The motive power to be used on the Liverpool and Manchester remained uncertain when George Stephenson and his "navvies" were attacking the engineering proposition of Chat Moss. It was still uncertain in October, 1828--or two years after the passing of the Act--when three of the directors went to Killingworth colliery, to see the early locomotive which Stephenson had made there, and to Darlington to see the locomotives then operating on the Stockton and Darlington line. They decided that "horses were out of the question"; but even then the point remained doubtful whether the Liverpool and Manchester should be provided with locomotives or have stationary engines at intervals of a mile or two along the line to draw the trains from station to station by means of ropes. How the directors sought to solve the problem by offering a premium of £500 for a locomotive which would fulfil certain conditions; how George Stephenson won the prize with his "Rocket"; and how the "Rocket," with a gross load of seventeen tons, attained a speed of twenty-nine miles an hour, with an average of fourteen--whereas counsel for the promoters had only promised a speed of six or seven miles an hour--are facts known to all the world. If the Stockton and Darlington Railway had had the honour of introducing the locomotive, it was the Rainhill trials, organised by the Liverpool and Manchester Company, which gave the world its first idea of the great possibilities to which alike the locomotive and the railway might attain. In this respect the Liverpool and Manchester line carried railway development far beyond the point already attained by the Stockton and Darlington, although no fundamentally {241}new principle in railway working was set up. The Liverpool and Manchester line did, however, establish a new departure in proclaiming direct rivalry with the then powerful canal interests, and the warfare thus entered on, and persevered in until the railway system had gained the ascendancy, was to affect the whole further history of railway expansion and control. {242}CHAPTER XX RAILWAY EXPANSION The monopolist tendencies of the waterway interests, the magnitude of the profits secured, and the resort by traders to the building of railways as an alternative thereto and as a means of meeting the transport requirements of expanding industries, were factors in the development of the railway system that operated as direct causes in the construction of other lines besides the Liverpool and Manchester. From these particular points of view the story of the Leicester and Swannington Railway is of special significance.