18O5-187O
Railway Contractor

Early Years. Thomas Brassey was perhaps the most important civilengineering contractor in the world in the nineteenth century. He was born into a respectable rural family in northern England in 1805. His father worked a small family farm in addition to cultivating a large farm owned by the Marquess of Westminster. Thanks to these resources, Thomas received a solid education in Chester, where he studied commercial subjects until the age of sixteen. After his sixteenth birthday in 1821 he was apprenticed to a surveyor, and on the completion of his apprenticeship he soon became the partner of his master. The local surveys he conducted throughout the north of England provided the foundations of his career as a railway surveyor and contractor. Well-respected and financially secure, Brassey began undertaking contract work in the fledgling British rail system in the 1830s. His first building design...