Thomas Longridge Gooch

• Birth date            1 November 1808, Brompton, London
• Married                30 April 1836 Ruthanna Scaife, daughter of Robert Scaife
• Death date          23 November 1882 (aged 74), Gateshead

Thomas Longridge Gooch was one of that great school of Tyneside engineers created by George Stephenson, and destined more or less to share with him the triumphs and the disappointments which preceded the general introduction of the railway system. [I C E Obituary]

Thomas Longridge Gooch was born on 1 November 1808 at Brompton, London, the eldest son of John and Anna Gooch (nee Longridge). His father was from Bedlington, Northumberland, and his mother was the daughter of Thomas Longridge of Newcastle. John and Anna had ten children, and of their five sons, four became railway engineers namely: Thomas Longridge Gooch; John Viret Gooch; Daniel Gooch and William Frederick Gooch.

On 6 October 1823, Thomas Gooch was apprenticed for six years to George Stephenson. With Stephenson, he surveyed the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway and for 2½ years from 1826 acted as Stephenson's secretary and draughtsman on the proposed Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&MR), living in Stephenson's house in Liverpool. In January 1829, Gooch became Resident Engineer for the Liverpool end of the L&MR, but in April the same year he took a temporary appointment as Resident Engineer of the Bolton and Leigh Railway.

In 1830, George Stephenson was appointed to survey the route of the proposed Manchester and Leeds Railway, and Gooch was appointed his assistant. Gooch carried out most of the actual surveying for the new line. Eventually Gooch was appointed joint principal engineer (with George Stephenson) of the line. Taking up residence in Manchester, Gooch was responsible for its construction. The works of this railway were of an unusually heavy character, including a summit level tunnel nearly 1.75 miles long, through a portion of Blackstone Edge, and the line had been described as the (then) greatest triumph of engineering science over the obstacles interposed by nature presented by any railway in the kingdom. The Manchester and Leeds Railway was opened on the 1st of March, 1841. On the completion of the line George Stephenson retired, Thomas Gooch remaining alone as principal engineer to the Company. He remained in that office for three years, chiefly occupied in winding-up the heavy contracts in connection with the main line, and in the construction of branches. Significantly these works included that part of the Manchester Junction Railway for which the Manchester and Leeds Railway were responsible and the construction of a new Joint Railway Station at Hunt’s Bank – named Victoria Station on its opening.

From his diary it appears that for nearly twenty years his only real holiday was a three days’ honeymoon following his marriage. When he retired from the Manchester and Leeds Railway in June 1844, he had proposed to take a holiday in the Lake District but had scarcely reached Bowness before being called away again to resume his labours. By this time railway mania was in full swing, and Thomas Gooch found himself widely in demand to lay out new lines.  Although he attempted to limit the number of projects he associated himself with, he soon found himself fully occupied. At the time these schemes were only in the parliamentary stage, the Manchester, Bury, and Rossendale, to which he had succeeded Sir John Hawkshaw, being alone in actual construction.

In August 1847 Thomas Gooch was suddenly taken ill, and the doctor at once prescribed an entire cessation from work. Thomas Gooch went to first to Dawlish, where he remained quietly for about a month; but, finding the pressure to return to work too great, he left England, passing the winter at Pau in south-west France with his family. He returned to England in the Spring of 1848, after eight months’ complete holiday. He then resumed his profession but his health continued to decline, and in 1851, at the early age of forty-two years, he was finally compelled to retire, much to his sorrow.

He married Ruthanna Scaife, daughter of Robert Scaife of Liverpool, on 30 April 1836 and had two children. Their daughter, Mary was born in Coventry in 1837 and their son, Frederick, was born in France about 1853 (died aged 11 in 1864?)

Thomas Longridge Gooch died on 23 November, 1882, in his seventy-fifth year at Team Lodge, Saltwell, Gateshead.