Thomas Gray, of Nottingham, was another speculator on the same subject. Though he was no mechanic nor inventor, he had an enthusiastic belief in the powers of the railroad system. Being a native of Leeds, he had, when a boy, seen Blenkinsop’s locomotive at work on the Middleton cogged railroad, and from an early period he seems to have entertained almost as sanguine views on the subject as Sir Richard Phillips. It would appear that Gray was residing in Brussels in 1816, when the project of a canal from Charleroi, for the purpose of connecting Holland with the mining districts of Belgium, was the subject of discussion; and, in conversation with Mr. John Cockerill and others, he took the opportunity of advocating the superior advantages of a railway. He was absorbed for some time with the preparation of a pamphlet on the subject. He shut himself up, secluded from his wife and relations, declining to give them any information as to his mysterious studies, beyond the assurance that his scheme “would revolutionise the whole face of the material world and of society.” In 1820 Mr. Gray published the result of his studies in his ‘Observations on a General Iron Railway,’ in which, with great cogency, he urged the superiority of a locomotive railway over common roads and canals, pointing out, at the same time, the advantages to all classes of the community of this mode of conveyance for merchandise and persons. In this book Mr. Gray suggested a railway between Manchester and Liverpool, “which,” he observed, “would employ many thousands of the distressed population of Lancashire.” The treatise must have met with a ready sale, as we find that two years later it had passed into a fourth edition. In 1822 Mr. Gray added diagrams to the book, showing, in one, suggested lines of railway connecting the principal towns of England, and in another, the principal towns of Ireland.