The Duke’s Carriage
A correspondent of the Athenæum, in 1830, speaking of the carriage prepared for the Duke of Wellington at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, remarks: “It rather resembled an eastern pavilion than anything our northern idea considers a carriage. The floor is 32 feet long by 8 wide, gilt pillars support a crimson canopy 24 feet long, and it might for magnitude be likened to the car of Juggernaut; yet this huge machine, with the preceding steam engine, moved along at its own fiery will even more swimmingly, a ‘thing of heart and mind,’ than a ship on the ocean.”