BY 1847, Brassey had helped to build a third of Britain’s rail network, including most of the West Coast mainline. As Britain’s ‘railway mania’ cooled, he turned to other projects, including a waterworks in Calcutta, London’s Victoria Docks, and the Victoria Embankment on the Thames, and to further railways abroad, from Australia and India to Austria, Romania, Denmark and Italy. Thomas also collaborated with Robert Stephenson on Canada’s Grand Trunk Railway between Quebec and Toronto, and founded the Canada Works in Birkenhead to manufacture locomotives, and parts for Robert’s tubular Victoria Bridge in Montreal.
Brassey’s payroll reached 80,000, spread across five continents.* He paid his navvies generously, saw to their education, and took on unprofitable contracts rather than lay his workers off. In the weeks before he died on 8th December, 1870, at St Leonards-on-Sea, grateful navvies walked miles to see their benefactor one last time. He left over £5m in his will, but the legacy of Thomas Brassey was very much larger than that.
They are: Australia (New South Wales, Queensland), North America (Canada) and South America (Argentina, Brazil, Peru), Europe (Britain, Denmark, France, Holland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland), Africa (Mauritius), and Asia (India, Syria). Some authorities give just four, but Brassey’s firm was contractor for the Grand River Viaduct on the Midland line of the Mauritius Railway in 1863-1865; however, Brassey did not design it or superintend it himself. This is why Brassey is seldom named: he was often one of several contractors, and often worked through partners such as Peto and Betts in Canada, and agents such as Samuel Wilcox in Australia.