IRON HORSE 8l

Travellers, once they had got over the first shock of noise,
sulphur and speed, were entranced by the railroad, Greville in
1837 travelled in four and a half hours from Birmingham to
Liverpool to the races, sitting in a sort of chariot with two
places and finding nothing disagreeable about it but the whiffs
of stinking air. His first sensation, he admitted, was one of
slight nervousness and of being run away with, but a feeling
of security soon supervened and the velocity was delightful.
"Town after town, one park and chateau after another are left
behind with the rapid variety of a moving panorama." At every
stop all heads appeared at the windows, while the platform
resounded with astonished cries of "How on earth came you
here?" The most surprising feature of it all, apart from the
speed1 and smoothness of motion, was the wonderful punctuality.
It gave to man something of the precision and power of the
machine.

At first, of course, until people got used to the idea, there was
a certain amount of opposition. Landowners, corporations and
venerable Cathedral clergy and dons were at pains to keep the
vulgar, snorting intruders away from their domains, thus both
impoverishing and inconveniencing their successors. Gentlemen
resented their noisy intrusion on their parks and huntsmen on
their favourite gorses. Poets like Wordsworth thought them
hideous, and farmers complained of frightened horses and
cattle; keepers of posting-houses, stage coachmen and canal
proprietors also naturally hated the puffing billies. al thought
likewise," wrote Jasper Petulengro, "of the danger to which
one's family would be exposed of being run over and severely
scorched by these same flying fiery vehicles." Such opponents
found a doughty champion in -die Tory M.P. for Lincoln,
Colonel Sibthorpe, who "abominated all railroads soever" and
made it his business to oppose every bill for their promotion.

These efforts could not avert the march of progress. The
taste for railway travel once acquired continued to grow. In
1842 the linking of England by rail was still very incomplete.
When a Chartist agitator was arrested in Northumberland for
a seditious speech at Birmingham, he was taken by hackney
coach to Newcastle, by ferry across the Tyne to Gateshead, by

*0ne * engineer1' on the Hverpool-Birmingham line in 1837 reached the astonishing
rate of 45 miles an hour, after which he was promptly dismissed by a prudent company.
GrcviUt Memoirs, fart II, Vol. 1,13.