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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".