The works had scarcely been commenced ere the company got into difficulties, but eventually 26 miles of iron-way were constructed and opened for traffic. Any person was then at liberty to put wagons on the line, and to carry goods within the prescribed rates, the wagons being worked by horses, mules, and donkeys. Notwithstanding the very sanguine expectations which were early formed as to the paying qualities of this railway, it never realized any adequate profit to the owners. But it continued to be worked, principally by donkeys for the sake of cheapness, down to the passing of the act for constructing the London and Brighton line in 1837, when the proprietors disposed of their undertaking to the new company. The line was accordingly dismantled; the stone blocks and rails were taken up and sold; and all that remains of the Wandsworth, Croydon, and Merstham Railway is the track still observable to the south of Croydon, along Smitham Bottom, nearly parallel with the line of the present Brighton Railway, and an occasional cutting and embankment, which still mark the route of this first public railway. The want of success of this undertaking doubtless had the effect of deterring projectors from embarking in any similar enterprise. If a line of the sort could not succeed near London, it was thought improbable that it should succeed any where else. The Croydon and Merstham line was a beacon to warn capitalists against embarking in railways, and many years passed before another was ventured upon. Sir Richard Phillips was one of the few who early recognized the important uses of the locomotive and its employment on a large scale for the haulage of goods and passengers by railway. In his "Morning Walk to Kew" he crossed the line of the Wandsworth and Croydon Railway, when the idea seems to have occurred to him, as it afterwards did to Thomas Gray, that in the locomotive and the railway were to be found the germs of a great and peaceful social revolution: