Shropshire Routes to Roots

1. The necessity of transport

Introduction

In accompanying pages to this site, there are descriptions of the mining of coal and minerals during the past three centuries. One can imagine the thousands of tons of material extracted from the ground, but of what use was all this material if it could not be efficiently transported to the sites where it was needed; the iron foundries, the grinding mills or the new roads, canals and railways?

The main means of traction up until the invention of the steam engine was the horse. The weight a horse could draw was the standard upon which industry based its economic forecasts. The more it could pull, the cheaper it was to transport the goods, and therefore the cheaper these would be on the open market. The key equation related to the friction the vehicle had upon its running surface.

It was often quoted that a horse could draw: 2 tons on a level roadway 10 tons along a rail track 50 or more tons along a waterway Therefore this effort became known as One Horsepower

Horse Traction Larger image, in a new window [52kb] [Shropshire Archive reference: PH/S/14/1]

Examine the picture above:

• Is the horse bringing the wood to the rail track or taking it away?
• Are the rails part of a railway, a tramway or simply a means of movement within the yard?
• How would you lift a huge piece of timber such as that?

Over the next few pages we shall discover how the early industrialists near to a typical Shropshire town - Oswestry - moved their goods to a wider market, and how the changing face of transport affected this distribution.

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