As we have seen, a feature of many European railway schemes was the raising of finance on the London market, but there was no rush to invest in this line. It was not simply a question of the physical difficulties to be overcome; political uncertainty was an even stronger factor. As a result, the line was promoted in the unlikely surroundings of Cuba. This was not quite as odd as it seems, as there was at the time a thriving maritime trade between Havana and Bilbao. Nevertheless, those who fought shy of involvement in the line were proved wise. Brassey took out a fixed rate contract for the whole of the route through the mountains from Bilbao to Miranda – and lost £200,000 on the deal. He is said to have commented with remarkable sang froid, ‘Well, we can’t always gain; we must lose sometimes and bear our losses patiently.’
Vignoles again, some years after the German fracas, walked into a situation where local Spanish engineers had already produced preliminary plans. The Bilbao and Miranda showed a startling ruling gradient of 1 in 40: this is approximately the same as the notorious Lickey Bank in England, where additional locomotive power was needed for the two-mile run. The Spanish were proposing gradients of this severity as a commonplace on the line. So Vignoles set out to ride for weeks on end through the Cantabrian Pyrenees in search of a better route. His efforts were rewarded, for the new line, though still steep, was reduced to 1 in 66. There is no record of the detailed surveys for the line, but another British engineer, Frederick Cadogan Barron, came to the region in the 1870s to build a fourteen-mile line for the Bilbao Iron Ore Company. He described how, when surveying in the mountains, they ran out a series of base lines and then took cross-sections every 20 metres. By comparing those they were able to select the best line. Measurements were genuinely critical, as Barron reported that alterations of 4 or 5 feet in any direction ‘frequently made the difference between a deep cutting and a lofty embankment.’ Things could scarcely have been easier for Vignoles and his team. But surveying problems were as nothing in comparison with the actual work of construction.
The first tunnel near Bilbao was especially difficult, as half a mile of it lay through an unstable morass of quicksand-like mud in which massive boulders floated. These had to be supported by masonry columns built above the tunnel arch. Even then the engineers were not always accurate in gauging the forces acting on the arch, and one of the great stones came crashing down completely blocking the whole tunnel. Difficulties were no less severe above ground. The mountainous terrain made it all but impossible to get appropriate building supplies to some sites, so that local stone and earth was simply piled up to create vast embankments as high as a hundred feet. It is a little ironical that one of Vignoles’ complaints against Etzel and Bühler had been their absurd plans for building 100-feet-high banks. The line rose steadily to reach a summit 2163 feet above sea level. When complete it gave passengers wonderful views of mountain scenery, culminating in a viaduct that skirts the 700-feet-high Lezama waterfall.
Vignoles was faced with a major problem on the approach to Logrono where the River Ebro ran for two miles along the base of huge overhanging cliffs. To move the railway out of the valley would have involved a wide diversion and a series of steep gradients: the alternative was to move the valley, which is precisely what he decided to do. He would blow up the cliffs and divert the river. He consulted an old friend from his army days, Sir John Burgoyne, who advised excavating a series of shafts and galleries which could then be packed with gunpowder charges. These were then wired up so that they could be fired simultaneously by an electric current. It must have been a spectacular moment as a large chunk of Spanish scenery disappeared in a roar and a cloud of dust. The river deviation was accomplished using a technique first tried out during the construction of a suspension bridge over the Dneiper at Kiev. First a new channel was cut for the river. Then wickerwork ‘baskets’ were constructed, each 40 ft. by 20 ft. and divided into fifty compartments. These were floated out into the river, loaded with stones and sunk. Gradually they built up to form a huge weir and the Ebro was in that way diverted.
This could easily be a scene in Britain, but this former L.M.S. Stainer 2-8-0 was sent to work in Turkey at the end of the second World War
This line typifies the sort of problems with which engineers were faced. They were expected to turn up in a foreign land, often unable to speak the local language. They would either be presented with plans which were of little value or no plans at all, and would then set out into unknown territory as explorers, hunting out a route. Vignoles was one who did his own work. Alternatively a proposal would be put to a famous engineer who would accept the work on behalf of his company or partnership rather than as a project in which he would become personally involved. The actual hard, foot-slogging work was entrusted to an assistant. As the British engineer would be unlikely to know much – if indeed anything at all – about the country to which his surrogate was to be despatched, briefing was likely to be minimal. Few engineers could have had less time to prepare for a task than William Lloyd when he set off for Scandinavia.
When we last met Mr Lloyd he was dealing with angry French workers in 1842. In 1848 he joined Robert Stephenson’s office. In 1853 he was told that he was to go to Sweden to survey the country for 700 miles of railway – and he was booked on to a steamer leaving Hull the next day. His briefing by Stephenson’s principal engineer Mr Bidder was short, to the point, but not especially helpful: ‘Don’t go and make a fool of yourself’. He did not make a fool of himself, but he certainly had an adventurous time during the five months allotted for deciding the railway future of Sweden. He travelled up the Trollhätte Canal from Gothenburg, then across Lake Vanern by steamer, but the last part of the journey to Orebro was a good deal more exciting. He clambered into a vehicle which was simply an ‘oblong box mounted without springs on four wheels’ and the driver, ‘fortified with a good pint of fiery spirits’ charged off at high speeds over bumpy forest tracks. To help in the survey, he was given a translator and thirty assistants, all military engineers and ‘all of whom, with one exception, were either Barons or Counts’. He bought a carriage for his journeys, but still finished up walking much of the way. It was an exhausting task, made particularly dangerous – though Lloyd himself made light of this – by a major cholera epidemic. This was so severe that travel outside Sweden was banned – which did not prevent Lloyd bribing some local fishermen to drop him off on a quiet spot on the Norwegian coast for a visit.
What strikes one time and again is the supreme self-confidence of men such as Lloyd, ready to dash off anywhere in Europe or beyond at a moment’s notice and even, in the latter’s case, to calmly wander down streets littered with corpses. British engineers were also noted for their diligence and their inventiveness. The story of railway development in Switzerland began with the familiar one of political wrangling. There was a long period of argument between the various cantons lasting from 1836 to 1846 when the Swiss Northern Railway Company finally managed to build fourteen and a half miles of track from Zurich to Baden, but this was not a great success. The new federal constitution of 1848 at least brought bickering to an end, and enabled a railway system to be thought of as a whole, rather than as a series of disconnected short lines. Robert Stephenson was brought over and in 1850 he put forward his proposal for 500 miles of track, which would keep to the river valleys and would link Geneva to Lindau on Lake Constance with a cross line from Basle to Lucerne. His suggestions were largely followed, though the line as built went to the north of Lake Neuchatel instead of the south. Switzerland now had a respectable internal railway system, but the problems presented by the mountain passes had still to be solved. The first practical solution was devised by the engineer, John Barraclough Fell.
Fell was faced with the problem of building a line across the Mont Cenis Pass. The Napoleonic road over the pass zigzagged all the way – and if a road had to zigzag what could a railway track do? The answer was to provide extra traction. The track had a third rail running up the centre, and the locomotive had
an extra pair of drive wheels that worked horizontally, gripping either side of the middle rail. The advantage of this system over rack-and-pinion was that on level or moderately graded track the central rail could be omitted and the locomotive could work conventionally. This revolutionary design was given its trials on one of Britain’s first railways, the Cromford & High Peak, where the series of inclines were normally worked by stationary engines and cable haulage. The engine that could cope with the Cromford & High Peak Railway had nothing to fear in the Alps.
No doubt countries such as Switzerland and Sweden, with a sound industrial base of their own, could have created a rail network without outside help, but in the early years of rail building it must have seemed a good deal safer to turn to those with proven expertise. It was rare for the British influence to last for long. Once the first routes had been established, the mystique began to fade. There was no magic formula: if a British engineer could turn from designing road bridges to railway bridges, then so could his French or Belgian counterpart. If a British navvy could shift vast quantities of earth so could others given the experience. There were areas such as finance where Britain long maintained a supremacy and in the early nineteenth century the technological lead was also crucial. The London money markets had funds available for investment and those funds were regularly tapped for overseas railway schemes. The great contractors had built up expertise, capital, equipment and a workforce that was never seriously rivalled. But the gap steadily narrowed, and, in time, European engineers moreover began to realize that solutions developed for the particular circumstances found in England or Wales were not always best suited for a country with a different terrain, different climate and where the lines served different interests. Before that position was reached, however, there were few areas of Europe that did not make use of British expertise, cash and muscle.
CHAPTER THREE
The Crimea
It is all too easy to see railway construction as existing in a vacuum, insulated from the turmoil of politics. True, events such as the revolution of 1848 had a major impact on railway construction in Europe, but it was an indirect effect. British engineers and contractors responded to these immense upheavals in the political structure of the continent much as they might to a strike for better pay: they were unwelcome intrusions affecting the smooth workings of their enterprise. The rights and wrongs of the situation were simply not their concern; all they wanted was for difficulties to be resolved so that the really important matter of sending rails snaking across the continent could continue. The Crimea offered something very different: here it was not a case of politics getting in the way of progress, but of the politics determining events. Indeed, it was international politics that sent British navvies to the heart of a war that began as a conflict between Russia and Turkey.
A great deal of the trade between Europe and the Indies still went overland, using the old caravan routes through Turkey and Asia Minor. Turkey in the early nineteenth century was part of the decaying Ottoman empire, which was under threat from the steadily growing might of Russia. Whoever controlled the Black Sea controlled the land route, and the Russians were on the lookout for any excuse to wrest that control from the Turks. The ostensible arguments that precipitated war between Russia and Turkey involved such arcane factors as the ownership of the keys to unlock the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Bethlehem. In reality, the quarrel was over who should control the territory that had belonged to the enfeebled Ottoman empire. In November 1853, the Russian fleet sailed out of Sevastopol to attack the Turks. It was not so much a battle as a massacre in which the Turkish fleet was annihilated and some 3000 Turkish sailors were killed. There was a flood-tide of horror and revulsion in England and France, although the cynical might declare it was generated more by political than humanitarian interests. The two governments were determined to prevent Russian expansion to the west and were quite prepared to manipulate public opinion to achieve their ends. They were wholly successful. When in March 1854 Britain and France declared war on Russia, very few asked why war was necessary or what the objective was.
Britain had been at peace since the end of the Napoleonic wars, and in the intervening years the nature of the army had changed. No one expected to fight a war in Europe, so it had been given over to ceremonial and display. Regiments vied with each other like birds of paradise to see which could put on the most exotic and colourful display. The ordinary soldiers, poorly paid and badly fed, were no more than mannequins, displaying ever more gorgeous uniforms in ever more immaculate displays. The slightest falling away of standards – a dirty button, a foot placed out of sequence – was greeted with the vicious punishment of the lash. This was the army of popinjays and paupers that was sent to the distant Crimea to fight a real war in which blood would be spilled.
Navvies embarking for the Crimea at Birkenhead in 1854
There were early successes as the Anglo-French forces advanced into the Crimean peninsula having defeated the Russians at the battle of the Alma, but they failed to follow up this advantage. In the event the war settled down to a long siege of the Russian fortress of Sevastopol. Nowhere was the deficiency of the British high command more cruelly revealed. Here was an army, ill equipped and ill prepared, camped out on an inhospitable, muddy plain with impossibly long lines of communication. The army had arrived in September, just in time for the freezing winds that would make life a misery and the driving rain and snow that would turn the whole of the surrounding countryside into an all but impassable quagmire. The British army was no longer fighting the Russians: it was fighting cold, starvation and disease. Ships could deliver supplies to the ports, but there was no way of getting them to the besieging army, other than on the aching, bent backs of the men and a few pitiful ponies.
By the autumn of 1854, some 30,000 British soldiers were camped out on the ridge above Sevastopol, their only communication with the outside world just one dirt track which was daily becoming less usable. Henry Clifford, one of the officers at Balaclava, described the conditions in his letters home.
Our next affliction is want of transport for the Army. It is too bad that Government has made no provision in this department. We have, till lately, been entirely dependent upon the Russian ox wagons captured when first we landed and a few Turkish ponies with pack saddles to bring our rations and forage for horses from Balaclava, a distance of about four or five miles. But the cold, want of food, and hard work have killed the oxen and ponies, and the roads are impassable. We now only get a quarter of half rations of pork and biscuit, which is brought up by the few remaining ponies, and we are obliged to send our Chargers to Balaclava for their forage.
A sorry state of affairs for a cavalry officer, but by the December things were even worse.
The roads have been so bad between the Camp and Balaclava we have had great difficulty in providing our siege guns with ammunition, our artillery horses dying three and four a night.
Military opinion was being influenced, as conscientious soldiers such as Sir John Burgoyne spelled out the problems. He wrote to Lord Raglan,
To save conveyance of forage, all the cavalry and a large proportion of artillery horses are moved down to Balaklava; still, it is with difficulty that the troops can be kept supplied even with provisions. There is a lamentable deficiency of fuel for cookery, and materials for some kind of shelter better than tents are of primary necessity – all, too, before we can attend to getting up heavy guns, shot and shells. You may conceive the state of our men, and how hard are the duties, from the following: Two soldiers (a double sentry) on lookout in our more advanced trench in front of our batteries, were surprised two nights ago fast asleep at their posts by a small party of Russians, and bayoneted! a most brutal act. This serious crime, compromising the safety of perhaps thousands, and so derogatory to every military principle, was justified, excused, by the officers on the plea that human nature cannot support the fatigues that the soldiers have to undergo. The reports from commanding officers of regiments and
generals are to the same effect. The army is sickly to a grievous extent, and is declining numerically as well as physically.
Had this war been fought in the eighteenth century, then the above would have constituted no more than an internal army debate, but there were outside observers in the Crimea. William Howard Russell of The Times sent back his reports which were read by the public at large. He was brief, blunt and angry.
There is nothing to eat, nothing to drink, no roads, no commisariat, no medicine, no clothes, no arrangement; the only thing in abundance is cholera.
The generals may have been powerless, but the cries of misery were not entirely unheard. Morton Peto was by then a Member of Parliament, and he suggested to Palmerston that a railway could be built to link camp and harbour. The idea was eagerly seized upon and on 2 December the Duke of Newcastle wrote to Raglan that Peto and Betts ‘have in the handsomest manner undertaken the important work with no other condition than that they shall reap no pecuniary advantage from it.’ Peto called on his old associate Brassey who helped organize the whole operation, and between them they wheedled, cajoled and bullied railway companies all over Britain into giving them supplies and equipment. Now all that was needed was the manpower. Peto, Brassey and Betts were absolutely insistent that this was to be a civilian navvy force, answerable solely to the contractors and not subject in any way whatsoever to military discipline.
The organization on the ground went to Peto’s chief agent, Beattie, who was the first to arrive in the Crimea with his engineering staff to prepare the way. Colonel Gordon wrote enthusiastically from the camp,
The civil engineers of the railway have arrived, and we hope soon to see the navvies and the plant. No relief that could be named will be equal to the relief afforded by a railway. Without the railroad I do not see how we can bring up guns and ammunition in sufficient quantities to silence the guns of the enemy.
Railway Empire Page 9