Post by Iain Flynn

Chat Moss, an inconvenient blob of peat and bog two-thirds of the way to Manchester from Liverpool, on a suitably bleak and wet evening, from a Northern Train. Here, exactly 200 years ago, in June 1826, the proprietors of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, having just won the second leg of their epic parliamentary tussle with the canal interest, fired the starting gun on the Railway Age that was to transform the world. Their engineer, George Stephenson, began here, by draining the bog and building a raft of wood. On this he floated the twin-track inter-city railway, the world's first, over which I'm travelling today, thereby confounding his many critics. https://lnkd.in/eiB5BRwM