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Acting as land-agent for gentlemen of property in the mining districts, he had laid down several tramroads in the neighbourhood of Birmingham, Gloucester, and Bristol; and he published many pamphlets urging their formation in other places. At one period of his life he was a large iron-manufacturer. The times, however, went against him.
He ventilated the subject amongst his friends, and about the beginning of 1821 a committee was formed for the purpose of bringing the scheme of a railroad before the public. The novel project having become noised abroad, attracted the attention of the friends of railways in other quarters. Tramroads were by no means new expedients for the transit of heavy articles.
For a youth like Endymion, born and bred in our southern counties, the Berkshire downs varied by the bustle of Pall-Mall and the Strand Lancashire, with its teeming and toiling cities, its colossal manufactories and its gigantic chimneys, its roaring engines and its flaming furnaces, its tramroads and its railroads, its coal and its cotton, offered a far greater contrast to the scenes in which he had hitherto lived, than could be furnished by almost any country of the European continent.
The Act provided for the making and maintaining of tramroads for the passage “of waggons and other carriages” “with men and horses or otherwise,” and a further clause made provision for damages done in course of traffic by the “waggoners.” The public were to be free “to use with horses, cattle and carriages,” the roads formed by the company, on payment of the authorised rates, “between the hours of seven in the morning and six in the evening,” during winter; “between six in the morning and eight in the evening,” in two of the spring and autumn months; and “between five in the morning and ten in the evening,” in the summer months of May, June, July, and August.
Reynolds was shortly after followed on all the tramroads throughout the Country. It is also worthy of note that the first iron bridge ever erected was cast and made at the Coalbrookdale Works its projection as well as its erection being mainly due to the skill and enterprise of Abraham Darby the third.
William James, of West Bromwich, belonged to the active class of projectors. He was a man of considerable social influence, of an active temperament, and had from an early period taken a warm interest in the formation of tramroads.
The gauge of the first tramroad laid down had virtually settled the point. The gauge of wheels of the common vehicles of the country—of the carts and waggons employed on common roads, which were first used on the tramroads—was about 4 feet 8½ inches. And so the first tramroads were laid down of this gauge.
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