John Whitton - Biography

Biography

Indentured in England, Whitton gained extensive railway engineering experience prior to his arrival in the Colony of New South Wales in 1856. He was engineer for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincoln railway line (1847), and supervised the building of the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton line from 1852 to 1856.

Appointed in March 1856 as Engineer-in-Charge, Whitton arrived in Sydney and found the Colony with 23 miles (37 km) of 4 feet 8.5 inches (143.5 cm) standard gauge railway, four locomotives, 12 passenger carriages and 40 trucks. An advocate of the 5 feet 3 inches (160 cm) broad gauge adopted by Victoria and South Australia railways, Whitton set about extending the railway into the city and resisted pushes for 4,000 miles (6,400 km) of cheaper, light tramways, such as horse drawn lines with wooden rails, proposed by Governor William Denison. Whitton strongly opposed the government's uncritical acceptance of the lowest tenders for railway construction.

Whitton was accused of fraud, along with his brother-in-law, Sir John Fowler, and the charges were proved groundless. Following a select committee on railway extension that recommended the construction of cheap narrow-gauge railways, necessitating a break of gauge within the Colony, as well as at the border; estimates were prepared but Whitton, determined to sabotage the committee's recommendation, suspended all surveys and new work. Whitton overcame the engineering problems and in 1876 completed the Blue Mountains line that included two zigzags. In 1880-85 the unprecedented growth in railways, 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of new track and nine million more passengers, exposed existing inadequacies in administration of railways. A royal commission into railway bridges exonerated Whitton of the charges of faulty design and of using inferior materials. In 1888 Sir Henry Parkes's Government Railways Act reorganized the department and made Whitton's position easier.

In 1886 and 1887 Whitton submitted drawings for a proposed suspension bridge across Sydney Harbour from Dawes Point Battery to Milson's Point. On 1 May 1889 the Hawkesbury River bridge was opened; it was the final link in the railway system from Brisbane through Sydney to Melbourne and Adelaide and Whitton had fought for adequate finance for it. He was a member of the Hunter River floods commission 1869-70, the Sydney, City and Suburban Sewage and Health Board 1875-77, and the Board for Opening Tenders for Public Works 1875-87; he was a New South Wales commissioner for the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880. Granted a year's leave on 29 May 1889, Whitton retired on 31 May 1890 with a pension of £675, and visited England in 1892. He had supervised the laying of 2,171 miles (3,494 km) of track on which no accident had occurred attributable to defective design or construction. Parkes regarded him as 'a man of such rigid and unswerving integrity, a man of such vast grasp, that however his faults may occasionally project themselves into prominence, it would be difficult to replace him by a man of equal qualifications'.

In international references Whitton is recognised as one of approximately twenty of the greatest railway civil engineers in the first century of world railway construction.

Whitton was survived by his wife, one son and two daughters, he died of cardiac disease on 20 February 1898 at Mittagong, and was buried in the cemetery of St Thomas's Church of England, North Sydney. His estate was valued for probate at £10,396.