of 1848-9, caused him to decide to emigrate to Australia at the age of 29 with his friend Edward Prowse, having considered America. He arrived in Adelaide on the Bolton on 29 November 1849, recording in his diary: When I was 21 I calculated on making a small fortune by the time I was 30 but have made little headway in that line as yet. Snell spent some time in South Australia surveying and painting, spending three months on the Yorke Peninsula in 1850, then around Lake Alexandrina at the Murray River mouth. He produced a Plan for the Grand Junction Canal between Adelaide and the North Arm in August 1851. Gold digging and family On 12 March 1852 he arrived at the Castlemaine diggings where he amassed £341 worth of gold in five months. Snell married Charlotte Elizabeth Bayley in Geelong on 23 June 1853, and the pair had 9 children, the first of whom Emily Charlotte died as an infant, but the other eight survived to adulthood. Railway work It was Snell's work as engineer for the Geelong and Melbourne Railway Company, from 1853 until he resigned in October 1857, that established his fortune, for which he had been paid more than £17,000. His designs included a substantial terminal station and workshops at Geelong (which were only partly realised). However, his railway work was not without controversy as he was criticised for the inadequacy of the engineering, with light timber bridges requiring extra maintenance and having a short life span, and the decision to build only a single track leading to slow and infrequent trains, and travelers between Melbourne and Geelong continued to prefer the bay steamers across Port Phillip Bay leading to diminished profits for the company. Snell gave evidence at a number of railway commission enquiries, defending his approach as necessary to complete the work in time, with the expectation that the engineering works would be upgraded as traffic and revenue increased. In reply to the presentation and testimony given to him by the Company in March 1858, he again highlighted the problems of building "a new undertaking, in a new country, and surrounded by innumerable difficulties." The railway also had the misfortune of a fatal accident on its first run. The company's superintendent – and a friend of Snell's – was struck when leaning out of the train's engine as it approached a tunnel. An