Samuel Barton Newton
Samuel Barton Newton (1831-1904)
1905 Obituary [1]
SAMUEL BARTON NEWTON, born at Liverpool on the 18th June, 1831, obtained his preliminary training under Messrs. Jones and Potts, at the Viaduct Foundry, Newton-le-Willows, and, adopting the railway branch of the profession, served successively on the Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the London and North-Western railways in this country, and for a period of 3 years on the Madras Railway in India.
After practising for a time on his own account in Madras, he was engaged for 2 years on the construction of the Great Southern of India Railway, and subsequently joined the staff of Mr. W. T. Faviell, contractor for railways in Ceylon, by whom he was employed on the works of various lines then under construction in that country.
In 1868 Mr. Newton received an appointment on the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railway, and in the following year he was placed in charge of the Ganges Bridge works at Cawnpore. Up to that date few such works had been carried out in India, and great and unexpected difficulties were encountered in the course of construction, the abnormal floods of 1870 causing much damage to the works; but Mr. Newton’s untiring zeal and resource surmounted every obstacle, and the bridge, over 3,000 feet in length and costing about 5150,000, was successfully completed and opened to traffic on the 15th July, 1875.
Mr. Newton remained in the Company’s service, in charge of a section of the line, until 1887, when he retired to his estate Bhowalie, near Naini Tal in the Himalayas, where1,7 years later, he died of enteric fever on the 3rd October, 1904, in his seventy-fourth year.
He was elected an Associate Member of the Institution on the 5th May, 1868.