapse, but when the centering was removed in 1839 it stood in all its elegance as it still does today, though widened, and carrying much heavier trains than at its inception. He also cut the longest tunnel at the time, the Box tunnel, 1.8 miles (2.9 km.), which took five years, the tunnellers reputedly needing a ton of candles and a ton of gunpowder a week.
At the opening of the line in June 1838 four trains with 1,479 passengers travelled from London to Maidenhead, pulled by the locomotive North Star, designed by Daniel Gooch (1816-89) appointed at the age of 20 to be Brunel's Chief Locomotive Assistant (ending up as Chairman of the G.W.R (Great Western Railway) for the last twenty-one years of his life); by 1841 Bristol could be reached in four hours.

Queen Victoria first travelled by steam train from Slough to Paddington in the summer of 1842, with Brunel beside her, and Gooch at the locomotive controls. She wrote how nice it was to be "free from dust and crowd and heat, and I am quite charmed by it". This Royal approval had a strong influence on the general acceptance of the railways, counteracting the description of the horrors that would follow from the spreading of the 'tentacles' of the railways across the countryside.

Dickens in Dombey and Son (1840) describes the grim scene of the building of the London end of the London to Birmingham railway: "the first shock of a great earthquake had rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre…" but he does recognise the benefits to come; later "In short the yet unfinished and unopened railroad was in progress...and from the very core of all this dire disorder trailed smoothly away upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement". Wordsworth however remained hostile; in a sonnet he declaims: "Now for your shame, a Power, the Thirst of gold/ That rules o'er Britain like a baneful star/ Wills that your peace, your beauty, shall be sold/ And clear way made for her triumphal car".