Joseph Locke - Subsequent Commissions

Subsequent Commissions

In the north, Locke also designed the Lancaster and Preston Junction Railway; the Glasgow, Paisley and Greenock Railway; and the Caledonian Railway from Carlisle to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

In the south, he worked on the London and Southampton Railway, later called the London and South Western Railway, designing, among other structures, Richmond Railway Bridge (1848, since replaced), and Barnes Bridge (1849), both across the River Thames, tunnels at Micheldever, and the 12-arch Quay Street viaduct and the 16-arch Cams Hill viaduct, both in Fareham (1848).

He was actively involved in planning and building many railways in Europe, including the Le Havre, Rouen, Paris rail link, the Barcelona to Mataró line and the Dutch Rhenish Railway. He was present in Paris when the Versailles train crash occurred in 1842, and produced a statement concerning the facts for General Charles Pasley of the Railway Inspectorate. He also experienced a catastrophic failure of one of his viaducts built on the new Paris-Le Havre link. . The viaduct was of stone and brick at Barentin near Rouen, and was the longest and highest on the line. It was 108 feet high, and consisted of 27 arches, each 50 feet wide, with a total length of over 1600 feet. A boy hauling ballast for the line up an adjoining hillside early that morning (about 6.00 am) saw one arch (the fifth on the Rouen side) collapse, and the rest followed suit. Fortunately, no one was killed, although several workmen were injured in a mill below the structure. Locke attributed the catastrophic failure to frost action on the new lime cement, and premature off-centre loading of the viaduct with ballast. It was rebuilt at Thomas Brassey’s cost, and survives to the present. Having pioneered many new lines in France, Locke also helped establish the first locomotive works in the country.

Distinctive features of Locke’s railway works were economy, the use of masonry bridges wherever possible and the absence of tunnels. An illustration of this is that there is no tunnel between Birmingham and Glasgow.