Richard Vicars Boyle

Richard Vicars Boyle (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.

Life Born in Dublin on 14 March 1822, he was from a Scots-Irish background, the third son of Vicars Armstrong Boyle; his mother was Sophia, eldest daughter of David Courtney of Dublin. After education at a private school and two years' service on the trigonometrical survey of Ireland he became a pupil to Charles Blacker Vignoles. When he had finished his articles, he was engaged on railway construction in Ireland, at first as assistant to William Dargan, who employed him on the Belfast and Armagh and the Dublin and Drogheda Railways. In 1845, under Sir John Benjamin Macneill, he surveyed and laid out part of the Great Southern and Western Railway, and in 1846–7 was chief engineer for the Longford and Sligo Railway. In the autumn of 1852, he laid out railways and waterworks in Spain as chief assistant to George Willoughby Hemans, son of Felicia Hemans.

In 1853 Boyle was appointed a district engineer on the East Indian Railway. At first he was stationed at Patna, and was then transferred to Arrah.

Boyle joined the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1874. On retiring in 1877, he spent time travelling. He died at 3 Stanhope Terrace, Hyde Park, London on 3 January 1908, and was buried at Kensal Green Cemetery. It spanned the Tama River, joining present-day Ōta, Tokyo to Kawasaki City. 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. Under Boyle a rail bridge was constructed in 1877, of cast iron, with the components imported from the United Kingdom. It survived floods in 1878 that swept away a new toll bridge that had been built nearby.

Family Boyle married in 1853 Eleonore Anne, daughter of W. Hack of Dieppe. They had one son, who died in infancy.