The French example set off a pan-European race to provide high-speed travel. The Germans are trying a mix of new and old tracks even on such major routes as that from Berlin to Munich – partly because the ferocity and effectiveness of the country’s green lobby makes it both time-consuming and expensive to build new lines. After several decades of effort – the Apennines have always proved a notoriously difficult obstacle for tunnelers – the Italians have finally completed their major line north from Naples through Rome, Florence and Bologna to Milan while the Spanish have proved the most ambitious of all, planning to ensure that nine tenths of the population will soon be within 50km of a high-speed station. Unhappily European countries – or rather their rail operators – remain firmly nationalistic. As a result national prejudice ensures that the much-vaunted international route network sponsored by the EEC has largely proved to be a non-starter with only three out of 14 schemes completed. Outside Europe the efforts can be even more ambitious. The Kenyans are trying to jump generations of speed, while they used to say ‘if you’re in a hurry you take a bus not a train’ they are planning to build a line which will reduce travel time from Mombasa to Nairobi from 13 to 3 hours. But throughout the world the growth of traffic on lines old and new has been emphasised by the abandonment of the old tradition of a select few especially fast trains in favour of regular fast services.
Celebrating the world first underground railway.
The TGV network was predicated on the belief that trains could compete with travel by air only for journeys of up to three hours – though even this limit gave rail the advantage for journeys of up to 450 miles. But the sheer ease of train travel, the ability to use computers – and increasingly wifi – on trains, and the airports’ obsession with irritating, time-absorbing security has added another hour to the time, allowing for competition between cities over 500 miles apart – even when some of the route is travelled on older, slower tracks. The same applies to them, until recently a great many planes flew between London and Manchester, a mere 200 miles away. But the arrival of a reliable two-hour rail service has greatly reduced the number of flights – as has the Eurostar service from London to Paris and Brussels.
Another happy sign of the renaissance of the railway has been the involvement of major architects, most notably Salvatore Calatrava whose most breathtaking achievement has been the new station in Lisbon. But perhaps the greatest achievement has been not a new station but the rebirth of Saint Pancras station in London in which 700 Victorian iron columns now support the trains destined to travel to the Continent.
Significantly it was Mrs Thatcher, who hated everything to do with railways – and didn’t much like the Europeans – who gave the go-ahead to a rail tunnel under the English Channel, a major engineering triumph finally opened in 1994 after 190 years of hesitation – and repeated doses of hysterical xenophobia – on the part of the British. But the Chunnel is not alone, three new tunnels are being dug under the Alps including a 57-kilometre wonder under the Saint Gotthard Pass. Like the Chunnel this will serve for both passengers and freight.
In general, however, rail freight is now largely confined to journeys of less than several hundred miles, often dealing purely with the transport of raw materials. Nevertheless the discovery of new deposits of minerals has led to some impressive new lines, like that in Western Australia from Mildara to transport iron ore to the Pacific – the Australians have also completed a north–south railway from Adelaide to Darwin through thousands of miles of scrub and desert. Similarly in the mid-West of the United States a new line was built to exploit the Powder River coal deposits in Wyoming. This was a sign of the way that although passenger rail travel – apart from sedate tourist trains – is almost completely confined to the ‘North East Corridor’ from Washington to New York and Boston, freight has surged ahead after the passage in 1979 of the Staggers Act which freed the railways from the often ridiculous restrictions imposed decades earlier when they had a monopoly of long-distance travel. So successful and profitable have they been that in 2010 Warren Buffett, that most thorough of investors, bought one of the biggest groups, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe network.
But perhaps the most astonishing change of attitudes to railways has occurred in Britain. In the words of Will Hutton, starting in the 1960s ‘some talented managers starting with the much-reviled Richard Beeching’ had ‘managed to pull an under-invested service up by its bootstraps over thirty years’ after which it had become one of the most efficient railway systems in Europe even though it received a mere £9 per head of financial support every year from the government as opposed to £21 in France and £33 in Italy. The situation darkened after privatisation in the 1990s which split British Rail into over ninety companies for the sake of spurious ‘competition’ but today state investment in the industry has soared and has been spared any of the cuts imposed by the coalition on virtually all other government activities.
Much of the investment has been on improving London’s rail transport system. For the single most dramatic development of rail travel in the 20th century, at a rate that looks like accelerating in the 21st, has been in urban travel in the world’s growing number of major metropolises during a period when the – ever-increasing – population of the whole world seems to be concentrating into ever larger conurbations. The effects of rail transport on the growth of cities is hopelessly underestimated because it is divided into so many categories, from trams and light rail running along city streets, through metro systems to ‘overground’ lines running within the metropolises. But they are all railways combining the two key elements in the definition of the term ‘steel wheel running on steel rail’, generally with a 1435mm gauge. Typically London has one of the world’s longest networks of both sub-surface and deep subway lines, an ever-increasing ‘London Overground’ system, a driverless network serving the city’s former docklands and a single, but lengthy, tramway. Under construction there is Crossrail, an ambitious route half in new tunnels and taking in existing suburban routes at both ends, an even-longer imitation of the RER which was built through Paris thirty years ago.
If in the 19th century railways were above all means of transport between towns and cities in the 20th the major growth was within the urban environment. Indeed within a few years after 1900 railways had shown that they were capable of yet another revolution. This has ensured that the world’s major cities could continue to thrive and expand seemingly almost without limit, a revolution as fundamental and important as that achieved by any of their overground brethren since the creation of ‘mega-cities’ was one of the fundamental developments of the 20th century and one that shows no sign of slowing down during the 21st. As William Barclay Parsons, the engineering genius who built the first New York subway put it ’We have no means of foretelling the ultimate fate of a modern city or assigning a limit to its growth.’
The key to this massive new role was the underground railway. The first was of course the steam-powered Metropolitan in London in 1863 that by the end of the century had expanded to form a circle round the heart of London. This was a one-off, which, until the arrival of electric power involved travel in tunnels in which only the inhabitants of London, permanently subject to the city’s fogs and its universal coal smoke, could be expected to survive. But at the time only a tenth of the city’s 600,000 workers ‘commuted’ by train, though that was far more than in New York or Paris. The only other truly urban railways were experiments, notably in Chicago and New York, with elevated railways that were clearly undesirable blots on the urban landscape.
City railways underground only exploded on the scene in a few years after 1900, simultaneously in New York Paris and London, the three exemplars of a modern city. But after the examples set by the Big Three the idea spread fast – by 1914 more than a dozen cities including Boston, Glasgow and Budapest had introduced metros of a sort. Tunnelling was no longer by hand but largely mechanical thanks to use of a circular shield at the point of tunnelling. The first had been i
nvented by Marc Brunel, father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who had used it to dig the world’s first sub-aqueous tunnel under the Thames, a task which took nearly twenty years. By the end of the century two engineers, Peter Barlow and James Henry Greathead had developed a more sophisticated machine, first used to dig another subway under the Thames.
By the 1890s short stretches of underground railway had been tunnelled under the Thames south from the City of London but the subsequent rapid world-wide growth was due to two Americans Charles Tyson Yerkes and Frank Sprague. Yerkes, a dubious ‘public utilities’ entrepreneur, monopolised the electric traction companies running the elevated railways in Chicago but had fled, first to New York and then to London where he combined all the struggling underground railway companies – the first of which, the City and South London had been completed in 1890 – built a power station and was responsible for the first stretches of London’s four major historic deep level lines, the Central, Piccadilly, Northern and Bakerloo, fortunately dying before he could exploit the passengers and the shareholders! These lines form the heart of their present network, were all operating before the outbreak of World War One. Unfortunately the tunnels were narrow and to this day the carriages have been smaller than those in other systems. It was Sprague, a former colleague of Thomas Edison who developed ‘differential motors’ which provided every carriage in a train with its own source of power which could be controlled by a single driver, thus obviating the need for locomotives and allowed trains to reverse without any problems at the end of the line.
In France the situation was complicated by the historic rivalry between Paris and the rest of the country that had culminated in the massacre of thousands of Parisians by soldiers from the national government in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian war. This hostility ensured that the tracks on the Paris Metro were laid to a different gauge to the country’s main line system. It was designed and built as a whole covering only the city itself and ignoring the much-despised suburbs (the banlieues) until after 1945. It was dug by a cut and cover system improved by the great engineer responsible, the one-armed Fulgence Bienvenue, who also managed to lower the shell of entire stations into the muddy banks of the Seine.
In New York after many delays a Rapid Transit Commission was appointed in 1894 and on May 24th 1900 the first spadeful was dug in a ceremony that involved fireworks consuming 100,000 tons of dynamite. The first contract, to build a line up the whole of the west side of Manhattan went to a brilliant contractor John B McDonald and to Parsons who foresaw correctly that ‘The instant that this line is finished there will arise a demand for other lines’. Both in Paris and New York the entrances to the stations were delightfully decorated iron work – in Paris the variation of Art Nouveau was even called Style Metro – unhappily all New York’s iron work ‘kiosks’ have disappeared and only a few have been preserved in Paris.
In the 1930s the Soviet Union boasted many of the largest investment projects of that unhappy decade. The biggest was the Moscow Metro. Work began in 1931 but progress was only possible when ‘grouting’, a chemical process, was developed for hardening the subsoil which was sometimes like a limestone sponge so that a tunnel could be driven through it. In charge was Stalin’s toughest henchman Lazar Kaganovitch but the project was completed thanks to a young peasant Nikita Khrushchev, who had shown his capacity for effective slave-driving in completing the Moscow-Volga canal in his native Ukraine. He relied on imported tunnelling shields which he drove at speeds totally incompatible with safety – sometimes whole shifts of workers were crushed to death or drowned. Even so when the first line was opened in May 1935 it was six months late on the absurd timetable demanded by Stalin. As Benson Brobrick remarks* ‘The Moscow Metro was a many-splendored thing. In the stations’ spacious vestibules and along their lofty vaulted halls lights flashed and coruscated from carved crystal chandeliers of a magnificence not likely to be encountered in the capitalist world outside the mansions of the Vanderbilts and Astors.’ By 1943 70,000 square metres of marble had been installed in the Metro’s first 22 stations. There were mosaics, frescos, friezes, bas-reliefs, statues and stained glass windows aplenty celebrating past triumphs and more recent Soviet achievements.
By 1940 there were still only nineteen metro systems in the world but two decades after the war there were sixty six. Since then the number of cites involved has increased dramatically. By the end of the century barely a single major city outside the United States lacked some form of subway/metro/tube with no fewer than 190 systems in 54 countries from Armenia to North Korea. Today dozens more systems are being built – or at least being planned with twelve in China alone – and that’s not counting the overgrounds and the tramways! Which all goes to show that steel wheel on steel rail is still alive, flourishing – and innovative – as it approaches to within a decade of its 200th anniversary.
* Labyrinths of Iron Newsweek Books 1981
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Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Nicolas Faith and Christian Wolmar
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About this Book
This is the story of a revolution that would create nations, carry empire, capitalism and industrialization to every corner of the planet, and, in its wake, usher in the modern world. This is the story of the railway.
Across American prairies, through Siberian tundra, over Argentinian pampas and deep into the heart of Africa, the modern world began with the arrival of the railway. The shock was sudden and universal: railways carried empire, capitalism and industrialization to every corner of the planet. For some, the ‘Iron Road’ symbolized the brute horrors of modernity; for others the way toward a brighter future.
From 1825, when the first passenger service linked Stockton and Darlington, to the outbreak of World War I, Nicholas Faith presents an engaging and entertaining journey through the first century of rail, introducing visionaries, engineers, surveyors, speculators, financiers and navvies – the heroes and the rogues of the mechanical revolution that turned the world upside down.
The railway was the most important invention of the 19th century, and The World the Railways Made argues that in the 21st century, with high speed lines that can compete with air travel and over 190 metro systems in 54 countries underpinning the world’s greatest cities, it remains just as relevant.
About the Author
NICHOLAS FAITH is a distinguished British author and journalist. He was for many years a senior editor on the business pages of The Sunday Times and The Economist and was a regular contributor to the Financial Times.
CHRISTIAN WOLMAR is a journalist, author, politician and Britain’s leading railway historian.
Also by this Author
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I was first given the chance to write about railways at any length in the summer of 1985 when Andrew Knight, the editor of The Economist, and Gordon Lee, the Surveys Editor, encouraged me to write a long survey called ‘
Return Train’, analysing the railways’ comeback. I was particularly grateful for their backing since my findings challenged the paper’s previous ideas on the subject.
But the ideas I generated would not have been transformed into a full-length book without my agent Robert Ducas, who provided the ideal mixture of encouragement, support and discipline: Chris Holifield, then the editorial director of The Bodley Head, who forced me to think through my originally rather vague ideas into something approaching cohesion; and her successor, Jill Black, who deployed the same mixture of tact, firmness, professionalism and charm in wrestling with my sprawling manuscript. Peter Dyer designed a superb jacket which expressed my ideas far more imaginatively than I could have done, and Sarah Heneghan managed to find some splendid photographs in a ridiculously short time.
The World the Railways Made Page 40