Edward Bury 1794-1858
Edward Bury owned a factory in Liverpool where in 1830 he built a locomotive that included a number of new ideas. The Locomotive was called Liverpool and was the first engine to combine horizontal inside cylinders with a horizontal tubular boiler. The frame consisted of bars rather than iron plates.
Edward Bury
The first train to go through Linslade was a Bury Locomotive called the Harvey Combe.
The Bury Loco engine paint work was very smart. It was green with black bands round the boiler, the hemispherical top of the firebox was polished copper, the splashers, number plates and figures carried on the chimneys were brass.
Bury Locomotive
Bury won the contract to supply Locos for the London and Birmingham Railway as it was decided by the London and Birmingham Board that no quote for locomotives for the line from Robert Stephenson and Co could be accepted while he was Chief Engineer of the Railway.
This gave Bury a chance to supply the line with his own Locos, which he did. The fifty-eight 2-2-0 Locomotives that he built for them were reliable but proved to be under-powered, sometimes it was even necessary to use two or three locos on one train, on one occasion seven had to be used!
Bury Liverpool
Travelling Post Office (TPO)
In 1838 a Post Office official called John Ramsey noticed that trains could travel at twice the speed of the horse drawn mail coaches and devised the Travelling Post Office (TPO). It was a relatively simple idea of using a traductor arm and a net.
The Post Office workers working on the train were able to collect mail at the stations, without the train stopping, and were thereby able to speed up the mail delivery. The mail was sorted on the trains. These trains had priority and the drivers were fined if the trains were late.
Mail bag traductor arm - passing trains scooped the hanging mail bags off the arm into a net on the side of the carriage.