William Moorsom

Captain William Scarth Moorsom (1804-1863) was an English soldier and engineer. He was born in Whitby to a military family, being the son of an admiral, and trained at Sandhurst, becoming a captain in the 52nd regiment (Royal Engineers). After assisting Robert Stephenson he created railway lines in England, Belgium, Germany and Ceylon.

Overview

Moorsom was the son of Admiral Sir Robert Moorsom, who had served at the Trafalgar, and his wife Eleanor.

Moorsom seems to have made his mark when he served in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1820s, as a deputy quartermaster-general, publishing his Letters From Nova Scotia; comprising Sketches of a Young Country in 1830.

He then returned to England and, with experience of military surveying made the acquaintance of Robert Stephenson, becoming the engineer for the Cromford and High Peak Railway. He assisted Stephenson in the construction of the London and Birmingham Railway. Seeing a future in railway engineering, he sold his commission in 1832

Lickey Incline

Moorsom was engaged by the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, who had found Brunel's proposals out of its financial reach. His brief in 1836 was to build the line as cheaply as possible, which he did by following open country, avoiding populated areas where land prices would be higher. Arriving at the Lickey Hills there was no option but to climb them, using cable assistance if necessary. The resulting Lickey Incline has entered railway folklore. Since no English manufacturer would, or could, supply him, he ordered 4-2-0 locomotives from Norris of Philadelphia in the United States. In passing, one of his assistants was Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, regarded as the founder of social science.

In 1843 he worked on a new line from Cologne (Prussia's Rhine Province) to Antwerp in Belgium for the Königlich Preußische und Großherzoglich Hessische Staatseisenbahn (K.P.u.G.H.St.E.), designing the award-winning twin 600-foot (180 m) span bridge at Cologne. This line appears to have been partly superseded in 1879 by a line to Mönchengladbach known as the Iron Rhine. In 1845 he was in Ireland working on the Waterford and Kilkenny Railway and in 1856 the railway from Kandy to Colombo Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

As a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, he read a paper in 1852 Description of the viaduct erected over the river Nore, near Thomastown . Among his other railway work he was Engineer on the Southampton and Dorchester Railway (1847), known locally as "Castleman's Corkscrew" after its promoter, and the Ringwood, Christchurch and Bournemouth Railway (1862). He also assisted with the lines from Plymouth to Falmouth and Penzance. He occupied his retirement by writing a history of his regiment