The line was a difficult one to construct; but George Stephenson set
about it with the skill and knowledge acquired during many years of slow
experience; and he performed it with distinguished success. He was now
forty-four; and he had had more to do with the laying down of rails than
any other man then living. The great difficulty of the Liverpool and
Manchester line lay in the fact that it had to traverse a vast shaking
bog or morass, Chat Moss, which the best engineers had emphatically
declared it would be impossible to cross. George Stephenson, however,
had a plan for making the impossible possible. He simply floated his
line on a broad bottom, like a ship, on the top of the quaking quagmire;
and proceeded to lay down his rails on this seemingly fragile support
without further scruple. It answered admirably, and still answers to the
present day. The other works on the railway, especially the cuttings,
were such as might well have appalled the boldest heart in those
experimental ages of railway enterprise. It is easy enough for us now to
undertake tunnelling great hills or filling up wide valleys with long
ranges of viaduct, because the thing has been done so often, and the
prospect of earning a fair return on the money sunk can be calculated
with so high a degree of reasonable probability. But it required no
little faith for George Stephenson and his backers to drive a level
road, for the first time, through solid rocks and over trembling
morasses, the whole way from Liverpool to Manchester. He persevered,
however, and in 1830, after four years' toilsome and ceaseless labour,
during which he had worked far-harder than the sturdiest navvy on the
line, his railway was finally opened for regular traffic.

Before the completion of the railway, George Stephenson had taken part
in a great contest for the best locomotive at Liverpool, a prize of L500
having been offered by the company to the successful competitor.
Stephenson sent in his improved model, the Rocket, constructed after