In the result there was created, in January, 1865, a body known as the Engineer and Railway Volunteer Staff Corps, constituted, according to its rules, "for the purpose of directing the application of skilled labour and of railway transport to the purposes of national defence, and for preparing, in time of peace, a system on which such duties should be conducted." The Corps was to consist of officers only, and its members were to be civil engineers and contractors, officers of railway and dock companies, and, under special circumstances, Board of Trade Inspectors of Railways. Civil engineers of standing and experience who had directed the construction of the chief railways and other important works, general managers of railways and commercial docks, and Board of Trade Inspectors of Railways, were alone eligible for the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. Other civil engineers and contractors connected chiefly with railway works, and, also, railway officers other than general managers, take the rank of Major. Col. McMurdo was appointed Honorary Colonel of the Corps on February 9, 1865.[29] As ultimately constituted, the corps consisted of an Honorary Colonel (now Maj.-Gen. D. A. Scott, C.V.O., C.B., D.S.C.), thirty Lieutenant-Colonels including a Commandant, (now Lieut.-Col. Sir William Forbes, general manager of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway) and twenty Majors.[30] FUNCTIONS AND PURPOSES That the Corps thus created was the direct outcome, first, of the Volunteer movement, and, through that movement, of the state of semi-panic into which the country had drifted in 1859, as the result both of the anticipations of invasion and the admitted weakness, at that time, of our national defences, has thus been clearly established. Writing in 1869, Major-General McMurdo, who had been raised to that rank in 1868, said in a pamphlet he issued under the title of "Rifle Volunteers for Field Service" that the Corps was "prepared to work, not for Volunteers alone, but for the entire defensive forces of the country." In this same publication Major-General McMurdo gave an account of the functions and purposes the Corps had been designed to serve. Alluding first to the Volunteer movement, he showed how the railway carriage must both carry and shelter the Volunteer when moving from one part of the country to another; and he proceeded:-- I will ask you to look attentively for a moment at a Bradshaw's railway map, and you will see that throughout the network of rails that overspreads the land none of the meshes, so to speak, in any vital parts of the country, exceed fifteen miles across, from rail to rail; but as the eye approaches the Metropolis, or any of the commercial centres, these meshes are diminished to about one-half the area of the others. He then dealt with the operations which the movement of troops along these lines of railway would involve, and continued:--