The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  The same pattern applied in Siberia as the Trans-Siberian pushed through: the biggest centres grew where the railway crossed major rivers. One of the most exotic new cities was in Manchuria. Harbin was a mere fishing village on the Songhua River until the Russians bullied the Chinese emperor into running a short cut for the Trans-Siberian Railway through Manchuria to Vladivostock. The Manchurians were never fond of the Russians – they called them ‘second-class light-hairs’ – but thanks to them, Harbin became the Manchurian equivalent of Paris, the centre of every sin, every luxury. It was only nine days by train from Paris, so it got the fashions and the music and the latest papers long before Shanghai. The striptease and the Charleston and Dixieland jazz were introduced to China in Harbin in the nineteen-twenties because of the Trans-Siberian link with Paris.’9

  Any railway crossing uncharted lands inevitably created its own settlements. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe challenged its Canadian rivals in the number of cities it spawned. Some of the names – Presidio, El Paso, San Diego – were Spanish. Others – Pasadena, Yosemite, Palcentia – sounded vaguely Spanish but were, in fact, Indian or merely invented.10 Bakingly hot settlements were called Siberia or Klondike, while immigrants named their towns Exeter or Moscow. But the majority of the settlements, an astonishing two hundred in all, were named after the railroad’s officials, employees, their wives and children, ranging from Mr Arntz the trainmaster to Mr Conrad the despatcher.

  The only railway which compared with the great transcontinentals was the ‘Lunatic Line’ from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, which, as we have seen, created a whole new country – Kenya. Previously the territory boasted only one town, Mombasa on the coast. Kenya’s other three major urban centres – Nairobi, Nakuru and Kisumu – were pure railway creations. Nairobi’s site was uninviting, described by Charles Miller as ‘a bleak, swampy stretch of soppy landscape, devoid of human habitation of any sort, the resort of thousands of wild animals of every species’. But its site was strategically obvious, the last stretch of level ground before the track rose two thousand feet up the eastern wall of the Rift valley. Like many another frontier town it grew fast but haphazardly. Two years after it was founded Sir Charles Eliot remarked that ‘the beauty of a view in Nairobi depends on the more or less thorough elimination of the town from the landscape’. It was only in the 1920s that its fame as a centre of East African high life gave it a glamorous veneer.

  Cheyenne

  Originally Cheyenne on Crow Creek, some 150 miles west of the then-significant city of Julesburg, was just another ‘hell on wheels’, a camp like hundreds of others famous only for sex, drink, gambling – and impermanence.

  Early in June 1867 white troops and Pawnee scouts saw off the Sioux warriors who had infested the creek, leaving room for the railroad and a settlement. The next six months saw enough activity to last a lifetime. On the 19th June the Union Pacific engineers arrived and staked off a site for the city, a task which took them a mere two days. According to the History and Business Directory of Cheyenne,* there were soon ‘a large number of saloons in tents where whiskey and other poisonous compounds were retailed at fabulous prices, and coarse provisions commanded prices according to the size of the hungry individual’s purse.’

  In August the first building with a shingle roof was laid – previously roofs were made of ‘boards placed on each other which enabled the inhabitants to get shower baths occasionally free of expense’. By then the pace was hotting up. Two gentlemen arrived in town on 15th August, and in forty-eight hours had built a substantial ‘out-fitting house’. On 16th September a well-known journalist, Mr N. A. Baker, arrived in town: by the 19th he had produced the first issue of the Leader, ‘the Pioneer paper of the future Wyoming’. It was a robust sheet, featuring a column entitled ‘last night’s shootings’. On the 25th, a Mr H. J. Rogers opened the town’s first bank. Two days later a mass meeting laid the foundations of local government. And on the 30th ‘oil springs’ were discovered eighteen miles west of the town.

  October started badly with ‘a terrible affray’ which killed Pat Mallaly ‘and a man known as Limber Jim’. The affair ‘caused great excitement, and but for the ability and firmness of the city government would have resulted in a reign of terror’. So all was quiet for the arrival on the 13th of a party of ‘Editorial excursionists’ – both railroads and journalists were partial to such editorial freebies. By then the town was getting too popular. It took a battalion of troops to disperse a party of squatters from Julesburg.

  November was even more eventful. A public school was established on the 9th, a day remarkable for a prize fight over 126 rounds, lasting in all one hour and forty-three minutes. On the 11th that remarkable entrepreneur, George Francis Train, hit town, and within six hours he had formed a company to organise the building of a large hotel. But all these were mere preliminaries to the real foundation day, the 13th, when the Union Pacific’s tracks reached Cheyenne.

  Two months later the Dakota legislature granted Cheyenne its city charter. Nevertheless the new metropolis was forced to rely on rough and ready measures to keep the peace. On 19th January three men were arrested for stealing $900. Because the court was busy the men were released. The next day they were found walking together festooned with a large canvas sheet announcing that only $500 had been restored, that ‘City authorities please not interfere until 10 o’clock am, next case goes up a tree. Beware of the Vigilance Committee’. According to the authors of the Business Directory this case of rough people’s justice gave ‘an assurance of safety to the honest man who desires to make this region his home’.

  The vigilantes had plenty of work. On the 20th they ‘relieved the county’ of three men, Jack Hays, Kief and Shorty, whose very presence had caused ‘many an honest man to grasp the butt of his revolver’. Not only the policing was amateur. The city had no money. Elected officials paid many of the expenses out of their own pockets. City employees had to be paid in scrip, redeemed at a mere 50 cents to the dollar.

  Cheyenne swiftly emerged as an early centre of feminism. The legislature was anxious for female immigrants and gave them the vote and the right to sit on juries. Even so the town was no place for wimps. The town’s first Congregational minister, a Civil War veteran, had asked to be sent to ‘the toughest town west of the Mississippi’. After a few weeks he remarked that ‘it needed more courage to plant the Gospel here than it did to hold up the old flag in battle’.

  Within a couple of years Cheyenne had found its raison d’être as a centre for shipping livestock, some sheep, but mainly cattle, alive or dead in their thousands east, to Omaha and Chicago, well deserving its name of ‘cattle capital of the plains’.

  Surbiton for Smugness

  Ever since it was built, Surbiton, fifteen miles south-west of London on the line from Waterloo to Southampton, has been a by-word for suburban smugness. A more kindly and accurate description would be that it was the forerunner of an agreeable way of life, the result of an accident of railway history.

  The London & South Western Railway served the ancient market town of Kingston-upon-Thames with a station a mile away. This provided the opportunity for a speculator called Thomas Pooley. In 1838 he bought a farm and began using the land to lay out an estate between the railway and the town – which probably didn’t want too close an association with the railway in the first place.

  Pooley’s speculation soon failed. The place ‘looked almost like a mass of ruins’ and Coutts’ bank foreclosed on the mortgages. The bank, making the best of a bad job, hired Philip Hardwick, who had designed Euston Station, and with the bank’s backing, he designed and built a substantial settlement. The guide-books emphasised the railway link by calling it ‘Kingston-upon-Railway’.

  The name seemed rather bald, so the locals took an old name ‘South Barton’ and shortened it to Surbiton. In 1855 they declared their independence from Kingston and within thirty years the town was substantial enough to justify a service of sixty trains a day to London. ‘Surbiton us
ed to be the butt of jokes,’ wrote Jack Simmons in Railway in Town and Country, ‘as a symbol of dowdy suburbia. To anyone with half an eye it was – it still is – an interesting place, in which the original plan and later accretions can be discerned, much as they can in a medieval town like Boston or Carlisle. And Surbiton can fairly claim its place in history: for it is the oldest suburb in Europe, perhaps in the world, that was called into being by a railway.’

  * The concept of the ‘Way’, complete with a glassed-in arcade and eight railway lines, was that of Joseph Paxton, the architect of the Crystal Palace.

  † Quoted by John Kellett, The Impact of Railways on Victorian Cities. In recent years this railway-owned property has been of enormous financial benefit to British Rail.

  * Railways also established the idea of the ‘red light district’. According to Frank P. Donovan in The Railroad in Literature, one of the rowdiest saloons in Dodge City had a red light in the window and trainmen advised respectable citizens to stay clear of the ‘red light district’.

  * Named after the London daily newspaper.

  * First published February 1868, facsimile edition Yale 1975.

  2

  The Monuments of Steam

  Building the railways stretched man’s capacity to master his environment. The impetus they provided, the optimism they symbolised, combined with the prospect of monetary gain, managed to force the bridging of the unbridgeable, the flinging of rails across deserts, mountains, marshes, no matter how grim, how inaccessible, how inhospitable they were. Every aspect of these monuments, the bridges, the stations, the hotels, have been the subject of innumerable books and articles, popular and learned. But they echoed the contrast, present throughout this book, between areas where the railways were genuinely pioneers, where they forced the technical and imaginative pace, and the majority of cases where they merely allowed fashion its fullest expression.

  It was in the engineering of the lines themselves that the railways showed their greatest boldness, their fearless contempt for previous conventions and assumptions of the limits of the practical. Appropriately George Stephenson had shown the way with his triumph over the supposedly impassable Chat Moss (Chapter I). But engineers outside Britain were soon conquering far more difficult terrain, from the Andes to the Rockies, from Kenya to deepest Burma. Only the railways could command the funds required to tunnel through the Alps, or up the Rockies and Andes. There are dozens of such lines, many of which naturally gave rise to magnificent descriptive passages. Curiously many of the best of these accounts are those by modern travellers – older generations cannot improve on the works of Colin Thubron or Paul Theroux, for, as rail travel becomes less ordinary, less run-of-the-mill, the effects on the writer become more vivid.

  These travellers remain excited by the other great thrill of railway travel: the magnificent bridges and viaducts to which they gave rise. The sense of excitement or insecurity is inevitably heightened if the bridge, or the line itself, is above the cloud line, as it so often is in the Andes or the Himalayas.

  Locomotives were the ultimate symbol of man’s control over nature. The first locomotives, their designers, builders and drivers, were natural stars. The Stephensons set the vogue, but the early railway age produced many others: the first locomotive made in France by the British engineer W. B. Buddicom was familiarly known as La petite Budie. Thomas Crampton, another expatriate engineer was so renowned that ‘Prendre le Crampton’ became slang for taking a train – and William Wilson, the first driver on Germany’s first line, became a local hero.

  All too soon the general public accepted them as simply part of the railway landscape, though they remained fascinated by the noise, the smell of engines, their perky hoots, the melancholy whistles, all the sensations they conjured up. Not surprisingly they could easily become deeply anthropomorphised, as witness Archibald MacLeish:

  Still sweating from the deep ravines

  Where rot within the buried wood

  The bones of time that are their food,

  Graze the great machines

  But it was an earlier American poet, Emily Dickinson, who best distilled the universal human feeling that these were friendly, domesticated beasts:

  I like to see it lap the miles,

  And lick the valley up,

  And stop to feed itself at tanks;

  And then, prodigious, step

  Around a pile of mountains,

  And, supercilious, peer

  In shanties by the sides of roads;

  And then a quarry pare

  To fit its sides, and crawl between,

  Complaining all the while

  In horrid, hooting stanza;

  Then chase itself down hill

  And neigh like Boanerges;

  Then, punctual as a star,

  Stop – docile and omnipotent –

  At its own stable door.

  Dickinson was certainly not interested in the technicalities of her ‘docile and omnipotent’ beasts. Nor, in fact, was Walt Whitman in his all-embracing Ode to a Locomotive in Winter, in which he provides the most complete set of outsider’s responses to the great machine. He was obviously fascinated by the moving parts:

  Thy black cylindric body, golden brass and silvery steel,

  Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides …

  Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels

  But these were a small part of the whole phenomenon, ‘Thy train of cars … thy swinging lamps at night’. His ‘fierce-throated beauty … in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive’ was the

  Bombay’s Victoria Station: imperialism at its most splendid.

  ‘Type of the modern – emblem of motion and power – pulse of the continent …

  Launched o’er the prairies wide, across the lakes,

  To the free skies unpent and glad and strong.

  Most of the public, like the poets, was interested only in the overall effect the locomotives created, perhaps, occasionally, in the engineers if they created a record.* But they left the details to the engineers, the spotters, the small boy in all of us who wrote thousands of books on every one of them. But they – and I am one of their number – were and are emphatically not interested in the design of the fireboxes or the names of their makers, matters of limited, specialist interest outside the scope of this book.

  But it is the great railway stations, the temples of steam, the lavishly embellished secular equivalents of the great medieval cathedrals, which remain the most appropriate symbol of the railways’ importance in men’s lives, for they illustrated the way every country interpreted the railway dream. As we saw in Chapter I, the form of the station, and indeed of the offices and hotels which grew up as part of them, found its definite shape within the first decade of the railways’ existence, and it is difficult to see any fundamental development since 1840, apart from the regrettable modern tendency to drive the trains underground to leave room for more profitable offices in the air space above.

  Yet, despite their importance, their grandeur, their beauty, as architecture they usually merely distilled, reflected a country’s styles at a given time. For, although they provided the opportunity (and the funds) for the century’s architects to express themselves in the fullest and most lavish manner, they tended not to innovate, architecturally. Their lack of originality was, perhaps deliberate. As J. M. Richards11 points out, their promoters and architects were often trying to reassure the public that this novel creature, the railways, was not as frightening as it appeared at first sight.

  Although there are innumerable books and paintings celebrating the stations, their architecture, the life that bustled there12, yet somehow, their architecture represents a marvellous opportunity missed: perhaps, as Richards says, because the promoters were trying to defuse the shock of the new represented by the railways, perhaps because the promoters, like all holders of financial power througho
ut the ages, were conservative creatures. For whatever reason, stations were not allowed to remain as original as they could have been and for a short period were.

  Only at Paddington Station in London did the station succeed in blending the new technology, the new strength of iron and steel, with orthodox architecture. It took the combination of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the architect Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, who had worked together on the Great Exhibition, to conduct what Builder Magazine described as the attempt to ‘avoid any recurrence to existing styles, and to try the experiment of designing everything in accordance with the structural purposes, or nature of the materials employed, iron & cement.’ In Christian Barman’s words ‘the whole of the train hall structure is treated as a single design … artist and engineer were never to work together in quite the same lively and imaginative way again.’

  The truth of Barman’s remark can be seen a couple of miles to the east. King’s Cross is a purely engineering solution, and very fine and integrated it is too; while its neighbour, St Pancras, represents an admission of failure, with two equally splendid edifices, the arching train shed and the arrogantly Gothic Hotel placed together with no attempt to harmonise the two totally opposing styles. The same pattern was repeated, often on an even grander scale, throughout Europe, most obviously at Amsterdam. But after King’s Cross, no other stations became simply a ‘machine for keeping trains in’ until Eero Saarinen designed the station at Helsinki in 1910.

  For stations soon became an opportunity for grandiose displays of railway macho rather than an opportunity to experiment. The railway promoters, like nouveaux riches throughout the ages, were looking for respectability combined with grandiosity. At Lime Street, in Liverpool, in Gordon Biddle’s words in Great Railway Stations of Britain, ‘the whole purpose of the facade was to create a symbolic gateway to the railway, using the Roman triumphal arch as its theme. It was quite deliberately expressed in the classical terms of the Renaissance because contemporary thought still saw in the buildings of ancient Greece and Rome the representation of great and noble concepts which was exactly how the railways were represented.’ At Nimes the idea was taken to its logical, ridiculous conclusion. The station there was a small-scale model of the town’s most famous Roman monument, the Maison Carré.