William Yolland

William Yolland CB, FRS FRSA (17 March 1810 – 4 September 1885) was an English military surveyor, astronomer and engineer, and was Britain's Chief Inspector of Railways from 1877 until his death.

He made a strong impression there, particularly with his mathematical knowledge and publications on astronomy, and in 1846 he was nominated to head the organisation by its departing Superintendent, General Thomas Colby.

[9] The Railway Inspectorate of the Board of Trade was invariably staffed from the Royal Engineers and Yolland, although still an army officer (by then a major) had no difficulty in securing a post with that organisation.

[6] His findings were accepted and his report was still influencing the training of military engineers (in Britain and the United States) at the end of the twentieth century.

At a time when Britain's railway mileage was expanding at a great rate, his duties included the inspection of new lines and he took full opportunity to insist that the latest safety features, such as signal interlocking and block working, should be deployed.

[11][12] Yolland's campaign for continuous automatic brakes (he favoured the spring-and-ratchet system invented by James Newall) was initially less successful.

[a] At that time the Inspectorate had no statutory powers with regard to existing lines;[b] all too frequently Yolland found himself reporting, in his characteristic rigorous manner, the organisational failures and neglect that had led to serious accidents.

The investigation led by Yolland established the root causes very quickly, and further details emerged at the public enquiry set up by the Board of Trade.

Yolland found that the bridge was in such a dire state, with the piers not perpendicular, that it failed under test and needed to be demolished and replaced by a more stable double-track structure.