Richard Vicars Boyle

Richard Vicars Boyle CSI (1822–1908) was an Irish civil engineer, noted for his part in the Siege of Arrah in 1857, and as a railway pioneer in Japan.

After education at a private school and two years' service on the trigonometrical survey of Ireland he became a pupil to Charles Blacker Vignoles.

[1] On the outbreak of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, towards the end of July, troops in the cantonments at Danapur, about twenty-five miles from Arrah, mutinied and deserted, Boyle fortified a detached two-storey house in the same compound as his own private residence, and provisioned it to withstand a siege.

Here on Sunday, 26 July, 16 Europeans and about 40 Sikhs took refuge, and the following morning mutineers crossed the Son River and took possession of Arrah.

With English assistants he laid out an extensive system of railways in Japan and left about seventy miles of completed line in full working order.

[1] To the Institution of Civil Engineers, of which he became an associate on 10 January 1854 and member on 14 Feb. 1860, Boyle presented in 1882 a paper on the Rokugo river bridge, Japan.

After successive floods had damaged bridges at the site, the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1688 had decreed that no replacement should be built, and for nearly two centuries ferries plied across the Tama there.