THE
RAILWAY COMPANION,

Describing
AN
EXCURSION ALONG THE LIVERPOOL LINE,
ACCOMPANIED WITH A
SUCCINCT AND POPULAR HISTORY
OF THE
RISE AND PROGRESS OF RAIL-ROADS,
ILLUSTRATED BY
SEVERAL LITHOGRAPHIC VIEWS.

BY A TOURIST.

LONDON:
PUBLISHED FOR THE AUTHOR, BY EFFINGHAM WILSON, ROYAL EXCHANGE,
AND JAMES FRASER, 216, REGENT-STREET.

MDCCCXXXIII.

(Entered at Stationers' Hall.)

E. Collier, Islington, 17, Trenchurch.

THE
RAILWAY COMPANION.

IN attempting a graphic delineation of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, it may not prove uninteresting to briefly trace the rise and gradual progress of those mechanical contrivances that have eventually led to an undertaking, the completion of which will be commemorated by future generations as a new epoch in commercial history. Indeed, had a task of the present nature fallen to the lot of any writer a dozen years ago, it would have been essentially his earliest duty to have enlightened the general reader on the import of the very term itself. At that period railway in our nomenclature was a mere technical of science,—a mystic word of sealed meaning to the many,—a binoun whose elements could be decyphered only by the mechanician and the philosopher.

True it is that the inhabitants of the northern counties of England, to whom nature has decreed a dwelling and a birth-soil—if we may be allowed the solecism—amid regions of granite and coal, have long possessed some knowledge on the subject; but they formed a very trifling proportion of the multitudinous mass of man-kind, and the information their locality afforded was comparatively limited. In those districts, where coal

LONDON:
PRINTED BY E. COLYER, 17, FENCHURCH STREET.