By Steve Matthews

Last updated 05:14, Friday, 07 November 2008

The railways we have left have mellowed into the landscape. They no longer seem like great feats of engineering – man imposing his will upon the landscape, cutting, embanking, tunnelling, bridging, changing the natural contours of the land to provide a near straight and level line from A to B.

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Dangerous work: A sketch of Gelt Bridge made by JW Carmichael in 1835. It shows the timber centering to support arch building and a travelling crane which could deliver masonry to any point on the bridge

A History of the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway 1824-1870 by Bill Fawcett. North Eastern Railway Association. £24.95

The Newcastle Carlisle railway was one of the great feats of early railway engineering. It was the first line to cut across the country from coast to coast.

The viaduct over the Eden at Wetheral was one of the greatest challenges. In 1828 the engineer, Benjamin Thompson, had visited Henry Howard, and, sitting in his library in Corby Castle and leafing through various volumes on classical antiquity, they had settled on a design of seven arches that imitated the fine Roman bridge at Alcantara in Spain.

When Francis Giles came to build the bridge, the viaduct was re-designed, the seven arches became five, the fussy detailing was removed and the aristocrat imagination was curtailed to meet the needs of the commercial world.

The promoters of the railway, a group of Newcastle industrialists, had first got together in 1824, but it was four years before they obtained the Act of Parliament that gave them the powers to go ahead, and problems with raising the immense amount of capital needed meant it was 1838 before the railway was fully functioning.

The new railway was part of a larger network of transport services connecting with shipping to Liverpool, Ireland and the west of Scotland.

Today, it is hard to appreciate the scale of this great enterprise. It was a work whose construction was recorded in great detail by artists such as JW Carmichael. One sketch from 1836 shows the Caldew bridge in Carlisle under construction. Vast blocks of masonry are piled on the ground. Masons with mallet and chisel are shaping and dressing the blocks. A precarious-looking timber crane has been erected to lift the blocks onto the temporary wooden structure that marks the intended bridge. The hoist is counter-balanced with a large block of stone and two operative are perched some 27 feet above the ground turning the windlass.

On February 20, 1836, one of the guy line stakes came loose from the soft ground and the crane toppled over, killing one of the operatives immediately. The railway was a very expensive venture.

It was very much a product of the society of its time. The gentry and the new industrialists, the self-made men and the wealthy combined to transform the face of the country.

Their work was the product of science and invention but it still depended on the muscle of large numbers of labourers.

The Newcastle and Carlisle railway is a monument to another age. Unusually, it remains much as it was when originally built. The bridges, tunnels, embankments and cuttings are little changed and many of the stations and houses for workers are still to be seen.

Bill Fawcett’s wonderfully meticulous book goes far beyond the interests of the railway buff. He tells in great detail the story of the railway’s commercial development, carefully describes all aspects of the railway’s engineering and construction and gives a picture of the personalities involved in the enterprises.

Throughout, he is aided by the wealth of illustrative material. There are construction plans, sketches of the railway as it is being built, photographs of the various stages of its existence and portraits of the people involved.

The book is a valuable contribution to local history and the kind of detailed study that will be of far wider interest.

If the railway has mellowed into the landscape, Bill Fawcett enables us to see this great enterprise as it was when it was first built.

Bill Fawcett will be talking about the book at Bookcase, 19 Castle Street, at 7.30 on the evening of Friday, November 14. All welcome.

A History of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway is available from Bookends, 56 Castle Street, Carlisle, and 66 Main Street, Keswick, and from www.bookscumbria.com