The theme of triumphal grandiosity was not confined to the British. They were soon outdone, by the French at the Gare de l’Est in Paris, the very model of the Imperial architecture which symbolises the reign of Napoleon III, and by the Germans with half a dozen stations, notably at Munich and Hamburg, symbolising the pride of individual states, while in the United States no major city was complete without its splendid, usually Roman-style, Union Station.
Grandeur spread to the colonies where it often became heavily symbolic. Paul Theroux considered Kuala Lumpur Station ‘the grandest in South-East Asia, with onion-shaped cupolas, minarets, and the general appearance of the Brighton Pavilion, but twenty times larger. As a monument to Islamic influence it is much more persuasive than the million-dollar National Mosque down the road, which gets all the tourists.’ In Vancouver the Canadian Pacific obviously perceived its terminus, linking with the steamships across the Pacific, as a symbol, emphasised through its position blocking the view and by its style, an extravagant combination of the French and the Scottish baronial.
India was large enough to absorb all aspects of the Raj-as-station builder. At Lahore the station was a fort, that proposed for Delhi was truly Imperial in scale and style, while at Victoria Station in Bombay, built at a time ‘when most of the world reverted to the classical forms, the British in India set about rediscovering and reinterpreting Indian architectural styles, symbol of a grandiose (and architecturally unhappy) mixture of west and east.’
Grandeur was internal as well as external: the finest feature of the old Euston station had been its Great Hall, its second most remarkable the directors’ offices. By the end of the century the booking office of a station like the Paragon at Hull, with its twelve elaborate ticket windows, was bank-like in its grandeur, while at Glasgow Central even the indicator boards were rich, decorative – and highly practical.
As early as 1840 railway promoters had realised that travellers appreciated having somewhere to stay when they arrived. The first hotel was at Euston in 1838, leased by a Corsican hotelier, Zenon Vantini. At Paddington, according to Gordon Biddle, Brunel saw the Great Western Hotel ‘as a fitting commencement to a journey from London to New York via the railway to Bristol and thence across the Atlantic on his new steamships.’ Carroll Meeks13 saw how the hotel, far grander than any of its predecessors, ‘pointed the way to increased grandeur’ and noted typical Brunel innovations, ‘electric clocks, private lavatories and hotwater pipes in linen cupboards’.
The association of railway accommodation with conspicuous consumption spread world-wide, to the carriages, to ‘the Pullmans that are like rushing hotels and the hotels that are like stationary Pullmans’, in Henry James’s words (The American Scene) and then to entire trains, most notably the Orient Express. Writers, most obviously Lucius Beebe, made it their whole life’s work to hymn the special trains and carriages discussed above.
In Edinburgh the gigantic hotel built by the railways became the most prominent feature of Princes Street, and from the very beginning cities were very conscious of the impact of these new steam elephants. In Liverpool, states Barman, ‘the city insisted that the station [Lime Street] harmonize with St George’s Hall. The church of Saint Simon & Jude at the end of the cutting into the station was taken down, moved and rebuilt three times as the station was enlarged.’
But Liverpool proved rather an exception. As we saw in the previous chapter, financial restraints ensured that most stations were built on what were then the outskirts of major cities. In theory this provided a major opportunity for grand urban renewal or development. But nineteenth-century urban development was usually totally unplanned, and stations throughout the world have become infamous as the centre of piece-meal, squalid developments of no urban or architectural interest. Even one of the apparent exceptions, the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich, a delightful boulevard, with the banks for which it is famous kept well out of sight, was originally at the centre of a crowded hot-bed of urban squalor and radical unrest. Stations, even in Switzerland, could not spread their aura of grandeur and luxury round them.
* In Britain the name of Sir Nigel Gresly, chief engineer of the LNER, and designer of Mallard, which created the world speed record for steam trains, was known to many people who would never have heard of his equally distinguished fellow-engineer on the LMS, Sir William Stanier.
X
WAR ON THE RAILS
Railway promoters quickly exploited threats from internal subversion or external enemies to reinforce their cause. In 1829 the railroad lobby played on the fears of the Baltimoreans that the British would repeat their invasion of a mere seventeen years earlier. Three years later a Dr Caldwell echoed their ideas when he told a Boston audience that ‘with the expedition of magic … all the military engineering of a nation might be brought to bear on any single point, to discomfit and destroy an approaching enemy.’
The argument was universal, self-generating. An 1833 pamphlet argued that a proposed line from Minden to Cologne would enable Prussia to reinforce its isolated provinces on the Rhine in the event of a surprise attack by the French. Nine years later it was France’s turn to be concerned at the threat posed to their eastern frontier by that very same railway.
Nevertheless, economic, financial, and commercial arguments soon banished military justifications in most developed countries. Even in Prussia the military, anxious that the state railway network should fit in with their strategic plans, soon found that railways followed the same routes as they themselves would have wished – fairly obviously, since both promoters and soldiers had the same object, to join the country’s major towns and cities together and to link them to the country’s frontiers.
No-one else seems to have followed the example of the Argentinians in the 1850s, when they diverted money raised for railway construction to build warships. For the nineteenth-century ‘military-industrial complex’ was different from its twentieth-century equivalent. Governments might help railways: but armaments followed, rather than led, other industries, financially as well as technologically. Both Alfred Krupp and Tom Vickers invested the fortunes they had amassed supplying the world’s railways in devising new and deadlier weapons – products of the same technology which had provided stronger rails and wheels – which they then sold to the world’s generals.
Nevertheless the security argument remained a trump card: the Canadian Pacific was saved at a low point in its fortunes when it helped quell a rebellion led by the half-Indian Louis Riel, and a powerful argument for promoters faced by autocratic rulers concerned that railways were instruments of democracy. At the end of the century the Chinese authorities, normally deeply suspicious of railways as foreign intrusions, were finally convinced of their value by the Boxer Rebellion.
Seventy years earlier the Austrian promoter Gerstner had tried to interest the Tsar in proposals for a network of lines throughout European Russia, to be run by a company which would enjoy a twenty-year monopoly. Gerstner told the Tsar1 ‘Your Majesty, at a notice of but twenty-four hours the railroad will be able to transport five thousand infantry and five hundred cavalry with all their horses, cannons and wagons. Permit me to recall England’s experience. There, during the recent Irish troubles, the government within two hours brought troops over the rail from Manchester to Liverpool, thence to be embarked for Dublin.’ At that point the Tsar, apparently, started to take a lively interest in the project.
In the early 1840s the Chartists used the railways to bring masses of their supporters to London and other major cities for peaceful demonstrations in favour of political reform. They were countered by the British military who used the same lines to ‘pour troops into the disturbed districts’, in Charles Greville’s words. As the railways spread, so did their use to suppress internal unrest. In 1846 the Prussians moved 12,000 troops to suppress the ‘Free Republic of Cracow’.
But the final confirmation of the railways’ crucial security role came in 1848 when much of Europe rose against its masters. Troops were despa
tched all over Germany to act as mobile fire brigades to fight the revolutionaries, who themselves made very effective use of the tracks. ‘Unable to stand against regular troops in the open field,’ wrote Dennis Showalter2, ‘outmanoeuvred and outfought at every turn, the revolutionaries persisted in removing themselves from the jaws of disaster – and out of pursuit – by rail. As Albrecht von Roon, a Prussian staff officer, wrote to his wife, “This frustrating war will only end when the entire railway is in our hands.” ’
Governments could use railways to suppress, not only their own rebelling populace, but those of their allies as well. In 1849 the Russians sent 30,000 troops by rail to help the Austrians overcome the rebellious Hungarians. The Russians, the biggest Imperial power in Europe, made ever-increasing use of the railways. After moving troops by rail to quell the 1863 Polish uprising, they found a new argument: that rapid rail communications would allow a reduction in the standing army, which was mainly immobilised in frontier garrisons. As the War Minister told Alexander III, ‘Railways are now the strongest and most decisive element of war. Therefore regardless even of financial difficulties, it is exceedingly desirable to make our railway network equal to that of our enemies.’
By that time the military were in a position to exercise a veto on Russia’s railway plans. In the 1890s Count Witte was under severe pressure to build lines like that to Central Asia in pursuit of the ‘Great Game’ and to help future mobilisation against Germany. ‘I tried to develop the railway network as best I could,’ Count Witte told the Tsar, ‘but military considerations, on whose side Your Majesty naturally was for the most part, significantly hindered the building of the railways.’
Rail construction often depended on the authorities’ perception of which enemies were the most dangerous at any one time. During the 1890s the Russians were obsessed with the possibility of war in Europe and their lines were developed in that direction. Almost inevitably, their first war was with Japan; and at that point their strategic thinking shifted eastwards. The next war was with Germany – though by 1914 the Russians had prepared facilities like double-tracking and plans for mobilisation as elaborate and as universal (though not nearly as efficiently implemented) as the Germans.*
But it was in the Balkans, that cauldron of imperial ambitions, that railways became most obviously a military weapon, the outward sign of otherwise secret diplomatic manoeuvrings. The Sultan included much of the railway building in the Ottoman Empire in the defence budget. The result, as Noel Buxton wrote in 1908, was that, ‘Over a large area the few railways that exist are built for strategy alone.’ The use of railways as a major weapon in the convoluted geo-political chess game played by Austria, Russia, France, Germany – as well as the home teams, the Turks, the Serbs, the Roumanians and the Bulgarians – continued until the outbreak of war in 1914.
Once war had actually broken out railways enabled generals and the armies they commanded to escape – for the first time in recorded history – from the limitations imposed by the speed and endurance of men and horses. In theory the railways’ capacity to transport soldiers and their equipment with unprecedented speed transformed the possibilities open to military strategists. In practice the railways’ inflexibility and their vulnerability to sabotage limited their revolutionary potential.
In fact, throughout the century, troops and supplies alike remained dependent on horse-drawn transport once they had arrived at the railhead. This exposed what Martin van Creveld has called3 ‘the inherent limitations of a system of supply based on the unfortunate combination of the technical means of one age – the railways – with those of an earlier one.’ Moreover the increase in mobility permitted by the railways imposed strains on the decision-making powers of statesmen and generals which proved too great in 1914, and helped make the First World War inevitable because the machine, once put in motion, proved mightier than its human controllers.
‘Ask of me anything but time,’ said Napoleon; but, thanks to the railways, ‘Space and time, two of the key factors in the strategists’ equation, meant something far different to Moltke than to Napoleon or Frederick the Great,’ as Dennis Showalter put it. But the revolution went deeper. Railways gave a new meaning to the phrase ‘a nation at war’ by multiplying the number of men who could be mobilised in the first few days or weeks after the outbreak of hostilities.
During the American Civil War, even seige guns travelled by rail.
They also radically transformed the balance between logistics and strategy. To Napoleon l’Intendance suit, the army’s logistical tail was inevitably subordinate to the will of the commanding general. Allowing the railways to spread meant that the generals had to follow the imperatives dictated by the intendance.
At the same time the railways, and the telegraph, widened the gulf between the reality of the front line and the dreams of a High Command – behind the lines – itself a concept possible only in the railway-cum-telegraph age. No wonder that accounts of most nineteenth-century military campaigns are full of tales of troop trains arriving at the wrong time, the wrong place, not at all, or without the soldiers’ equipment and supplies. The railways imposed their own industrial disciplines, alien to autocratic regimes: for instance, by commandeering trains sundry Grand Dukes greatly reduced the Russian army’s mobility when war broke out against Japan in 1904.
Railways were used against foreign enemies well after they had been employed against native troublemakers. In the so-called ‘Olmutz’ crisis in 1850 the Austrians transported 750,000 troops to the trouble-spot in what is now northern Czechoslovakia quickly and efficiently. By contrast the Prussian armies wandered aimlessly between stations, bereft of orders, let alone transport. The Prussians were slow to learn their lesson. When they mobilised against the Danes nine years later there was still chaos. In the meantime the British had proved the utility of railways in the Crimea: the makeshift line built by Peto’s navvies proved capable of handling up to 700 tons of supplies a day.
The French railways demonstrated their capacities in 1859. In the last ten days of April that year the Paris–Lyon railway carried a daily average of 8,421 men and 512 horses to the Piedmontese frontier to fight against the Austrians in Italy, an impressive performance helped by the way the French allowed railwaymen, not generals, to organise the mobilisation. The French did not take advantage of the time gained to change their military strategy, though. Moreover the supplies did not move at the same rate as the troops, who had nothing to eat except some mouldy biscuits in the twenty-four hours after they had defeated the Austrians at the battle of Solferino – a story of lack of coordination which was to be repeated time and again.
The lesson was learnt, not in Europe, but by bitter experience in the United States, where the Civil War proved to be the supreme railway war, strategically, tactically, logistically. Without the railways the conflict would have been confined to the Eastern seaboard and the country’s river systems, notably the Mississippi. Railways transformed the war into an almost continental conflict. The North’s triumph was based on the fact that it had a better rail network, three times as long as that available to the Confederates, and had the industrial and managerial skills to exploit its supremacy.
Scorched earth in the railway age: General Sherman dismantles Atlanta’s railroads.
Railways were the supreme symbol of the gap between the industrial North and the largely agrarian South. The Southerners knew this: before 1860 they had blocked progress on plans for a transcontinental railroad by insisting that it pass through the South. In their absence after Secession Congress easily passed the 1862 Act, providing for the building of a direct route from Omaha to San Francisco, well away from the South. During the war the North harnessed the managerial skills already available within the railroads to provide a transport and construction service far more professional than any in Europe. The managers and generals were backed up by the industrial infrastructure required to build and repair rails, locomotives and rolling-stock while the South had to rely on an inevi
tably dwindling supply of rails torn up from minor lines.
By the end of the war the Northern railroads were in far better shape than they had been in 1860. The previously separate lines serving major towns had been linked up, steel rails had replaced iron rails, coal had replaced wood as fuel, gauges standardised, many lines double-tracked, and both road-beds and the tracks themselves strengthened. The longer the conflict lasted, the greater the contrast with the South. For by the spring of 1864 the fastest train on the crucial line between Wilmington and the Confederate capital, Richmond, averaged a mere 10¼ mph.
At the outbreak of the war it was the North which was on the defensive, and their capital, Washington, was only saved by the Baltimore & Ohio. The pattern for the whole war was set by the shiftiest of the Union’s many ‘political’ generals, Ben Butler. Unable to transport his troops through Baltimore, where the bridges had been burnt, he shipped his troops down the Potomac to Annapolis, where he found the rails torn up and the rolling stock destroyed. He found a rusting old locomotive and called for volunteers to repair it. Up stepped a private claiming, ‘That engine was made in our shop; I guess I can fit her up and run her.’ He did, and Butler’s regiments arrived in time to save Washington. The Baltimore & Ohio remained crucial when the Union went onto the offensive because of its direct links west from Washington to the Mississippi river system.
The World the Railways Made Page 37