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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 5 (September 1, 1929)

An Early Railway Record

An Early Railway Record

We shall be carried at the rate of four hundred miles a day, with all the ease we now enjoy in a steamboat, but without the annoyance of sea sickness, or the danger of being burned or drowned!

It is certainly some consolation to those who are to be whirled at the rate of eighteen or twenty miles an hour, by means of a high pressure engine, to be told that they are in no danger of being seasick while on shore; that they are not to be scalded to death nor drowned by the bursting of the boilers, and that they need not mind being shot by the scattered fragments or dashed in pieces by the flying off, or breaking of a wheel. But with all these assurances, we should as soon expect the people of Woolwich suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets, as trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine going at such a rate.—Quarterly Review. London, 1825.