Even after the Act of 1846 chopped its ambitions down to size, nearly half a century passed before the broad gauge died. In the meantime, it was perfectly possible for trains of both gauges to share routes provided that mixed-gauge track was laid. The inconveniences of running trains of two different gauges were now internalised within the broad-gauge network itself.
One of the first stretches enabled the Great Western to run trains beyond Gloucester, to Cheltenham. This extension had four rails, the standard-gauge pair being placed symmetrically within the broad ones. However, this was a useless arrangement in terms of bringing standard-gauge vehicles within range of broad-gauge platforms and loading bays. Later mixed lines therefore used three rails, of which that on the platform side was common to both gauges. Even with just three rails, junctions, points and crossovers were of bewildering complexity. Consider what happens when a double-track route divides in two. Each track has a set of points to direct trains the right way, and three of the four rails must cross at least one other rail before the routes swing clear of one another, to a total of six individual intersections. Mixed-gauge track has six rails, five of which make crossings of other rails, to a total of fifteen intersections. Only the most masochistic of railway modellers would attempt to reproduce such an installation. Special arrangements were also required when a mixed-gauge line came to a turntable. For these to operate safely, the railway vehicle being turned has to be centrally placed. The three-railed track therefore had to give way to a four-railed section, in which the standard-gauge pair sat exactly between the outer, broad-gauge rails. Altogether, mixed-gauge track was costly to construct and maintain, and for a period in mid century the company was heavily in debt and struggled to pay a dividend at all.
Stage by stage, the Great Western began to give up on the cherished gauge. One milestone came in 1861, when the acquisition of a lesser West Midlands company compelled the extension of mixed-gauge track along the old main line, up to the buffer-stops of Paddington itself. (Brunel had died two years previously; the stock phrase ‘after a decent interval of mourning’ comes to mind.) In the year following, Queen Victoria made her first journey from Windsor to Scotland on standard-gauge wheels throughout. Another reverse came in 1863, shortly after the first instalment of the Metropolitan Railway opened. The underground line was conceived as a mixed-gauge spin-off of the Great Western, which contracted to operate its services, and its first trains were of broad-gauge type. The Metropolitan’s independent-minded management soon fell out with the senior company and went over to standard-gauge operation for a while, using borrowed stock. The broad-gauge rails were removed in 1869, the year in which all the Great Western’s routes north of Oxford became standard gauge only. The last new line built entirely to the broad gauge dated from 1877, in the shape of the four-mile Cornish branch to St Ives. By that time only seven of the forty-eight daily departures from Paddington used the broad-gauge rails. It was the main line to Cornwall that held out, like King Arthur making his last stand in the West.
The 1880s saw the Great Western preparing for the inevitable. New broad-gauge carriages were now built with narrower bodies, so that they could be reused on standard-gauge underframes when the day of reckoning came. Convertible wagons were built too, and even some convertible locomotives. The final transformation happened over one weekend in May 1892. By that time only the route between Exeter and Truro and some of the lines branching off it were still broad and broad only, to a total of 171 route-miles. Much of this was of single track, so the option of converting one track at a time was not available. A small army was required to get the job done, and the Great Western set about assembling one from its track workers across the network, to the number of some 4,200. Station waiting rooms, goods sheds and tents provided overnight shelter; the company supplied cooking equipment, and oatmeal to supplement whatever food the men brought with them. They were divided into gangs of twenty, most of whom were allotted just over a mile of line to convert. It was heavy and repetitive work, for which every hour of daylight was needed: the cross timbers were cut short, the rail furthest from the platforms was moved across on its timber baulk and all was fixed and ballasted in place again. Pointwork was more complicated, and to avert delays the replacements were assembled in advance and placed by the track ready for installation.
According to a special timetable, the superseded locomotives, carriages and most of the wagons gathered at the works at Swindon, where fifteen miles of reception sidings had been laid on farmland bought for the purpose. In the other direction, broad-gauge carrier wagons piggybacked standard-gauge locomotives and rolling stock to the places from which services were to resume once the disruption was over. They were soon joined by a stream of adapted broad-gauge vehicles; many of the carriages could be converted at the workshops at Swindon in just half an hour.
It all went like clockwork. Trains resumed as planned on the Monday after, when the first through service pulled in to Penzance four minutes early. Goods services took slightly longer to get back to full strength, the maximum interruption being a little over a week. Rather like the Dunkirk evacuation, what was essentially an episode of defeat became part of the Great Western’s sense of its own glorious history. The company can be forgiven: its achievement in 1892 was amazing.
The Great Western’s conversion weekend is a reminder of the giant scale of railway construction. Small economies in materials brought big cumulative savings. In its mature form, Brunel’s baulk road allowed the use of rails that weighed up to 23lb less per yard than the bullhead type. The difference saved over the double tracks from London to Bristol alone amounted to over 8,500 tons. But the tendency was always to improve the rails by making them heavier, like the trains they supported. To get the best use out of them, rails often had two lives: on the main line first, followed by relocation to a branch line or sidings. In the 1930s, the London, Midland & Scottish Railway allowed an average 21½ years before main-line rails were reused or scrapped; early in that decade it was getting through more than 90,000 tons of rail annually, of an estimated national total of a quarter of a million tons. Rails wore out faster in tunnels, on steep gradients and in places such as Widnes, where heavy industry made the very air chemically corrosive. To support this huge tonnage of rails, the LMS required 2.3 million new cast-iron chairs each year. These were made by the railway itself, at a foundry within its enormous works at Crewe, which was kept in continuous operation; 95 per cent of the metal used was scrap, including the railway’s own leavings.
Sleepers were another bulk-order item. Economy in the use of timber was achieved on some lines by making these of half-round section, easily created from split logs; in the 1860s these were still current in many areas. A type that seems to have disappeared earlier was of triangular profile, the apex being buried downwards in the ballast. But it was the rectangular type that became the norm, to a standard section of 10in by 5in. To be sufficiently resilient, sleepers had to be much wider than the track itself: 9ft was the common Victorian size, reduced in the twentieth century to 8ft 6in. Oak or pitch-pine had the best qualities for the job, but their high cost meant that cheaper imported softwood was usually preferred. These sleepers became a familiar sight at docks around Britain, cut to length and stacked in their millions awaiting despatch.
Softwood timber placed in the ground soon rots. Victorian railway companies varied in their response to this inconvenient fact. At first, some chose to let nature take its course, and replaced their sleepers as needed. Others sought to prolong their lives by artifice. For many years the Great Western favoured a process called kyanising, named after its inventor John Howard Kyan (1774–1850). This involved steeping timber in what Brunel called ‘pickle-tanks’, using a solution of mercuric chloride – as it happens, the same toxic compound that was prescribed in the treatment of syphilis. More common, and cheaper, was the use of creosote, one of the products distilled from the tar driven off when coal was heated to turn it into coke. The easiest way to apply creosote was by di
pping or soaking, but this gave only superficial protection. Much better results came from the use of pressurised cylindrical chambers to impregnate the timbers more deeply: the air inside having been exhausted, the heated solution was pumped in under high pressure, and each sleeper would absorb up to three gallons before the surplus was pumped out again.
Rather than using outside contractors, most companies undertook the preparation of sleepers themselves. By the 1930s the process had largely been mechanised, using adzing and drilling machines to ready the sleepers for the attachment of chairs. Pickling was the next step. At Greenhill depot near Falkirk, 400,000 of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway’s annual requirement of 1.25 million sleepers were treated in batches of ten at a time, which worked out at 130 cylinder-loads every working day. Other plants, such as that at Hayes on the Great Western or the Southern Railway’s wharfside depot at Redbridge near Southampton, did things on a grander scale. The cylinders here were 75ft or 80ft long and up to 7ft across, enough to take trolley-loads of 600 sleepers at a time. (Manhandling the reeking batches out of these cylinders after treatment was one of the railways’ nastier jobs.) In the 1930s the Great Western alone owned some 9,000 miles of track, sidings included; taking the most common spacing of twenty-four sleepers to each 60ft pair of rails as a benchmark, the company therefore had something close to 20 million sleepers on its lines.
The railways’ appetite for timber was impossible to sustain at normal levels during wartime, when Continental imports ceased and military needs had priority. The Great Western managed during the Second World War by such makeshifts as the use of paired concrete sleeper blocks in sidings, with a connecting cross tie at intervals. Simple concrete castings were acceptable for such uses, and the materials to make them did not have to be imported; they also resisted decay. For main lines, early concrete sleepers were of limited use because they fractured under stress. The answer was to ensure that their steel reinforcements were tensioned during casting, turning an inert and crack-prone object into something taut and resilient. A reliable production method was developed by the Dow-Mac factory at Tallington in Lincolnshire in 1943–4 (concrete sleepers with the company’s name endlessly repeated in letters cast into the top surface are still abundant). In 1964 the type became standard for use on ordinary track with welded rails. Little cushions of cork, rubber or plastic between sleeper and rail help to compensate for the absence of the natural bounce of timber. Concrete sleepers are also both longer-lived and much heavier than the wooden kind, and usually have a different profile, sloping up to a greater thickness under the rails where the stresses are greatest.
A stack of sleepers at the Great Western Railway’s creosoting depot at Hayes, Middlesex, in 1937
Concrete sleepers now prevail on the majority of routes in Britain, although hardwood is still preferred for some of the endlessly varied layouts and dimensions of points and crossings. The standard fixture that holds the rails in place on concrete sleepers is the Pandrol clip, a Norwegian invention shaped a bit like a kinked and partly unbent paperclip, which has the advantage of not working loose under the vibration of traffic. Older sleepers of timber are still out there in numbers as well, and some vintage examples can be seen gently disintegrating on secondary routes and sidings. Ancient rail components linger in sidings too; a Great Northern Railway chair dated 1894 turned up recently among recovered materials sent for recycling. The modern traveller beyond the main lines may also encounter sleepers made of pressed steel, profiled to bite into the ballast, which have become quite common of late. There have even been trials using sleepers made from recycled plastic. Altogether, for those who care to notice these things, there is more variety in the matter of railway track than there was half a century ago.
The third visible element of the permanent way is the ballast. Its task is to hold the track in place and to keep it well drained. Gravel was popular at first, but it was found in time that hard, sharp-edged stones such as granite or basalt that will interlock firmly are best for the job. Over much of the country this was easily obtained. A great deal of limestone was also used, not always of optimum types: in the south-east, the relatively fragile stone known as Kentish rag was pressed into service. Some railways in steel-making districts found that broken-up slag from the blast furnaces had the qualities needed. Other waste products used included spoil from mine workings and ash or clinker from coal fires, including the railways’ own; this effectively came free, but was too light to be satisfactory on heavily used lines.
Even the shifting expanses of shingle at Dungeness were plundered for ballast, the South Eastern Railway and its successors taking away trainload after trainload via a branch line that had been built in the vain hope that this weird coastal settlement of lighthouses and cottages might develop into a seaport. Sub-standard ballasting composed of these sea-smoothed flints, with ash and soil mixed in, was a contributory cause of a fatal derailment at Sevenoaks in 1927. After the crash, the penitent Southern Railway went over to using dolerite from Meldon Quarry on the edge of Dart-moor, at the far western end of its territory. Ash, clinker, gravel and other easily compacted materials continued to find uses in goods yards, engine sheds and other areas where there was the need for a smoother surface underfoot. Anyone who has rushed to catch a train across the eerie shingles of Dungeness – where a miniature railway still runs to the end of the headland, on sleepers ballasted by the loose native stones – will appreciate the reasoning behind this.
Heavy modern track needs deeper and more uniform ballasting than the wooden-sleepered type. The railways’ hunger for fresh ballast – 3 million tons a year was being laid down in the 1990s – is still redistributing the solid geology of these islands in countless little fragments. Granite is the only material used nowadays, although no longer from the quarry at Meldon, which closed in 2011. Even the hardest granite has a limited useful life: vibration and stress from trains wear away the sharper edges, and the space between the stones begins to clog with the sand-like dust that is produced. Old ballast is unsuitable as the setting for new high-speed track, for it will settle unpredictably; the two must be renewed together. Stiffer recycling targets also mean that old (‘spent’) ballast is no longer dumped in large quantities, and it finds uses in ready-mixed concrete or as roadstone, so that pieces of stone which once supported the passage of trains now perform the same task for lorries and cars. Modern sleepers are also reprocessed, the ground-up concrete going for new construction, the steel reinforcements for scrap.
Timber sleepers are a different story. When the railway had no further use for them, many others could see the potential of these large, seasoned blocks of wood. Their continuing reuse survived a challenge by the European Union in 2003, when it was declared that carcinogenic creosote residues made softwood sleepers too dangerous to use in places frequented by people; instead, they would all have to be incinerated. A compromise has since been reached, so that creosoted sleepers are still bought and sold, subject to cautions and restrictions; the going retail rate in Britain at the time of writing is around £12–£15. Sleepers are the most common article of what might be called the railway diaspora, instantly recognisable from their shape and size, and from the scars and holes where the chairs were attached at each end. Like any standard-sized unit, sleepers are easy to deploy. They can be built up into timber walls of surprising height by slotting them on top of one another between steel posts, to make outdoor enclosures for coal or discarded tyres, or even modest buildings. Sleepers also make good fences and retaining walls. Huge numbers have disappeared into gardens, to make steps or to frame raised beds (although growing foodstuffs in them is not recommended). Landscape designers value their textured and weathered surfaces, when used as a rustic form of wood-block paving. They turn up along the margins of beaches, marking the boundary between managed land and the natural world; dropped into boggy patches to serve as makeshift bridges, they greet the walker on farm tracks or high up on the fells.
Staying with the railway di
aspora, but leaving the tracks behind for the time being, we can return briefly to Dungeness. In the 1920s, the lighthouses there were joined by a huddle of weekend dwellings made from the bodies of redundant railway carriages, many of them bought by railway workers from their employers.** These carriage bodies have become an accepted part of the character of the strange landscape at Dungeness, with its partly demolished nuclear power station, converging power lines and general air of being at the end of things. One of the older carriages has even been reverently encased in a new architect-designed house; re-equipped as a kitchen, the frail relic now sits on the polished floor of a big bare interior behind plate-glass windows facing the shingle and the sea.
It would be mistaken to think of this settlement as unique, for the use of discarded carriage bodies as improvised homes dates back at least to late-Victorian times. One early stronghold was at Shoreham in Sussex, where land by the river mouth was colonised in the 1870s by a cluster for use as net stores by fishermen. Other carriage bodies were then imported for dwellings, and Shoreham’s long-vanished Bungalow Town was born. Its denizens were chiefly well-off devotees of the simple life, including theatre folk: H. G. Wells in 1906 referred to ‘a certain Bohemian-spirited class’ impatient with ‘the dull rigidities of the decorous resorts’. At its most basic, the practice was cheap, too: a smaller carriage body could be had for ten pounds, plus a modest outlay on land and installation. An essay by Max Beerbohm describes an encounter on a Norfolk road with such a vehicle in 1919 (a first-and-third composite, with smoking compartments), being towed by a traction engine to a new, immobile life. Following behind, the writer discovered a colony of carriages already set up amid the dunes, under such names as Spray o’ the Sea, The Nest and Brinynook.
The Railways Page 34