Charles Blacker Vignoles

Charles Blacker Vignoles ( born May 31, 1793 † November 17, 1875 ) was an early railway engineer. His name was transferred to a standard form of the railroad tracks.

Life

Early on, an orphan, he was raised by his grandfather, a professor at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. He trained mainly in mathematics and law continue. Since 1814, he served in the British Army, for which he was in Holland, Canada and the United States in use.

After 1820 he returned to Britain, where he supervised the docks of London in the service of James Walker. Later he worked for the London and Brighton Railway. He participated in the construction of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and was involved in two other rail companies, the Wigan Branch Railway and the St. Helens and Runcorn Gap Railway.

Due to its wide range of technical experience Vignoles came in large railway projects to train, especially at railway buildings in Ireland, for example in the Dublin and Kingston Railway. For the 1839 Midland Counties Railway opened, which Nottingham, Derby and Leicester joined, he served as a senior engineer. In addition, he planned construction of the Sheffield, Ashton -Under- Lyne and Manchester Railway, and especially the first Woodhead Tunnel.

In 1836 Vignoles recommended the Society of London and Croydon Railway, the use of rail profiles with flat foot, which had been first introduced by the railway engineer Robert Stevens in 1830. This track type soon became the standard in the railway and is known in technical terminology as flat bottom rail.

In 1843 he was appointed by the Württemberg government as a consultant to assess the planning for the local primary paths and to revise, among other things, due to the crossing of the Swabian Alb was particularly difficult. Since Vignoles considered stronger gradients than 1:100 impossible, his proposals were characterized by excessive caution and would have led to longer and more expensive railway buildings. They were therefore discarded, and the tracks were instead built according to the plans of Karl Etzel.

Then Vignoles worked for several European railway companies. In 1850 he built the great Nicholas Chain Bridge of Kiev on the Dnieper River, the longest chain bridge in Europe. From 1853 he worked for the Wiesbaden Railway Company and their successors at the Nassau Rhine train from Wiesbaden to Oberlahnstein. From 1857 to 1864, the engineer was in the service of Tudela - Bilbao train in Spain.

Since 1827 Member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Vignoles was appointed in 1841 for the first professor of engineering at University College London. Since 1855, he held the title Fellow of the Royal Society.