The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  At the height of his powers he controlled ‘a vast network of enterprises such as no one man before his time had dared to try and combine’. To the majority who fawned on him ‘he was as a mountebank upon a platform at a fair – one who could draw money from their pockets by tricks which kept them perpetually gaping’. He had the nerve and the bulldozing drive to push through the bills, the amalgamations, required. His basic aim, as he told a House of Commons committee in 1844, was a controlled monopoly through a mixture of amalgamations, leases and purchases. To achieve his aim he perfected most of the fraudulent devices employed by his successors the world over. He manipulated the stocks of the many companies in which he was interested; sold land from his own estate to his own railways; bought rails and other equipment cheap and sold it dear to his railways, and withheld the money he owed to landowners and contractors.

  Yet, at the height of his fame, he was, almost literally, worshipped; his grand mansion in Kensington was besieged by the great and good, his every move an object of wonder. In such an atmosphere it was not surprising that earlier ‘canal manias’ were soon eclipsed by the railway boom which erupted in 1845. The press whipped up the excitement, and the hype was often memorable. The line from London to Exeter was proposed partly because ‘it was nearly the road adopted by the Romans’. Were not ‘railways the emblems of internal confidence and prosperity … the great levellers, bringing the producer and consumer into immediate contact … by railways the whole country may be, and will be, under the blessing of divine providence, cultivated as a garden.’11

  In 1845 Parliament passed 225 Railway Bills, with a further 270 in the following session, providing for 4,540 miles of track, costing nearly £100 million. Members were not exactly impartial. In 1845, a total of 157 had their names on the registers of new railway companies – one company boasted of being able to command a hundred votes in the House of Commons alone. Titled personages were naturally much sought after by promoters; one man was a director in twenty-three railway companies, a second in twenty-two.

  The mania was universal. In a Yorkshire vicarage Emily and Anne Brontë ignored the warning of their sister Charlotte and invested their meagre savings in the Yorkshire & Midland railway. In London, ‘Men were pointed out in the streets who had made their tens of thousands. [Sober citizens] saw the whole world railway mad … they entered the whorlpool and were carried away by the vortex … their infant daughters were large subscribers; their youthful sons were down for thousands. Like drunken men they lost their caution and gave their signatures for everything that was offered.’12 Even Charles Greville dabbled, although he had been warned by the Governor of the Bank of England who ‘never remembered in all his experience anything like the present speculation … and that there could not fail to be a fearful reaction.’

  Inevitably the pot boiled over; but while the crash of 1847 inflicted severe losses on thousands of investors and permanently cooled the ardour of the British investing classes towards their native railway system, it did not inflict anything like the damage caused by bigger Victorian crashes. Although at the time the panic was, naturally, blamed on the railway promoters, Lewin sensibly blames the general economic situation: the failure of the Irish potato crop and the famine which followed; the repeal of the Corn Laws and the subsequent sharp reduction in the price of grain; and a consequent severe shortage of spare capital for investment.

  The greatest of all promoters survived the mania. Hudson’s downfall came two years after the general crash, sparked off by a crisis in the affairs of the Eastern Counties railway. The chairman of the investigating committee was a Quaker, which added moral and linguistic force to his questions – ‘Didst thou, after the accountant had made up the yearly accounts, alter any of the figures? … wilt thou give the committee an answer, yea or nay?’. Hudson fell because, although he controlled 1,450 out of the 5,000 miles of railway in Britain, they never formed a natural system, and his doom was inevitable once his enemies had managed to promote a direct line from London to York, thus greatly reducing the value of the roundabout routes he controlled between the two cities.

  Not even the crash and Hudson’s fall deterred the promoters for long, however, and by the end of the century Britain was saddled with an unnecessarily complex, over-competitive railway system with innumerable, inevitably uncommercial branch lines. Every major system strove to squeeze every possible drop of traffic from its hinterland. The sequence of events left the British public ambivalent: pride in the world’s first railway system combined with a sceptical, if not downright hostile attitude towards railway promoters and railway directors. But by that time they had infected the rest of the world. Thomas Gray’s ‘Observations on a General Iron Way’, translated into French and German, had spread the railway gospel, notably into Germany and Belgium, where George Stephenson was treated as a heroic figure. But then he had always been confident that, as he told a devout Methodist friend ‘I will send the locomotive as the great missionary over the world’.

  The Stourbridge Lion, the first imported locomotive on American soil, 1829

  *

  The Americans had started early. In 1827 a few farsighted citizens of Baltimore visited Britain and on their return promoted the grandiosely-named Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the city’s attempt to counter the dominance of New York – a dominance reinforced by the triumphal opening two years earlier of the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes. The Baltimoreans went about their work in style. In 1827 the first spadeful of earth was dug (naturally on 4th July) by Charles Carroll, the last surviving signatory of the Declaration of Independence, while the incumbent President, John Quincy Adams, was inaugurating work on a nearby canal.

  ‘Best Friend’. The first all-American locomotive, built in 1831.

  The same impetus – the desire by a seaport to capture the trade of a hinterland at a convenient point on a river – was behind America’s second real railroad, between Charleston and Hamburg on the Savannah River. Throughout the 1830s numerous lines in Pennsylvania repeated the pattern set by the Stockton & Darlington, joining coal fields and navigable waters. But ‘even these earliest railroads were new and largely independent agents of transportation, sturdy rivals of the older canals’, noted George Rogers Taylor.13 Over 3,300 miles of railways were built during the decade (in which 2,000 miles of canals were constructed) so that by 1840 the Americans had built over half the railways in the world. But in so enormous a country even the rapidly-growing web of rails in New York and New England made far less of an impact than a comparable mileage in Britain.

  Moreover, the Americans gained their independence from British engineering influence only slowly. A dozen American engineers visited Britain between 1825 and 1840. The resulting influence (particularly of the solid construction on the Liverpool & Manchester) was felt on the whole ‘technological package’, including the rails and the locomotives, especially in the south and in New England.

  The story in Continental Europe was rather different, if only because no other country was as industrially well-equipped as Britain to grasp the railways’ potential. The French, typically, started by theorising.* Most of their early railways were designed to be used by horses, or stationary engines, and during the 1830s the French devoted more of their energies to discussing the long-term results of railways than to planning, let alone building them.

  Frederic Barthlony, chairman of the Orleans company, hailed railways as comparable in importance to printing and the discovery of America, a herald of an age of universal peace. An anonymous deputy greeted them as a means of binding together the peoples of France even more tightly, though Proudhon the Socialist sourly proposed that the French improve the lot of their own people before embarking on the construction of railways. Railways were also denounced as an example of the irrational times. Nevertheless some lines were built, notably from Paris to Saint Germain and Versailles, both under the aegis of the Pereire brothers, Saint-Simonians,† for whom railways were, in a sense, the crucial instrument of their creed.<
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  During the 1830s and 1840s lines, generally short and unconnected, were built in most European countries, in Prussia, in other German states, in Russia, Holland, Denmark and Austria. Outside Europe a short line was opened in Cuba, then a Spanish colony, to transport sugar, before there were any lines in the mother country. But only the Belgians seized on the new form of transport to bind a country together in a systematic fashion, a lead which resulted in the first international railway, from Cologne through Brussels to Antwerp, which opened in 1843.

  Globally, the railways’ age of glory started in 1840, when there were a mere 5,500 miles in operation. By 1880 there were over 220,000 throughout the world. The Europeans, in particular, had overtaken the British in mileage, and, often, in techniques as well. By 1880 not only Jules Verne’s fictional hero, Phileas Fogg, but also a real-life journalist, Nelly Bly, could use the world’s vastly expanded railway network to go round the world in less than three months. As Eric Hobsbawm points out,14, without railways the journey would have taken Phileas Fogg or Nelly Bly nearly four times eighty days.

  The world’s rail mileage doubled again in the last two decades of the century, partly because of explosive growth in Russia, Latin America, Africa and Australia, which had had a mere 2,500 miles of line between them, less than a twentieth of the world total, as late as 1860. But even in Europe as many miles were built between 1880 and 1913 as in the preceding thirty years. France, Germany, Sweden Switzerland and the Netherlands all more or less doubled their networks in the thirty years before World War I – although these were mainly branch and feeder lines, which proved uneconomic with the arrival of the internal combustion engine.

  By the 1880s the railway was no longer the wonder of the age. Electric power – in the form of motors, telephones, lighting – was replacing steam as the miracle worker. It is not surprising, therefore, that most of the examples in this book inevitably come from the period between 1840 and 1890 when the railways ruled unchallenged as the great, general, exemplar of progress.

  William James – the Forgotten Pioneer

  It was William James15 not George Stephenson, who first projected the idea of a national network of railways to replace the canals, and he was well placed to carry his ideas through to reality. Indeed, it was only a financial crisis in the early 1820s, which ruined him, that prevented him reaping the reward of his efforts.

  He was a distinguished land agent with so lucrative a business that he was a multi-millionaire by today’s standards by the middle of the second decade of the century. He devised improved means of transport for the coal produced under his employers’ lands, projecting new turnpike roads and new canals to carry coals from Staffordshire to Birmingham. These plans came to naught, so he spent the early 1820s planning a railway system, centred on Birmingham, running from Wolverhampton to London via Oxford (avoiding the expensive tunnels, cuttings and embankments required by the alternative route eventually followed) and to Liverpool (the future Grand Junction railway). He also sketched a dozen other lines, notably from London to Brighton, Portsmouth and Chatham, all realised in the 1830s and 1840s.

  More immediately he grasped the need for a railway connecting Liverpool with Manchester and other cotton towns to compete with the inordinately expensive Bridgewater Canal. In 1821 he formed a company to build the line, intended from the beginning to be powered by steam locomotives. ‘He did not discover the locomotive,’ as Samuel Smiles put it, ‘he did what was next best to it, he discovered George Stephenson.’ At the time it was James, rather than the Quakers promoting the Stockton & Darlington, who appeared best-placed to exploit the locomotives Stephenson was producing.

  James carried out a thorough survey of the line, but was caught short of cash in the financial crisis of the early 1820s and crashed – he was so important a figure that his case occupied the Bankruptcy Commissioners for twenty years and the lawyers’ fees amounted to hundreds of thousands of pounds in modern money. The first vulture to profit from his misfortunes was Joseph Saunders, a local man to whom James had brought his ideas, who underwrote the survey of the line and subsequently became its managing director. He forced James to hand over control, assuring him that ‘your name shall be prominent in the proceedings … you may rely on my zeal for you in every point connected with your reputation … the appointment of George Stephenson will, under the circumstances, be agreeable to you.’

  James had to agree. He was pushed aside and died, a broken man, in 1837. But he was not forgotten. Maunder’s Biographical Treasury noted that James: ‘may be in truth regarded as the father of the railway system’, and nine years after his death all the country’s leading engineers, with the single exception of George Stephenson, formed a committee to compensate James’s children for the fact that their father’s ‘successful exertions and great pecuniary sacrifices’ had deprived his family of all patrimony. The letter spelt out the ‘acknowledged fact that, to their father’s labours, the public are indebted for the establishment of the present railroad system’.

  George Stephenson could not bear the implication that he was not the sole creator of the railway – especially as he was in the best position to know the truth. He was furious, and forced his son to withdraw his signature from the letter.

  The Battle of the Gauges

  For centuries, some say since the Romans, mining engineers had been accustomed to rail-ways laid to a gauge of about 4’ 8½” – 1,435 mm. George Stephenson followed the tradition – using a 4’ 8” gauge for the Stockton & Darlington and, for some unknown reason, added an extra half-inch when he came to construct the Liverpool to Manchester. The Stephensons, partly accidentally, institutionalised the gauge, because the locomotives built in their Newcastle factory – the first to be used in a dozen countries – were built to that gauge.

  George Stephenson later claimed that he had originally preferred a 5’ 2” gauge, but had reverted to the earlier measure after discussing the matter with his son. Most of the other major engineers at the time preferred a slightly broader gauge of between 5 ft and 5’ 6”. They needed room for the biggest possible boilers and were looking for the lowest possible centre of gravity, both aims helped by a broader gauge.

  Only one man in Britain, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, dared challenge the Stephensons. ‘Looking at the speeds which I contemplated would be adopted on railways and the masses to be moved,’ he later told a government committee, ‘it seemed to me that the whole machine was too small for the work to be done, and that it required that the parts should be on a scale more commensurate with the mass and the velocity to be attained.’ But by 1835 when he proposed his alternative – and technically superior – 7-ft gauge, it was already too late: too many railway lines had already been built, or planned, at the narrower gauge. Although broad-gauge trains ran on Brunel’s Great Western until 1892 the doom of the 7-ft gauge had been sealed half a century earlier.

  The Gauge Act, passed in 1844, effectively confined the broad-gauge system to its existing territory, but allowed the two to co-exist. At that point Joseph Locke, one of Britain’s leading engineers, and normally an equable man, exploded with rage. England, mother of railways, would see uniformity everywhere else, but ‘would stand alone in the anomalous position of having (because one man of great genius disdained to pursue the path pursued by others, and because Parliament, being careless and indifferent to the subject, allowed one company to deviate from the general plan) engraved on her railway a duplication, a complexity and a ruinous expense, of which I am satisfied it would be said that could they have been foreseen they would never have been tolerated.’

  Once the continental pioneers, the Belgians, had adopted 4’ 8½”, their western European neighbours were, eventually, bound to follow suit, as the Dutch found to their cost. Against the advice of their British contractors and engineers they used a gauge of 6’ 6” for their first railways, but these proved unprofitable. Nevertheless the infrastructure of tunnels, viaducts and bridges in Continental Europe allowed broader, taller trains
, wagons and coaches than most British lines – a discrepancy in ‘loading gauges’ which is hampering development today of the truly European railway system which will radiate from the Channel Tunnel.

  To remain different, you had to be isolated. Irish rails were 5’ 3” apart, the Russians and the Spanish, on the edges of the continent, 5’ 6” – though the Spanish are now having to convert to the standard 4’ 8½” gauge to enable the ultra-fast lines they are building to be used by international expresses.

  The British, by choosing 5’ 6” for main lines in India, also, accidentally, imposed the same gauge on the budding Argentine network. The first locomotives bought by the Argentine Western Railway had been destined for India, had been sent to Sebastopol to haul troops and equipment during the Crimean war, had returned to England, been rejected as unserviceable, and were snapped up by the Argentines at a bargain price. Later lines had to follow suit.

  In the United States individual railroads often chose non-standard gauges as a gesture of independence, an affirmation of their territorial imperatives. Even though the powerful ‘Commonwealth’ of Pennsylvania stipulated the use of the 4’ 8½” gauge as from 1852, there were at least eleven different gauges in the North, including the 6-ft gauge adopted by the mighty and mightily contrary Erie railroad. In the Southern states many, though not all, the major lines were of 5-ft gauge. As a result there were at least eight changes in track width between Philadelphia and Charleston. Territorial imperatives were not confined to the railways. The town of Portland in Maine imposed a gauge of 5’ 6” on the Grand Trunk railroad to exclude its better-established rivals like Boston and New York from the traffic it hoped to attract from Canada.