Stephenson became a partner in a business for constructing locomotives at Newcastle, and three engines were made for the Stockton and Darlington Railway. Nevertheless they appear to have been used chiefly if not almost entirely for hauling coal; for the passenger-coach called the _Experiment_ was hauled by a horse, and the journey occupied about two hours. The locomotive was not even yet a brilliant success over horse-power. What was to be the next step? CHAPTER III. FIFTEEN MILES AN HOUR. Five hundred pounds for the best locomotive engine! So ran the announcement one day in the year 1829. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was nearly completed, but yet the directors had not fully decided what power they would employ to haul along their waggons. Horse-power had at length been finally abandoned, and numbers of schemes had been poured in upon the managers. But the contest seemed at last to resolve itself chiefly into a rivalry between fixed and locomotive engines. Principally, if not entirely, swayed however by the arguments of George Stephenson, the directors yielded to the hint of a Mr. Harrison, and offered a £500 prize. The engine was to satisfy certain conditions. Its weight was not to be above six tons; it was to burn its own smoke, haul twenty tons at a rate of ten miles an hour, be furnished with two safety valves, rest on springs and on six wheels, while its steam pressure must not be more than fifty lbs. to the square inch. The cost was not to exceed £550. Stephenson, who was the engineer of the Railway, decided to compete. He was now in a very different position from that which he occupied when he built his second locomotive in 1815. His appointment as engineer to the Stockton and Darlington Railway had greatly aided his advancement, and when it was decided to build a railway between the two busy cities of Manchester and Liverpool it was not unnatural that he should take part in the undertaking. The idea of constructing rail, or tram ways, was not new. Railways of some kind were used in England about two hundred years before, that is, about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Thus Roger North writes:—“The manner of the carriage is by laying rails of timber from the colliery to the river, exactly straight and parallel; and bulky carts are made with four rollers fitting those rails, whereby the carriage is so easy that one horse will draw down four or five chaldron of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal merchants.” It is said that the word tramway is derived from tram, which was wont to mean a beam of timber and also a waggon. In any case, such rough ways were introduced in mining districts, for, as may be readily believed, one horse could draw twenty times the load upon them that it could on an ordinary road. The old ways were first made of wood, then of wood faced with iron, then altogether of iron.