On the comparatively short length of 35 miles of the Manchester Ship Canal there are 221 miles of temporary railway, 90 excavating machines, 171 locomotives, and 6,206 wagons, the whole value of the plant being £850,000, while 14,000 men, are employed on the works, which are pushed forward day and night.

For some time before his death Mr. Walker was carrying out, concurrently with the canal, docks at Barry, with 2,000 men, and at Buenos Ayres with 5,000 men, thus giving employment to an army of 20,000 men, in whose moral and material welfare he exhibited the greatest solicitude.

At the opening of the Barry Docks, in the summer of 1889, it was noticed that Mr. Walker was absent from the entertainment given by the Railway Company, to celebrate the occasion, and he was found presiding at a dinner he had given to his 2,000 navvies, who he had determined should not be neglected on such a day.

The mental strain induced by the responsibilities attendant upon such gigantic enterprises no doubt tended to shorten Mr. Walker’s life. He had returned from a visit of inspection to the Buenos Ayres Harbour Works when the first symptoms of serious illness manifested themselves, and he gradually got worse, until his death, from Bright’s disease, [a disease involving chronic inflammation of the kidneys] on the 25th of November, 1889, in his sixty-second year.

He was elected an Associate of the Institution on the 2nd of April, 1867.

Mr. Walker was well worthy of a place in the front rank of English contractors, his works vying with the best of those carried out in the heyday of railway construction. In one respect his enterprises were unique. They did not consist of long stretches of railway, in which, the preliminary organization once perfected, the construction could be expected to go on with clockwork precision, under the supervision of clever and intelligent subordinates, but were generally undertakings of moderate extent but of the most costly and elaborate character, carried out under conditions which necessitated the solution of nearly every problem known to the engineer. Thus the Manchester Ship Canal, for its whole length, resembles the construction of one continuous clock, with all the formidable and delicate works attending the diversion of roads, railways, and canals crossing the line of route in every direction. For this sort of work Mr. Walker was, by his early engineering training, peculiarly fitted; and his comparatively early death is a distinct loss, not only to his own friends, but to the country, in the prosecution of whose public works he took such an important part. - Institution of Civil Engineers [174] 1890 - Graces Guide [016]

0-6-0 locomotive 'Penarth' at work c.1891. [563] [566]

1894-99 - 'Penarth' working nearby Ashby Magna. [564] [565]