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CHAPTER IX.

WOLVERTON.

FLYING by rail through green fields below Harrow Hill and thence to Watford,-stopping for a moment in a deep cutting to hear a man cry "Tring!" and a bell say "Ring!" until the passenger gets so confused with the paltry squabble that he scarcely knows which of the two competitors is vociferating the substantive, and which the verb,-we will now conduct our readers to the Station and little town of Wolverton.

As every city, village, or hamlet on the surface of the globe is usually inhabited by people of peculiar opinions, professions, character, tastes, fashions, follies, whims, and oddities, so there is always to be witnessed a corresponding variety in the allinement and architecture of their dwellings-the forms and excrescences of each often giving to the passing traveller a sort of phrenological insight into the character of the inmates. One street, inhabited by poor people, is as crooked as if it had been traced out by the drunken Irishman who, on being kindly questioned, in a very narrow lane across which he was reeling, as to the length of road he had travelled, replied, " Faith! it's not so much the length of it as the BREADTH of it that has tired me!" Another—a rich street -is quite straight. Here is a palace-there are hovels. The hotel is of one shape the stock-exchange of another. There are private houses of every form-shops of every colour-columns, steeples, fountains, obelisks ad infinitum. Conspicuous over one door there is to be seen a golden pestle and mortar-from another boldly projects a barber's pole-a hatchment decorates a thirdthe Royal Arms a fourth-in short, it would be endless to enumerate the circumstantial evidence which in every direction proves the truth of the old saying, "Many men, many minds.” ·

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To all general rules, however, there are exceptions; and certainly it would be impossible for our most popular auctioneer, if he wished ever so much to puff off the appearance of Wolverton, to say more of it than that it is a little red-brick town composed of 242 little red-brick houses-all running either this way or that way at right angles-three or four tall red-brick engine-chimneys, a number of very large red-brick workshops, six red houses for officers-one red beer-shop, two red public-houses, and, we are glad to add, a substantial red school-room and a neat stone church, the whole lately built by order of a Railway Board, at a railway station, by a railway contractor, for railway men, railway women, and railway children; in short, the round cast-iron plate over the door of every house, bearing the letters L. N. W. R., is the generic symbol of the town. The population is 1405, of whom 638 are below sixteen years of age; indeed, at Wolverton are to be observed an extraordinary number of young couples, young children, young widows, also a considerable number of men who have lost a finger, hand, arm, or leg. All, however, whether whole or mutilated, look for support to "the Company," and not only their services and their thoughts but their parts of speech are more or less devoted to it :—for instance, the pronoun "she" almost invariably alludes to some locomotive engine; "he" to "the chairman," "it" to the London Board. At Wolverton the progress of time itself is marked by the hissing of the various arrival and departure trains. The driver's wife, with a sleeping infant at her side, lies watchful in her bed until she has blessed the passing whistle of "the down mail." With equal anxiety her daughter long before daylight listens for the rumbling of " the 33 A.м. goods up," on the tender of which lives the ruddy but smutty-faced young fireman to whom she is engaged. The blacksmith as he plies at his anvil, the turner as he works at his lathe, as well as their children at school, listen with pleasure to certain well-known sounds on the rails which tell them of approaching rest.

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The workshops at Wolverton, taken altogether, form, generally speaking, an immense hospital or Hôtel des Invalides " for the sick and wounded locomotive engines of the Southern

District. We witnessed sixty of them undergoing various operations, more or less severe, at the same time. Among them was Crampton's new six-wheel engine, the hind wheels of which are eight feet high, weighing thirty-eight tons, and with its tender sixty tons. It is capable of drawing at the usual speed twelve carriages laden with passengers. The workshops at this station are so extensive, that it would be tedious and indeed almost impracticable to describe them in detail; we will therefore merely mention that in one of them we saw working at once by the power of an 18-horse steam-engine twelve turning-lathes, five planing-machines, three slotting-machines, two screw-bolt dittoand, as a trifling example of the undeviating accuracy with which these contrivances work, we may state that from a turning-lathe a shaving from cold iron will sometimes continue to flow for forty feet without breaking. There are a large cast-iron foundry, a brass foundry, machines for grinding, and also for polishing; sheers for cutting, and stamps for punching cold iron as if it were pasteboard; an immense oven for heating tires of wheels; a smith's shop containing twenty-four forges, all of which were in operation at once. Two steam-engines-one for machinery, the other for pumping water for the town and offices only, for the Company's well-water here, as at Camden Station, disagrees with the locomotives. A large finishing store, in which were working by steam fifteen turning-lathes, five slottingmachines, five planing ditto, one screwing ditto, two drilling ditto, two shaving ditto. Beneath the above we entered another workshop containing sixteen turning-lathes, two drilling-machines, one slotting ditto, one screwing ditto, one nut ditto, one cylinderboring ditto, one shaping ditto. In the great store-yard there is an hydraulic press of a power of 200 tons for squeezing wheels on to their axles, or wrenching them off. Another workshop is

filled with engines undergoing repair, and adjoining it there is a large store or pharmacopoeia, containing, in the form of oil, tallow, nuts, bars, bolts, &c., all the medicine which sick locomotives occasionally require.

At a short distance towards the south we entered a beautiful building, lighted during the day by plate-glass in the roof, by

gas at night, and warmed by steam. In its centre there stands a narrow elevated platform, whereon travels a small locomotive, which brings into the building, and deposits on thirteen sets of rails on each side, twenty-six locomotive engines for examination and repair. On the outside, in the open air, we found at work what is called "a scrap drum," which by revolving cleans scraps of old rusty iron, just as a public school improves awkward boys by hardly rubbing them one against another. The scrap iron, after having been by this discipline divested of its rust, is piled on a small wooden board for further schooling, and when sufficiently hot the glowing mass is placed under a steam-hammer alongside, whose blows, each equal to about ten tons, very shortly belabour to "equality and fraternity" the broken bolts, bars, nuts, nails, screw-pins, bits of plate-iron, &c., which are thus economically welded into a solid mass or commonwealth. In another smelting-shop, 150 feet in length, we saw at work fourteen forges, six turning-lathes, one drilling-machine, and one ironshaving machine. Lastly, there are gas-works for supplying the whole of the Company's establishment with about seventy or eighty thousand cubic feet of gas per day.

The above is but a faint outline of the Company's hospital at Wolverton for the repair and maintenance merely of their locomotive engines running between London and Birmingham.

The magnitude of the establishment will best speak for itself; but as our readers, like ourselves, are no doubt tired almost to death of the clanking of anvils-of the whizzing of machineryof the disagreeable noises created by the cutting, shaving, turning, and planing of iron-of the suffocating fumes in the brassfoundry, in the smelting-houses, in the gas-works-and lastly of the stunning blows of the great steam-hammer-we beg leave to offer them a cup of black tea at the Company's public refreshment-room, in order that, while they are blowing, sipping, and enjoying the beverage, we may briefly explain to them the nature of this beautiful little oasis in the desert.

Wolverton Refreshment-Room.

In dealing with the British nation, it is an axiom among those who have most deeply studied our noble character, that to keep John Bull in beaming good-humour it is absolutely necessary to keep him always quite full. The operation is very delicately called "refreshing him ;" and the London and North-Western Railway Company having, as in duty bound, made due arrangements for affording him, once in about every two hours, this support, their arrangements not only constitute a curious feature in the history of railway management, but the dramatis personæ we are about to introduce form, we think, rather a strange contrast to the bare arms, muscular frames, heated brows, and begrimed faces of the sturdy workmen we have just left.

The refreshment establishment at Wolverton is composed of— 1. A matron or generallissima.

2. Seven very young ladies to wait upon the 3. Four men and three boys do. do.

passengers.

4. One man-cook, his kitchen-maid, and his two scullery-maids. 5. Two housemaids.

6. One still-room-maid, employed solely in the liquid duty of making tea and coffee,

7. Two laundry-maids.

8. One baker and one baker's-boy.

9. One garden-boy.

And lastly, what is most significantly described in the books of the establishment

10. "An odd-man."

"Homo sum, humani nihil à me alienum puto."

There are also eighty-five pigs and piglings, of whom hereafter.

The manner in which the above list of persons, in the routine of their duty, diurnally revolve in "the scrap-drum" of their worthy matron, is as follows:-Very early in the morning-in cold winter long before sunrise-" the odd-man" wakens the two

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