The Railways

  By this time the objection to emergency stops on a main line no longer had the same force, thanks to advances in protection by signalling. Rather, the sticking point was the lack of any alarm system reliable enough to earn official endorsement. Several were already in use or under trial. Some had switches or buttons in the compartments, wired to a battery-powered electric bell in the guard’s compartment. A contraption with an iron speaking-tube running all along the train, linked between the carriages by flexible wire-and-rubber pipes, was quite seriously proposed as an alternative. Most of the devices were also meant to trigger an indicator arm or disc that poked out from the carriage side when the signal was given, so that the guard could track the alarm to its source with a single glance.

  Two successive committees of railway managers scrutinised these systems, and found them all wanting. To outsiders, such reservations sounded like temporising. By 1868 the Board of Trade had had enough. Under the Regulation of Railways Act of that year, all trains timetabled to run non-stop for twenty miles or more were required to permit emergency communication between passengers and crew. Which apparatus to endorse was left to the Board of Trade to decide. The Board duly sanctioned an installation devised by the North Eastern Railway’s chief engineer, by which a tuggable rope jerked a wheel-mounted bell in the guard’s van and banged a gong on the tender of the engine. But the apparatus did not work well in practice, to the extent that the inspectorate had already recommended against it. In 1873 the Board acknowledged these failings too, and quietly withdrew its endorsement.

  Left to choose for themselves, the railways came to no collective conclusion. Three of the four main companies in the south of England plumped for electric alarm systems. These had the advantage of allowing the controls to be placed inside the compartment. Making the equipment reliable took some years, however, as the Baker case of 1875 suggests. In court, the train’s guard came clean: there was no working connection between the carriages, and not one of the controls actually did anything. The fourth of the southern companies, the London, Chatham & Dover, chose a cord system instead, but spoiled matters by running this along the bottom of its carriages. The alarm could be given only by groping through a hole in the floor beneath the seats. In other regions, passengers had to remember to open the window and grasp upwards for a cord at eaves level on the carriage roof. The existence of all these incompatible systems also made it less likely that an alarm would work at all, because it could not be linked up along the train when rolling stock from different companies ran together. Such were the consequences of laissez-faire.

  Some figures for the usage of these early alarms are included in F. S. Williams’s Our Iron Roads (1883 edition). On the South Eastern Railway, the electric alarm sounded on average about once every three and a half weeks. Of fourteen instances described in detail, only two involved matters of safety, both of a mechanical kind: an open door and an over-heated axle. The rest were due to ‘curiosity’, an impulse that may not have come cheap: the 1868 Act laid down a fine of £5 for improper use, equivalent to 1,200 miles of third-class travel at the normal rate.

  There matters largely stood until near the end of the century. The trigger for improvement was a dreadful accident, caused by the unsatisfactory brakes then still in use on many British and Irish lines. The brakes having failed, unsafe methods of signalling and operation made the consequences still worse for the stricken train. Parliament then forced the hand of the reluctant railway industry, and improved braking systems were made mandatory. These brought with them a more reliable method for passengers to operate the alarm. In effect, the lesser hazard of non-communicating compartments was reduced as a by-product of making the network safer overall.

  The accident happened in Ulster, on 12 June 1889. An overloaded and underpowered Sunday school excursion train stalled near the summit of the long incline outside Armagh, on the line to Newry. Some 960 people were on board. The crew decided to divide the train in order to proceed. That required the release of the brakes. These were of the ‘simple’ type, which depended on a continuous supply of vacuum pressure piped from the locomotive in order to stay in place against the wheels. To make safe the rear portion of the train, the men applied the handbrake in the guard’s van and wedged stones from the track ballast against the carriage wheels. But when the locomotive began to draw away with the front portion of the train, a fatal jolt was transmitted to the now isolated rear section. The wheels crunched through their restraining stones, and nine carriages and the ineffectually braked van began to roll backwards down the slope. The crew ran after the accelerating carriages for a while, trying to stop the wheels with more stones, but it was useless. Nor could the passengers jump clear: their compartment doors had been locked on both sides, to prevent unauthorised entry. Powerless, the carriages ran back down the incline and into the path of the following train. This was running under the antiquated time-interval method, by which trains using the same line were separated by an intermission calculated to prevent them catching up with each other. As the carriages were smashed or overturned, eighty passengers died, most of them children – the worst toll in any railway accident to that date in the British Isles.

  On paper, the Armagh carriages were up-to-date in terms of safety. They had continuous brakes, controlled from the locomotive and effective all the way down to the last vehicle – as if the train were a single organism with a central nervous system. The older method of braking was activated by the guard using levers or chains, and was usually limited to individual vehicles along the train. Sometimes this required a whole posse of guards, positioned at intervals between the locomotive and the guard’s van or brake van at the end. To manage an entire train effectively these guards had to work in step with the driver, as he applied or released the brakes of the engine and tender. The weakness of the method is illustrated by Dickens’s ill-fated boat train of 1865: the driver saw the emergency signal and braked hard, but the guards remained oblivious until too late. But there is a key distinction between continuous braking and continuous automatic braking. The latter kind came instantly into play if the brake pipe was severed or interrupted, as it would be when a train split in two. The brakes at Armagh were of the non-automatic type, requiring a constant input of energy in order to operate; once the rear carriages lost their connection to the vacuum power from the locomotive they could not be reapplied. Automatic brakes worked in precisely the opposite way, remaining clamped against the wheels except when released by vacuum pressure to allow the train to move. It is a neat illustration of the fail-safe principle, a term sometimes misused as a synonym for foolproof, but which strictly refers to any system that reverts to a safe position when a fault occurs.

  The Board of Trade had been urging the use of automatic brakes for years. The companies could hardly refuse point blank, but often dragged their feet. To complicate matters, there was – inevitably – more than one method available. Most British railways favoured the vacuum principle, by which air was exhausted from reservoirs and pipes along the train. Less widespread were air brakes, which worked by compressing rather than exhausting the air within the system. Much higher forces can be obtained by compressing air above the atmospheric rate than by pumping it out to make a vacuum, so the pipes and reservoirs could be made smaller and lighter. The air brake could also be applied more quickly. It was a better method.

  Already common abroad, air brakes had made some progress in Britain by the 1880s. The most popular system was developed from that patented in 1869 by the twenty-five-year-old George Westinghouse of Pittsburgh. Britain was an obvious export market for Westinghouse, not least because of the enormous quantities of rolling stock that were built in its workshops for use overseas. As to the choice of system for home rails, this should have been settled by the trials held on the Midland Railway’s lines at Newark in June 1875: a sort of brake Olympics, in which trains belonging to six railway companies demonstrated their stopping distances with roughly equal loads and speeds under eight different braking sy
stems. Westinghouse’s automatic air brake was the clear winner.

  Yet the Westinghouse air brake found a secure home only in Scotland and in southern, eastern and north-eastern England, where the panting of the little air-pumps attached to the locomotives became part of the background noise at every busy station. Many other railways invested in one or other of the various vacuum-brake systems, after which the expense of conversion to air brakes was forbidding. Even so, the existence of incompatible versions imposed extra costs on any railway sending carriages through to lines on which a rival form prevailed. Such vehicles had to be equipped with two sets of pipes – one to work the brake, the other just passing through – before continuous braking could operate at all. Taking no chances, the royal train in the 1880s was equipped with three sets of brakes. The risks were genuine: a derailment of 1887 at Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands, where many trains included through carriages from other parts of Britain, was blamed on a diversity of brakes: every carriage was so equipped, but in such a combination that not one vehicle could be controlled from the locomotive.

  All this caused exasperation and mistrust outside the industry. The wrangles over braking also exposed the ways in which vested interests and railway capital had colonised the political realm. The benefits of automatic brakes were widely understood, and moves had been made in Parliament in 1871 and 1877 to enforce their use; but each time the reform was thwarted by the ‘Railway Interest’. This was formally defined as those members of both houses who had seats on the boards of railway companies. There was nothing furtive about the Railway Interest; its members were listed annually under that heading in Bradshaw’s Railway Manual (sister publication to the famous Guide). The nexus was already strong by the Mania years – there were eighty railway directors in the House of Commons in 1847 – and peaked in 1873, when 132 MPs enjoyed at least one railway directorship. That was almost exactly one in five. Other MPs and peers with railway shareholdings large enough to keep them mindful of sharply increased running costs and capitalisation could be expected to line up behind these well-placed directors.

  The railways’ defence, articulated inside and outside Westminster, was to claim that they were making good progress with safety improvements, and should be left to get on with the job as their own resources allowed. The Armagh disaster changed all that. A new Railway Regulation Act was pushed through, making automatic brakes compulsory. The Act was a clear break with established relationships between government and railways, by which technical matters had been left for the Board of Trade to determine. Even then, the Act failed to enforce a single system of automatic braking. Instead, the companies had to choose between Westinghouse’s air brake and one version or another of the vacuum type. The latter having the head start, the incentive to upgrade to the more efficient system dwindled away.* So it came about that, when Britain’s railways were grouped into four companies in 1923, the vacuum brake was endorsed as standard for new locomotive-hauled stock.

  There were exceptions, one of which nicely proves the rule. In 1923 the Great Eastern Railway’s London suburban lines into Liverpool Street had just been reorganised. Even before the changes they were already the busiest of their kind on any railway system, handling over 107 million passenger journeys a year in 1919; but the strains were showing. Adding to the strain, the average City clerk or typist’s working hours after the First World War tended to be shorter than in Edwardian times, accentuating the crush at the evening peak. Then in 1920 the timetable was transformed, increasing capacity by 50 per cent in the crucial evening period, by rethinking every operational detail. Sixteen-coach suburban trains – still four-wheeled, still gaslit, but all equipped with Westinghouse’s brake – now set out to climb the incline from Liverpool Street at intervals as short as two and a half minutes, after spending no more than four minutes at the platform after arrival. Each of these movements required the incoming locomotive to be detached and despatched, as well as the prompt appearance of a fresh engine at the opposite end to draw the train out again. Stopping and acceleration times at other stations were kept as brisk as possible too. The result has never been surpassed as the most intensive steam-worked passenger service anywhere in the world. These smart manoeuvres would barely have been possible using the slower-acting vacuum brake.

  This was not all. Passengers were steered and signalled through the crush by means of number codes for quick identification of trains across the sea of bobbing hats, and colour codes to indicate the higher classes of compartment within in each train: a blue stripe above the doors for Second, which lingered late on these lines, and a yellow stripe for First. The convention of marking first class with a yellow stripe later spread through the network, persisting even now in some of the flashy liveries of privatisation.

  An evening paper soon labelled the new timetable the ‘Jazz service’, after the latest American musical craze. The inspiration may have been the colour stripes, hence the alternative label of the ‘Rainbow service’, or (more likely) the accelerated speeds. America was speeding up in other ways too, including the electrification of many of its suburban railway services. The underground lines and several other main-line routes to the London suburbs had already gone electric, but the Great Eastern lacked the money to follow them. So there is a subtext to the ‘Jazz’ nickname, a whisper that London was no longer the first home of mechanised urban bustle, as it had been in Queen Victoria’s time.

  By the 1940s no one considered these overcrowded services especially modern any more. As the Second World War drew to its close, a newspaper joked that Goering and Himmler should be punished after capture by being made to ride between Liverpool Street and Romford all day long, for ever. By the end of 1946 it was common for twenty-three people or more to have to cram into each dirty and shabby twelve-seat compartment (squeezing in seven per side, the rest standing). Underframes had to be strengthened after an incident on the Enfield line, when the doors jammed shut because the weight of its sardine-packed passengers had caused the structure of the carriage to deflect out of true. Extra rolling stock could not be drafted in promptly from the rest of the network, because it lacked the necessary Westinghouse brake. Bad coal meant that trains often had to stop to get up steam between stations. In the House of Commons, the service was described as ‘a positive disgrace to our civilisation’, and compared to something from the time of Dickens or Zola. Things improved at Liverpool Street only after the railways were nationalised, when long-planned electrification began at last.

  The advent of single ownership also brought the hoary question of standardised braking back into focus. The obvious reform almost happened in 1955, when air brakes were recommended by two expert committees, but the plan was given up after pressure from the railways’ operational side. Air brakes finally became the norm for new passenger stock only in 1967, and many locomotives carried the equipment for both systems well into the 1990s. To the informed eye, the fat, archaic vacuum hoses looped next to the buffers were one more token of the inertia and inefficiency of Britain’s railways – weaknesses that may be traced back to the nineteenth-century failure to distinguish between the benefits of unregulated operation and the wastefulness of incompatible systems.

  Whatever their other failings, the first generations of automatic brakes at least delivered a better class of passenger alarm. The need for separate communication between passengers and crew effectively disappeared, because the alarm could now be linked directly to the brake. The old usage ‘communication cord’ somehow survived, even though the new apparatus was more likely to be operated by a handle or a chain. And so matters have largely remained ever since, with the proviso that some alarms now include an intercom connected with the driver. Even the £5 fine for misuse stipulated in the 1868 Act stayed in force until 1977, by which time inflation had made it quite a bargain in the economy of public misdemeanours; it now stands at £200.

  The march of sanitation on Britain’s railways moved at a slow pace too. The story of the carriage lavatory was outli
ned by Hamilton Ellis in 1965:

  1848–50, lavatories in royal saloons …; 1850–60 (circa), lavatories in family and invalid saloons; 1873, lavatories in sleeping cars; 1874, lavatories in Pullman and Pullman-type cars; 1881–2, lavatories in East Coast first-class coaches with side corridor; 1886, lavatories in M.S. and L. [Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire] third-class saloons; 1887, lavatories in Midland Railway third-class coaches; 1889, lavatories in second- and third-class coaches with side corridors on East Coast Route; 1891, lavatories for all classes in complete side-corridor train on Great Western Railway …

  Saloons of early date, royal or otherwise, with their own lavatories have already been described. The ultimate outcome for the ordinary passenger train, with lavatories at the ends of intercommunicating carriages, is familiar. In between came many attempts to crack the problem of how to incorporate the facilities in non-corridor trains. The result was an extraordinary variety of plans, as diverse internally as the standard, lavatory-free type of compartment carriage was predictable.

  The higher classes of accommodation naturally did best. A representative design was the London & North Western’s tri-composite carriage of 1887 – i.e. one with first-, second- and third-class compartments – in which the two first-class compartments were separated by a pair of lavatory cubicles, dovetailed together by means of a diagonal partition. A first/third composite of 1880 on the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway had just one lavatory, reserved for one of the two first-class compartments; the other was designated for smoking, as if to imply that passengers had to choose between different kinds of relief. The more generous standards of the Edwardians can be represented by a tri-composite carriage built in 1903 by the London & South Western, which can still be seen in the National Railway Museum at York. Each of its three classes is represented by two pairs of compartments, separated by pairs of lavatories with doors opening on opposing sides. In this way every compartment had exclusive use of its own lavatory.