And yet his large experience of railways and locomotives, as described by himself to the committee, entitled this "untaught, inarticulate genius," as he has been described, to speak with confidence on the subject. Beginning with his experience as a brakesman at Killingworth in 1803, he went on to state that he was appointed to take the entire charge of the steam-engines in 1813, and had superintended the railroads connected with the numerous collieries of the Grand Allies from that time downward. He had laid down or superintended the railways at Burradon, Mount Moor, Springwell, Bedlington, Hetton, and Darlington, besides improving those at Killingworth, South Moor, and Derwent Crook. He had constructed fifty-five steam-engines, of which sixteen were locomotives. Some of these had been sent to France. The engines constructed by him for the working of the Killingworth Railroad, eleven years before, had continued steadily at work ever since, and fulfilled his most sanguine expectations. He was prepared to prove the safety of working high-pressure locomotives on a railroad, and the superiority of this mode of transporting goods over all others. As to speed, he said he had recommended eight miles an hour with twenty tons, and four miles an hour with forty tons; but he was quite confident that much more might be done. Indeed, he had no doubt they might go at the rate of twelve miles. As to the charge that locomotives on a railroad would so terrify the horses in the neighborhood that to travel on horseback or to plow the adjoining fields would be rendered highly dangerous, the witness said that horses learned to take no notice of them, though there _were_ horses that would shy at a wheelbarrow. A mail-coach was likely to be more shied at by horses than a locomotive. In the neighborhood of Killingworth, the cattle in the fields went on grazing while the engines passed them, and the farmers made no complaints.