Brunel was a marvel, and it is impossible to read even a little about him without being delighted at his endless daring, inventiveness and panache. His vitality and intelligence shine from photographs: the quizzical gaze under the thick eyebrows and stovepipe hat, the full mouth that seems about to speak, even through the enormous cigar. By comparison, his admirable contemporaries Robert Stephenson (1803–59) and Joseph Locke (1805–60) seem a little staid. They were certainly less versatile than Brunel, for whom the design of innovative ocean liners, station buildings, docks, gun barrels, workers’ suburbs, suspension bridges, water towers and prefabricated hospitals were all in a day’s work. When the Great Exhibition opened Brunel walked alone, fourth from the front of the procession, as if representing a one-man aristocracy of genius (in truth, he had been just one among many notables on the organising committees). In his own domain he behaved like a Renaissance prince. No other railway engineer would have made the beau geste of taking a ring from his finger to present to the foreman in charge, when the gangs broke through the last rocks in the middle of Box Tunnel between Wiltshire and Somerset. No other engineer entertained the nation’s eleven most eminent artists to dinner and commissioned a painting from each. That was in 1847; in Worcestershire four years later, Brunel defied the law of the land by inciting thousands of loyal navvies to set upon the men of a contractor with whom he was in dispute, and got away with it. On his death, huge letters reading I. K. BRUNEL ENGINEER 1859 were affixed to his new bridge at Saltash, between Devon and Cornwall, which used up some of the parts originally intended for Brunel’s suspension bridge at Clifton. In another memorial tribute, leading civil engineers joined forces to ensure that the Clifton Bridge was completed after all.
Commemorations continue. A London university has been named after Brunel, he has a near-monarchical total of eight statues in the capital and points west, and he beat Shakespeare, Darwin and Newton to take second place, after Churchill, in a BBC poll of the Hundred Greatest Britons in 2002. Like Dickens, he seems somehow to be still with us; an exhibition at the Design Museum in London in 2000 was entitled ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Recent Works’. Brunel’s mental processes are accessible thanks to the copious deposits of drawings and sketches he left on his favourite squared paper, which are to be housed in a new museum under construction in Bristol at the time of writing; it will feature a giant replica of the great engineer’s head.
Had the broad gauge been the invention of a committee, or of some colourless drudge, it surely would not have received so much posthumous respect. The idea that Brunel was somehow done down in the battle of the gauges refuses to die entirely, and the Great Western’s admirers have kept up the aura of unfulfilled potential around it. The book of the Design Museum’s exhibition presented the case for and against in the form of a tennis match, with broad gauge in the lead over standard for most of the way, only for the ‘better engineering solution’ to be foiled by outside intervention in the final set. For L. T. C. Rolt, author of the first modern biography of Brunel (1957), it was ‘the bravest lost cause in engineering history’; he compared its inventor romantically to a brightly plumaged bird mobbed by sparrows. There was a political subtext here: Rolt was writing in the belief that the initiative and individuality of the railways’ era of greatness was being stifled by state ownership. For Brunel also fits the twentieth century’s pervasive myth of the avant-garde, the sense that the future belonged to a handful of artistic or technical visionaries who were ‘ahead of their time’.
The broad gauge demonstrates the weaknesses of this attitude. Brunel’s working method was of the top-down model, impatient with collaboration or delegation, and sometimes impervious to bad news and inconvenient truths. The engineer compared his Great Western Railway to a language only he could speak, of which ‘Every word has to be translated’ – as if he had established a happy realm of Esperanto speakers, fully expecting that the rest of the world would decide to learn Esperanto too. Not that his vision was narrow in other ways, for the Great Western was conceived on a global scale. At Bristol it was intended to connect with sailings to the New World by Brunel’s own mammoth steamships – by Great Western to take the SS Great Western, no less. With international travellers in mind, he even provided a giant hotel close to the city’s docks. The railway and the docks did not interconnect at first; passengers and cargoes were conveyed between them through the streets of Bristol. For Brunel, the need for passengers and cargoes to detrain when crossing the frontiers of the broad gauge, and the impossibility of running carriages or goods wagons across those frontiers, were simply part of the due price for its overall superiority.
Transferring goods from broad-gauge to standard-gauge wagons at Gloucester, from the Illustrated London News, 1847
Not everyone agreed, especially those close to the frontier in the prosperous West Midlands, where the Great Western had expansive plans. The arrangements at Gloucester showed what might result, and it was not a picture that flattered the broad gauge. The cathedral city was reached by standard gauge from Birmingham in 1840, by broad gauge from Bristol in 1844. After 8 July of that year, all rail-borne traffic between the Midlands and the west, human or otherwise, had to be transhipped by means of a badly planned exchange station at Gloucester. The hectic daily round at that station became notorious, partly thanks to negative publicity around the time that the Gauge Commission was sitting. Henry Cole and W. M. Thackeray went down to witness the dashing about and barrowing to and fro, which the novelist then satirised in Punch as ‘Jeames on the Gauge Question’, using one of his cod-cockney personae (Jeames loses his baby because of complications caused by the break of gauge, but learns via the ‘elecktricle inwention’ of the telegraph that it is safe and well back at Paddington, albeit ‘C.R.Y.I.N.G’.).
This was no mere comical muddle: the break of gauge was a serious restraint on trade and circulation. Brunel had conceived of the Great Western primarily as a passenger route; but on other lines, income from goods traffic was already closing the gap with that obtained from passengers, and freight could not be expected to transport itself between trains at the point of transfer. The Illustrated London News quoted a (possibly invented) carrier on the ordeal of a single train-load of mixed goods passing through Gloucester:
In the hurry the bricks are miscounted, the slates chipped at the edges, the cheeses cracked, the ripe fruit and vegetables crushed and spoiled; the chairs, furniture, and oil cakes, cast iron pots, grates and ovens, all more or less broken; the coals turned into slack, the salt short of weight, sundry bottles of wine deficient, and the fish too late for market.
To reduce the battle of the gauges retrospectively to a technical beauty contest is also to ignore the political and social context. The Gauge Commission happened at the instigation of Richard Cobden, radical MP for the manufacturing town of Stockport. Cobden and his allies won a great victory in these years when the protectionist Corn Laws were repealed, opening the nation’s markets to cheaper grain from abroad. There is an affinity between this campaign and the Commission’s verdict in favour of standard gauge, because it was better suited to ‘the general commercial traffic of the country’.
Nor was the broad gauge quite as far-sighted in practice as Brunel’s admirers have suggested. In particular, the great width of the tracks was not carried through proportionately to the loading gauge, so that the spatial advantage over the more generous standard-gauge lines of the next generation was modest at most. In truth, Brunel’s choice of gauge was made not so much with a potential future of bigger trains in mind – in his view, the Great Western’s wide, squat carriages and large-wheeled locomotives already represented ideal types – but to allow a faster, safer and more stable ride, on trains with a lower centre of gravity than standard gauge could provide. He also failed to anticipate the extent to which the rival gauge could be improved. Better and more durable materials narrowed the gap, as did the adoption of more precise tolerances, and such adjustments as the canting up of the tracks on one side
so that trains could take curves more quickly. And so the Great Western’s lead in speed and comfort dwindled, and by the end of the century it was the rival London & North Western that was most often cited as having the best permanent way – to use the industry’s term for the combination of rails, sleepers, ballast and underlying formation that makes up the running lines.
The story rolls on, for the standard Stephenson gauge has proved amazingly capable of bearing whatever the world has wanted to carry by rail. Continental railways that were built to the British standard gauge used it in conjunction with much roomier loading gauges. Elsewhere even greater clearances were adopted. To British eyes, the trains of North America seem especially gigantic. Thanks to inter-war publicity stunts that sent the latest express locomotives from Stephenson’s homeland to tour the New World, it was possible to compare them side by side; photographed next to American locos, the visitors look like dapper little earls in the company of hulking lumberjacks.
In matters of speed, the standard gauge has proved no less accommodating. Those beautiful express locomotives that crossed the Atlantic in the 1920s and 1930s were a legitimate source of national pride, because Britain then still enjoyed the fastest railway timetables in the world. The Great Western’s crack train was the Cheltenham Flyer, which achieved an average speed of 81.3 mph over the seventy-seven miles from Swindon to Paddington on 5 June 1932. Such feats of the steam age in its late maturity were left standing by electrification, in which Britain lagged behind; and again by the new generation of dedicated high-speed routes that began with the Japanese bullet trains of the 1960s. Japan’s original network was built to a gauge of 3ft 6in (the involvement of British engineers explains the imperial measurements), but standard gauge was adopted for the bullet-train lines. Brunel’s supporters referred dismissively to the ‘coal-waggon gauge’; in 1964, Japanese passenger trains of mighty weight began operating at speeds of up to 125 mph along tracks whose dimensions and basic principles had indeed been developed to allow wagons of Tyneside coal to run more easily. It is a similar story in Spain: a gauge several inches wider than standard was adopted in the 1840s, but the new high-speed lines added in the 1990s – running now at speeds of over 190 mph – follow the European norm. Standard gauge gets more standard all the time.
Since we have just been kicking Brunel while he is down, this is a good place to discuss the Atmospheric Railway, alias the South Devon Railway. No other project by the great engineer captures his contradictory qualities quite so well. The concept was certainly far-sighted: trains were to run without locomotives, by connecting them via a piston to a heavy tube laid between the rails from which air was constantly exhausted. The vacuum created within the cast-iron pipe impelled the train forward. Power to produce this suction came from coke-fired pumping stations spaced along the track. In effect, thinned air took the place of the ropes or cables that were still in use on some passenger routes in the 1840s, usually where gradients were steep. Atmospheric power promised to do the job no less cleanly and quietly, but at much higher speeds and over greater distances. Trains could dispense with the use of heavy locomotives, condemned to carry everywhere their own supplies of fuel and water; track could in turn be made lighter and cheaper. Looking forward, this transfer of the power source from the train to a stationary supplier anticipated the principle of railway electrification.
The atmospheric railway per se was not Brunel’s invention. A workable form was patented by two London engineers named William Clegg and Jacob Samuda, who were engaged to install it on the new line to Dalkey in the outskirts of Dublin, opened in 1843. This was a sort of boutique railway, being self-contained, less than two miles long, and devoted entirely to passenger traffic. Trains were relatively light and ran only once an hour. Five minutes’ pumping was sufficient to suck each departure up the gradient to Dalkey. It was a steady ascent, so the return journey could be made by gravity. Effectively, here was a vacuum-powered version of a rope-worked incline.
Brunel was not the only senior railway engineer to detect promise in the atmospheric system. The technology was adopted by William Cubitt for the London & Croydon Railway, whose seven-and-a-half-mile route terminated at London Bridge station. This was not a new railway: the route had already been open for several years, but its lines were increasingly used by through traffic. What was now attempted was an additional track for local services. Pumping stations were built at each end of the first atmospheric section, between Croydon and Forest Hill, about halfway to the London terminus. Trial services began in 1845.
Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway: reconstruction drawing of a train at Sprey Point, on the South Devon Railway’s seafront section
Local lines like the Dalkey railway and the London & Croydon had never got Brunel’s juices flowing. Reviewing current railway contracts in his journal for Boxing Day 1835, he dismissed the small jobs with impatience. (‘A little go, almost beneath my notice. It will do as a branch.’) These were orthodox, locomotive-hauled lines. More exciting was the prospect of what the emerging atmospheric technology could be made to do on a grand scale. The chosen beneficiary was the South Devon Railway, enacted in July 1844, of which Brunel was chief engineer. The line was to run for fifty-three miles between Exeter and Plymouth, on a route that included steep gradients. Brunel believed that the atmospheric system could take these in its stride, and that he was the man to refine or perfect its workings in order to achieve this. Questioned about his plans for the line by the Gauge Commissioners, he promised something ‘very superior in general comfort and luxury’.
It was not to be. So many wayward ideas were herded together on the South Devon Railway that even the most brilliant engineer could never have driven them all successfully in one direction. This is not mere hindsight: many at the time said as much, but these dissenters proved no match for Brunel’s energetic self-confidence.
The weakest point of this fragile, inflexible and woefully expensive railway was the vacuum pipe itself. As it moved along the pipe, the piston attached to each train opened up a greased leather flap that sealed the slot along the top, which was then pressed shut again behind it. But this flap leaked badly, even without the regular passage of trains. What was meant to be a low-maintenance system therefore came to depend on constant replenishment of the grease. Many sealants were tried: the London & Croydon used a mixture of beeswax and tallow; the South Devon began with lime soap, which proved prone to form a hard skin, followed by a mixture of soap and cod liver oil, which was too easily sucked out by the vacuum. As the leather lost its oils, it became prone to waterlogging and liable to freeze in cold weather. On coastal sections of the line the metal parts of the seal also proved vulnerable, on account of corrosion from salt spray.* So the stationary engines in South Devon had to work three times harder than expected in order to keep the vacuum at working pressure, and the fuel bills shot up.
Rubber seals were tried in the Devon system’s last days, but never had the chance to prove themselves. Even if they had stopped the leaks, other difficulties would have remained. In the first place was the extraordinarily difficult matter of how tracks were to merge or divide. Anywhere that trains crossed on the level, the pipes of both lines had to be interrupted. The London & Croydon managed this by means of a flyover, carrying its atmospheric line across the conventional tracks of the original route. Thus the railway flyover was invented, long before the traffic densities and speeds of the time would have justified the expense in a steam-hauled context. But this was a crossover only, not a junction. Braking was also difficult, and if an atmospheric train overshot the platforms there was no practical way to reverse using the power in the pipe. Shunting trains into sidings, or adding or removing carriages – everyday operations on railways elsewhere, including Brunel’s own – were therefore the preserve of horses, or even of human muscle-power. Heavy trains presented yet another problem: the power from the pumping engines being constant, they could not be made to move as fast as lighter ones. Worse, when a pumping station broke dow
n, there was no back-up system for its stretch of line; by contrast, if a locomotive failed, a spare one could be sent to assist. As Robert Stephenson noted sceptically, ‘the perfect operation of the whole is dependent on each individual part’.
In practice, the South Devon Railway barely worked at all in its intended form. Only the easiest graded section of the line, from Exeter to Newton Abbot, was ever operational; it opened with hired locomotive haulage in 1846, went fully atmospheric after much delay as late as 23 February 1848 and reverted to locomotives on 6 September, after a turbulent shareholders’ meeting the week before. The London & Croydon had meanwhile given up pumping in 1847. The Dublin operation quietly carried on, until the line was converted from British to Irish standard gauge in 1854.
Thus the South Devon Railway became an everyday broad-gauge line, like the two Cornish companies by which Brunel later carried his trunk route westward to Penzance. The wasted expenditure was calculated at nearly £500,000 – a poor exchange for Brunel’s estimated saving of £67,000 in construction costs. The engineer had the delicacy of feeling to waive his fee until the line finally opened all the way to Plymouth. He saddled the company with a line that was cruelly difficult to operate by locomotives, since its gradients were concentrated into sharp climbs in sections where extra pumping power was to have been provided. Today it is hard to credit that the South Devon hills were ever animated by Brunel’s quietly gliding trains. It seems like early science fiction, or a retro steampunk fantasy.
The Railways Page 33