There is an interesting article on the Diamond Rock Boring Co Ltd
by Rodney Weaver in issue 35 (Autumn 1984) of "The Industrial
Locomotive" (Journal of the Industrial Locomotive Society).

This issue last been long out of print, but a copy of the article is given
below, with the permission of the Editor.

Hopefully this will be some interest.

Russell Wear


The Diamond Rock Boring Co Ltd
by Rodney Weaver

The Diamond Rock Boring Company was one of several enterprises that owed its
existence to the active mind of the late Lt. Col. F. E. B. Beaumont (1833 -
1899), a talented member of the Corps of Royal Engineers whose interests
embraced fortifications, balloons, mining and tunnelling machinery,
compressed air propul-sion and politics. One of those larger than life
characters without whom the pace of development would be both slower and
less interesting, Beaumont failed to make a commercial success of his
various excursions into civilian engineering, and as a result he is all but
forgotten today. Yet in Europe he is rightly remember-ed as the pioneer of
successful deep-drilling technology; ignored at home he is accorded a
display all to himself in the Bergbau Museum in Bochum.

Beaumont's claim to fame was the perfection of the diamond drill, which was
first developed by a French engineer in the early 1860's. Beaumont, who had
a colourful career behind him even at the age of 33, was, at the request of
the French government, loaned to them to lay out and superintend the Hall of
Machinery at the 1867 Paris Exposition. Already engaged upon the development
of a per-cussive tunnelling machine, possibly as a result of meeting the
noted American engineer Herman Haupt, Beaumont found himself arranging a
display of tunnelling machinery - or was it his own idea? Naturally, the
Beaumont machine found a place in the line-up. So too did the new diamond
drill, by all accounts not a very successful piece of equipment. Beaumont
alone seems to have recognised the potential in the principle of the diamond
bit, whereby drilling is achieved by rotating an extremely hard drill bit at
low speed under a high drill load as opposed to the percussive action of
most contemporary drilling machinery. He lost no time in buying out the
inventor and, giving up his own machine, proceeded to redesign the diamond
drilling rig to produce the first truly successful deep-drilling rig. At the
same time, he designed smaller diamond drill units capable of being used
singly or in multiple for mining and tunnelling applications.

The initial development was carried out by the partnership of Beaumont,
Appleby and Ashwell. C. J. Appleby was the senior partner in Appleby Bros.
Ltd. , a well- known London firm of railway equipment manufacturers and
agents. The early drilling rigs were made by Appleby Bros. One of the
earliest contracts to be obtained by this concern, if not the first, was the
driving of the inclined shaft at Croesor Slate Quarry, begun in late 1868
using an early tunnelling machine comprising six diamond drills mounted on a
frame and powered by a common engine. Not long after the contract began, the
partnership was replaced by the Machine Tunnelling Co.Ltd. which in turn
became the Diamond Rock Boring Co.Ltd. in 1872. The latter concern had its
machinery made by Ormerod, Grierson & Co. of Manchester. The Croesor
contract dragged on through this period and by the time the shaft was
finished the quarry was bankrupt; one gets the impression that it took the
1872 reorganisation to inject the necessary impetus into the exploitation of
the new drill, for apart from the Croesor shaft all the well-documented
applications of the technique came in the days of the Diamond Rock Boring
Company. In view of Beaumont's wide interests, it is perhaps of significance
that the new company had a resident chief engineer; by this time he had not
only to find time for his military duties but also for his parliamentary
ones, having in 1870 become one of the few full-time soldiers to enter the
House of Commons, as MP for South Durham, and had also begun to take an
interest in the mechanisation of tramways'.

In 1875 Beaumont read a paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers
describing the activities of the Diamond Rock Boring Company (Proceedings
1875 pp 92 -125). Among the contracts mentioned here are numerous
deep-drilling exercises such as the geological explorations under-taken on
behalf of the Sub-Wealden Boring Committee, in connection with which mention
was made of the superior quality of the sample cores obtained by the new
method. This was perhaps the first time that really accurate geological
information had been obtained simply by boring, and it puts in perspective
the horrible mistakes made during the survey of the Tay estuary some years
previously; even as Beaumont was compiling his paper the ill-fated Thomas
Bouch was making hurried and ultimately disasterous alterat-ions to the
design of his greatest bridge as a result of those mistakes. Another
recently completed contract was the removal of a reef in the Tees estuary,
using a subaqueous prospecting rig, and as a result of this experience
Beaumont went on to outline his ideas for future undersea drilling
operations using equipment which in principle foreshadowed the mighty oil
platforms of the present day.

The Llynvi & Ogmore contract (see IL 34) was too new to warrant mention, but
from other sources it appears that this particular tunnel was the scene of
some comparative trials between different types of rock drill. How and why
the company acquired a 2ft 6in gauge de Winton is hard to say. One assumes
that the locomotive was used to remove spoil from the tunnel, but it could
alternatively have been used to power the drilling machinery itself. Using a
locomotive for this purpose would greatly simplify the task of moving the
drill into and out of the working area between successive blasts, for it was
this feature of the constant-pressure type of drill that put it at a
disadvantage against the noisier, dustier but more portable pneumatic drill
with its percussive action. There is a persistent account of de Winton' s
early days as locomotive builders that they built self-propelling boilers
for steam rock drills. Steam drills of a type one would use in a quarry were
rare in the 1865 -1875 period, which at first sight makes one wary of the
mobile boiler story; the discovery that the Diamond Rock Boring Company
owned a de Winton makes one think again. Was this the rock drill for the
operation of which de Winton supplied one or more of their early locomotives
? Presumably the de Winton connection had been forged during the Croesor
contract, when de Winton's works would have been the nearest source of
engineering support, from which one might hypothesise that some further
contracts had been carried out in North Wales using de Winton ..mobile
boilers", thus making the choice of prime mover for the Llynvi & Ogmore
contract a foregone conclusion. Comments on this suggestion would be
welcome.

Quite a lot would be explained by the full inventory of the Diamond Rock
Boring Company's equipment on site, which from John Fletcher's notes in IL
34 would seem to exist. Did it include air compressing machinery? Did it
include spoil removal plant, or was the company solely engaged to drill the
shot holes and possibly to place the charges as well?

In 1877 Frederick Beaumont retired from the Royal Engineers and devoted his
energies to the boring and spoil removal equipment for the Channel Tunnel,
the small locomotive for which 1 described in IL 22, and to the development
of his system of compressed air propulsion of tramcars. Both projects
foundered in 1883, the former through the machinations of Sir Edward
Watkin's many opponents and the latter through the more common agency of
insufficient money. Beaumont rather dropped out of the picture after that,
although he remained active to the end. Only a few days before his death on
22 August 1899 he had been out testing an improved bicycle. When, hopefully,
the Channel Tunnel is at long last completed it would be rather appropriate
to name one of the terminals "Beaumont".