The Chat Moss Debacle
Rennie organised the opposition to George Stephenson's route for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. He made sure Giles was called as a witness. Giles famously stated:
No engineer in his senses would go through Chat Moss if he wanted to make a railway from Liverpool to Manchester. In my judgement a railroad certainly cannot be safely made over Chat Moss without going to the bottom of the Moss.
Read more about this topic: Francis Giles
Famous quotes containing the words chat, moss and/or debacle:
“A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf.... For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then ... be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“They are very proper forest houses, the stems of the trees collected together and piled up around a man to keep out wind and rain,—made of living green logs, hanging with moss and lichen, and with the curls and fringes of the yellow birch bark, and dripping with resin, fresh and moist, and redolent of swampy odors, with that sort of vigor and perennialness even about them that toadstools suggest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A major power can afford a military debacle only when it looks like a political victory.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)