Just thirty-three years ago, at the original planning of the Grand Junction Railway, CREWE, which otherwise might have never been more than a road-side station, was fixed upon as the site for the company’s locomotive and carriage establishments. Its locality was convenient, being 42½ miles from Liverpool, and 54½ from Birmingham. Besides, it was at a comparatively poor and unfrequented part of the railway, where land could be—and actually, in the first purchases, was—obtained cheaply. Well, the line was built, the station was opened, and the repairing shops were erected. They were (in the plural number) “_parra metu primo_,” for it was always the late Mr. Joseph Locke’s habit to build with as much cheapness and economy as were consistent with efficiency and good working. The locomotive and carriage requirements for 97½ miles of railway, with six trains a day in each direction on week days and four on Sundays, added to which were a couple or three goods trains each way on week days, were not great. Therefore, the first erections at Crewe were modest and unpretending. In process of time Crewe grew, for not only was the Grand Junction married with the London and Birmingham, neither bride nor bridegroom, however, retaining its former name, but each becoming “London and North-Western.” A year or so after celebration of the marriage, Crewe became the junction point of the railway to Manchester; thence afterwards extended in a mystifying net-work of lines over all the manufacturing towns of Cheshire, Lancashire, and Yorkshire. On the left there was the line to Chester, one of the railways constructed by George Stephenson, which, in 1849, was extended, by his son Robert, to Holyhead. The main arterial railway did not, in the first instance, extend farther north from London, than the point where the Liverpool and Manchester Railway bisected it at Newton Junction; but, by degrees, it stretched out to Preston, then to Lancaster, then to Carlisle, and therefrom all over western Scotland. So that the insignificant, almost unknown, Crewe of 1837 had not only become, in 1849, a great centre of traffic of every description, but it was also the workshop, the family residence, when in health, of upwards of 220 engines and tenders, as well as the hospital and place of receptacle for such of them as became sick, halt, or maimed, while working the traffic of what became, at the time of the amalgamation, the northern division of the London and North-Western Railway. The extreme southern point of this division was, and we believe still is, Stafford; at the commencement of the railway—very much like Crewe—an insignificant and unimportant road-side station. In the north, Crewe engines worked as far as Carlisle, westward to Holyhead, and eastward along the mystifying net-work of lines which fertilise Cheshire and its two adjacent manufacturing counties. Upwards of one hundred engines were at work every day; and