From 1832 he spent six years working as an engineer in
Constantinople,
Ottoman Empire, helping build an ordnance factory on behalf of machine tool manufacturers
Maudslay, Sons & Field. He also produced a report for the Turkish government on
lighthouses in the
Bosphorus, which led to his first two scientific papers. For his services to the Ottoman government he was awarded the Order of Nishan Iftikhar (Order of Glory). Barlow returned to Britain in 1838 to take up a post as assistant engineer on the
Manchester and Birmingham Railway working for
George W. Buck. In 1842, he joined the
Midland Counties Railway as resident engineer for the section between
Rugby and
Derby. When the Midland Counties Railway became part of the
Midland Railway in 1844, he retained the position, later becoming chief engineer of the larger railway. On 1 April 1845, Barlow was elected a member of the
Institution of Civil Engineers and on 6 June 1850 he was elected a
Fellow of the
Royal Society. Whilst working on the Midland Railway's main line, Barlow established that the replacement of
sleepers was a larger part of the cost of track maintenance than the replacement of rails because the sleepers decayed more quickly than the rails wore-out and needed renewal more often. To remove the cost of providing and replacing sleepers, he developed and patented his own rail design in 1849. It had a wide flanged profile which could be laid directly on to
track ballast without the need for sleepers, with just periodic tie-bars to maintain the correct
gauge. Known as the
Barlow rail, it was widely used, especially by the Great Western Railway.
Joseph Paxton, designer of the
cast iron and glass
Crystal Palace for
The Great Exhibition of 1851, was a director of the Midland Railway and he asked Barlow for his help in the preparation of the structural calculations for the frame of the building. In 1857, Barlow left the Midland Railway to form his own consultant engineering practice in London, with the Midland Railway as a significant client. Following the death of
Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 1859, Barlow was commissioned with
John Hawkshaw to complete the
Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol, construction of which had been stalled since 1843 due to insufficient funds to finish it. Reusing the chains from Brunel's earlier
Hungerford Suspension Bridge in London, demolished in 1860, Barlow and Hawkshaw completed the bridge in 1864 with a more robust deck than Brunel had planned and other variations caused by the reuse of the existing chains. Its span was the longest in Britain at the time. Between 1862 and 1869, Barlow was consultant engineer for the Midland Railway's southern extension from
Bedford to London, including the layout of the London terminus station at
St Pancras on
Euston Road. To deal with the sloping site and the need to cross the
Regent's Canal a short distance to the north, the platforms were constructed on a raised structure supported on cast iron columns and girders. Under this structure, storage was laid out for beer from the breweries at
Burton upon Trent. With assistance from
Rowland Mason Ordish, Barlow also designed the arched, cast iron station canopy which spans across the platforms without intermediate support – then the widest of its kind in the world. It was designed as a cost-effective and efficient means of avoiding the need for additional solid structure in the lower level.
George Gilbert Scott designed the hotel in front of the train shed. 's original
Tay Bridge. The higher, central section collapsed entirely in a December 1879 storm. On 28 December 1879, the central section of the
North British Railway's bridge across the
River Tay near
Dundee collapsed in the
Tay Bridge disaster as an express train crossed it in a heavy storm. All 75 passengers and crew on the train were killed. As the newly elected President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Barlow was appointed as a member of the
Board of Trade's Court of Inquiry into the disaster. He sat with
Henry Cadogan Rothery and
William Yolland, co-authoring one of the final reports with Yolland recommending a commission be established to examine wind loads on bridges. In its report dated 30 June 1880, the Court of Inquiry concluded that the bridge, designed by
Sir Thomas Bouch and opened only the year before its collapse, had been "badly designed, badly built and badly maintained". The entire central
box truss section of the bridge known as the "High Girders" collapsed along with the thirteen
trestles supporting it, leaving a gap of nearly half-a-mile in the bridge. His reputation destroyed, Bouch died in October 1880. Work on the
suspension bridge he had designed to cross the
Firth of Forth was stopped after the Tay Bridge collapse and Barlow,
Sir John Fowler and
Thomas Elliot Harrison, consultant engineers for the three railway companies involved in the construction, were asked to choose a replacement design. The solution was the
cantilevered Forth Bridge by Fowler and
Sir Benjamin Baker. In 1881 Barlow sat as member of the Wind Pressure (Railway Structures) Commission established at the recommendation of the Tay Bridge report. He led the design of the replacement
Tay Bridge (1882–87) with his son Crawford Barlow as engineer. The new design used large
monocoque piers to support a double railway track. The old brick and masonry piers from the first bridge were retained as
breakwaters for the new piers upstream. They can still be seen today as a forlorn reminder of the tragedy of 1879. Barlow was an early experimenter with civil engineering uses for steel, carrying out research at Woolwich Arsenal in the 1850s and being a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers' committee on the subject. From 1873 he was a member of a Board of Trade committee which produced the first recommendations on safe working loads for steel in railway structures in 1877. Barlow also experimented with sound recording. In February 1874 he presented the
Royal Society with a talk
On the Pneumatic Action which accompanies the Articulation of Sounds by the Human Voice, as exhibited by a Recording Instrument. He called his 'recording instrument' a
Logograph. Barlow was a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh, a member of the
Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the
Society of Arts. He served as Vice President of the Royal Society in 1881 and was an honorary member of the Société des Ingénieurs Civil de France. He was also a
Lieutenant-Colonel in the
Railway Volunteer Staff Corps. With his health failing, he retired from practice in 1896, along with his son. He died on 12 November 1902 from exhaustion after breaking his leg, and was buried in
Charlton Cemetery in a plot adjacent to that of his father's grave. His home "
High Combe", Charlton Road, Greenwich, is marked with a
blue plaque. ==Notes and references==