Full Steam Ahead: How the Railways Made Britain. Peter Ginn
the nineteenth century, the only real competition for slate as a roofing material was tiles. However, in the 1830s these were still heavier than slate and also expensively hand produced. Of course, slate also required a good deal of handwork, from extraction to shaping – but it was still cheaper to produce. The quarrymen worked in small gangs of between four and eight men and their wages were determined by the finished output of the gang. About half the members of the gang would be ‘rock men’, who cut the slate out of the ground. The others would be equally divided between ‘splitters’ and ‘dressers’, who shaped the rock into slates. Independently of these gangs, ‘bad rock men’ were employed to remove other rock that was impeding progress and ‘rubbish men’ to remove the waste rock. By 1860, sawing, planing and dressing machines assisted in dividing up the large rough blocks into more manageable pieces for the splitters to work with, and helped trim the edges into regular, standardized rectangles. Rather than reducing the amount of work as such, mechanization allowed for faster processing, which in turn brought costs and prices down. All these factors made slate even more competitive as a product compared with its main alternative, tile.
The Ffestiniog railway line is a remarkable feat of engineering. With no motive power, the loaded wagons were intended simply to run down to the quay under the force of gravity. That meant that the gradient of the line had to be a steady one-in-eighty. If the railway became steeper, the trucks might speed up and run themselves off the rails at the bends; if the line flattened out, there was the danger of the wagons slowing to a standstill. Only the very last portion of the line was level, where the momentum of the loaded wagons was enough to allow them to run on for a distance before gently stopping just before the quayside. The surveying and construction skills involved in the building of the line can still be seen and appreciated today, as the line snakes its way around the hillside over embankments and through cuttings, following the contours of the landscape. Such skills had been honed in building the canals, and by the mid-nineteenth century they were the stock in trade of a large body of professional men and skilled labourers.
These days the Ffestiniog railway no longer transports slate – only passengers. However, its proud heritage lives on.
Historian Ruth Goodman aboard the Ffestiniog railway steam train Prince.
SLATE MINING
Widely known as ‘blue gold’, the slate extracted from Welsh mines has been used to cover roofs across the globe. Welsh slate mining was an industry that expanded with the railways. It began with simple horse-drawn railways that took the slate from the mine to the ports and ended with an extensive rail network that could move vast quantities of heavy loads across the entire country.
Prior to descending into the mine, we looked at the exposed stratigraphy of the rocks around us. The band of slate was quite clear and went down into the ground at a 35-degree angle. We entered the mine, went down the trackway that would have once been used to haul up the slate, and found ourselves in a different world. The mine we were in was the second largest slate mine in Wales (the biggest was just across the road). Branching off a central circular passage were a number of caverns from which the slate was extracted. I was asked by our television sound engineer, ‘why are you whispering?, and the only answer I could give was that the mine reminded me of a cathedral.
Families which lived near the Welsh slate mines often worked together in gangs and were paid according to the amount of usable slate that they produced. Once you were assigned a plot, as a miner you had to see it through until the slate was exhausted. This could easily take up to 30 years. As a rule of thumb, of all the material extracted from the ground, only ten per cent was usable as roof tiles. The rest was cast onto giant heaps adjacent to the railway near the entrance of the mine. This has completely changed the surrounding landscape, effectively creating new hills.
Slate is a sedimentary rock formed in layers that are easily visible to the naked eye. To mine it, holes were drilled by hand, perpendicular to the grain. On a new face of slate, before a platform was created upon which the miners could work, the first holes had to be drilled. To do this the miners used a chain wrapped around one of their legs, which supported their weight.
Slate is a relatively soft rock, so the drill that makes a hole which can be filled with powder and a fuse to blast a new face is simply an iron rod with a bulbous section that is heavy near to one end. The short end of the rod is used to start the hole and the long end to finish it. The drill is simply moved up and down by hand and the weight pulverizes the rock below to dust.
We were in the mine with electric lights and modern access routes. When the mine was fully operational in the nineteenth century, each cavern may have been lit by just one candle. The miners covered their own expenses, so burning lots of candles would impact on profit. The work was repetitive, often dangerous – especially when blasting – and the men spent much of their time chained to rocks in the half-light. In some instances, it is easy to imagine these conditions breaking the spirits of the miners, but in Wales it was quite the opposite. Poetry, song and political ideology were all penned in the mines. Lunch was taken in a caban (Welsh for cabin) built out of discarded slate in the mine area that the men were working. It was here that many discussions took place – and they were often minuted, so some records of their contents still survive to this day. Competitions with miners from other caverns also took place, often based on song or poetry.
However, it was above on the surface where the real competition was arguably happening. The slate taken up there had to be cut down to size in order to make the roof tiles. Tiles ranged in sizes and had names such as ‘king’ (largest), ‘empress’, ‘princess’ or ‘lady’, according to their dimensions. The skill of the cutter and the speed at which he worked would directly impact upon the usable product produced. The rock had to be sawn, split and trimmed – and slate dust is not kind to the lungs....
STEAM
However, we must not forget steam. That, too, has a long and convoluted history. Claims that such and such was ‘the man who invented the steam engine’ tend to obscure the fact that all great people stand upon the shoulders of giants. Look closer, and what you see is a long journey of ideas, experiments, refinements and improvements, with the baton of progress moving from one hand to another, and advancements often dependent on other tangential developments. Amongst all the great visionaries and engineers involved in the story of steam engines, one of the greatest was James Watt. Using huge skill, he applied new scientific thinking from the academic world and combined it with what he discovered by analyzing the working model of another man’s engine. This statement, of course, does not take anything away from Watt’s genius or his astonishingly hard work. But steam engines did not simply pop into existence one night after somebody watched a kettle boiling…
The young James Watt was a clever lad who did not really fit within the usual schooling system of his day, having no head for Latin or Greek; however, he did have both a good feel for numbers (his grandfather had set up a school of mathematics) and for practical matters. Watt’s father was a gifted maker of precision instruments who gave his son a set of small tools as a present. As a child, James was reported as enjoying nothing more than taking his toys apart and putting them back together, often in different combinations. One of his father’s workmen even remarked that he thought ‘Jamie’ would have ‘fortune at his fingers’ ends’. It was years later, when he was working for the professors of the University in Glasgow producing the instruments and apparatus that they required for teaching and research – as well as making musical instruments – that James Watt’s researches into steam power began. Ideas had been discussed and models made from the latter part of the seventeenth century onwards, and the first commercial steam-powered engine had emerged back in 1698, when Thomas Savery produced his ‘Fire Engine’. This machine could pull water vertically upwards for a distance of forty feet, earning it the nickname, ‘the miner’s friend’. It addressed a newly urgent problem. The mines of southern England were reaching greater depths and experiencing severe flooding problems. Traditional methods of pumping out all this water using horse or water power were proving inadequate, both systems