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The Guinness Engineer
In 1772, Doctor Arthur Price, Archbishop of Cashel, took over the Kildrought town brewery in County Kildare and placed his land steward, Richard Guinness in charge of production of "a brew of a very palatable nature." After his death in 1752, Dr. Price's estate bequeathed £100 to Richard's son, the 27-year-old Arthur Guinness to help him expand the brewery, on a new site in Leixlip, County Kildare in 1755. Some of the blocked up doors from the original Price-Guinness brewery can still be seen on the perimeter walls of the Catholic Church forecourt in Cellbridge, County Kildare. In 1759, at the age of 34, Arthur left the brewery to his younger brother and moved to Dublin City. There, he decided to acquire what was then a small, disused and ill equipped brewery at St. James's Gate, Dublin. The lease, signed on 31 December 1759, was for 9000 years at an annual rent of £45. With diligence, clever business acumen and hard work the Guinness brewery grew and prospered.The steadily increasing output from Guinness’s Dublin Brewery in the Victorian era had reached such proportions by the 1870’s that the movement of large quantities of heavy and bulky raw materials and waste products within the brewery was proving to be a serious obstruction to any future projected expansion. The existing methods (horse tramway, and horse and cart were both slow and cumbersome and very inefficient. With the acquisition of land between the existing brewery and the River Liffey, further expansion was able to take place and some activities previously carried out in the old brewery were transferred there. Moreover, as this land was situated near the Kingsbridge terminus (Great Southern & Western Railway), a direct connection with the Irish railway network could be effected, with barges working to and from a quay on the River Liffey.Enter Samuel Geoghegan, draughtsman and mechanical engineer. Geoghegan was born in Dublin in 1844 or 1845. In 1861, according to the English census of that year, he was a pupil of a schoolmaster named Richard Biggs in Devizes, Wiltshire; he then served a four-year apprenticeship in England with a mechanical engineer. Work as a draughtsman and mechanical engineer in England and Scotland followed; in the English census for 1871 he appears as a fitter in Doncaster. He then spent eighteen months in Turkey as a locomotive engineer and three years on bridge work in India. He was appointed to the engineering staff of Guinness's Brewery in 1872. By 1899 he had become head of the company's electrical and mechanical engineering staff. He retired on 9 July 1901 at the age of fifty-six but was retained as a consultant until 11 February 1905. After his retirement he ran a private practice from 17 Westland Row. He died in 1928 or 1929. He had married in 1876 and had five children.Geoghegan recognized the difficulties at the brewery and set about solving this major problem. Knowing that the era of the horse and cart was over, he felt that speed and efficiency would be the answer. Using his skills and foresight, the young man designed and built a system of transportation which would revolutionize the movement of goods. The solution to the transport problem lay in the construction of a narrow gauge railway network serving the entire brewery. Much of the basic system was laid between 1873 and 1877 under the supervision of this man.Samuel Geoghegan set himself certain limits on the size of the narrow gauge lines and rolling stock. The track gauge was settled at 1ft 10in, the loading gauge was to have a headway of six feet and a maximum width of five feet, and the maximum gradient was to be not steeper than one in forty. A difference in levels of about 50ft existed between the old brewery and the newer land which sloped sharply down to the Liffey, the two areas being separated by James’s Street.To connect the two halves of the works and overcome the difference in levels, Mr Geoghegan constructed a spiral tunnel in the old brewery and tool the narrow gauge line under James’s Street. The spiral section replaced a short-lived hydraulic lift, a clumsy and slow apparatus which could only manage to tale one wagon at a time, causing trains to be broken up and re-assembled on different levels. The single track spiral tunnel contained the line’s steepest gradient, 1 in 39, and, in 2.65 turns raised the line about 35ft, with a spiral radius of 61.25ft.The narrow gauge track was largely laid in granite setts, for the benefit of road vehicles in the brewery yards, and this also applied to lines laid on the quay. The permanent way itself, where laid in setts, consisted originally of 56lbs per yard iron tram rails fastened to longitudinal sleepers which were laid on cross sleepers. When laid in concrete the rails were set directly in the ground, using wrought iron cross ties. Later, 76lb steel rails having a web and flange were brought into use, being laid on cross sleepers. Narrow gauge points used the tongued, pointed rail found on many early tramways. Two noteworthy features of the narrow gauge network were the marshalling yard (officially known as No.10 Vat house Yard in the lower half of the brewery which was still in use in September, 1964, together with the tunnel, and also the quay on the Liffey, started in 1873, but demolished in February, 1963. The quay was extended at various intervals until 1913, but nothing remains of it today.A paper read by Samuel Geoghegan, Guinness's Engineer, to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers on 31st July 1888 gives details of the railways supplementing those in the article in RECORD 22. Geoghegan implies that the 5ft 3in and 1ft10in gauge rails were laid at the same time. New land was acquired in 1873 and a second brewery built in 1877-1878; further extensions in 1886 nearly doubled the size of the complex. The original 1ft 10in rails, used in the tunnel excavations, were flat bars of iron 2¼in deep by in thick; at the time the first locomotive arrived the rails weighed 18 lbs per yard. The 6ton Sharp Stewart locomotives delivered in 1878 cost £597 each. On the 5ft 3in gauge Geoghegan said that the converter bogies (haulage wagons) had been in use for three months from about May 1888. The spiral tunnel was designed by Geoghegan in 1876 and constructed at a cost of £3,000 in 1877-1878. Regarding the degree of originality in Geoghegan's design, Daniel Adamson commented in the subsequent discussion that the arrangement was good although it had similarities with the KING WILLIAM and old No.1 locomotives on the Stockton & Darlington Railway.Samuel Geoghegan also designed the standard tip wagon, built to carry grain, hops and other bulky goods about the brewery. It was built as large as possible within maximum limits of a width of five feet, overall length of eight feet, a height of six feet, and a three feet wheelbase.*Group Picture from © Guinness Archive, Diageo Ireland. Sources:Guinness Brewery Archives.Industrial Narrow Gauge Railways www.ingr.co.uk, 18 April 2011Narrow Gauge Railway Museum - Amgueddfa Rheilffyrdd Bach Cul - Guinness Loco No. 13 www.talyllyn.co.uk, 17 May 2006.Guinness Brewery Tramways www.irsociety.co.uk, 16 May 2006See More