The Railways

  Vaughan’s memoirs describe how he came to understand that his old working routines were not ‘timeless’ at all, but represented the fusion of ‘a century of Trade Union effort’ with ‘the security and humanity of old-fashioned railway work’. That fusion brought a less domineering approach to discipline, and less exacting working hours. Williams’s novel takes the story back to a harsher time, one generation earlier. Border Country stresses the political dimensions of railway labour, especially the challenge to solidarity represented by the General Strike of 1926. Williams’s signal-men are divided by the dispute in lasting ways: one man who supported the strike chooses to leave the railway afterwards; another, who took the opposing view, is shunned by one of his fellows, who will communicate with him only by leaving notes. Though himself opposed to the strike, their stationmaster eventually declares the station closed, preventing further work. After the strike ends he is reassigned elsewhere by the company, like the many railwaymen in real life whose prospects were blighted by having backed the wrong side. All these positions are portrayed with sympathy and understanding for the conflicts of loyalty, politics and interests among the men.

  This political dimension is important. The signalman’s stamina, attention to detail and familiarity with bookkeeping were excellent preparations for union work, and the signalling and telegraphs department was represented disproportionately in the post of branch secretary (one of Vaughan’s fellow signalmen among them). Thus the working routines of the signalmen became a factor in the struggle for better conditions across the industry. Sidney Weighell, General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen in 1976–83, remembered his signalman father taking the branch typewriter into his box at Northallerton, in the years before the power box there took over, so that he could carry on his union duties in between Sunday trains. These efforts proved more productive than Mr Weighell Snr’s repeated attempts to win a council seat for Labour in his Tory home town: he went on to serve on the executive of the NUR, then as secretary and chief negotiator of the LNER Council, representing disciplinary appeals from among 70,000 members.

  Masts and wires now stand alongside the tracks at the site of Mr Weighell’s Northallerton box, and are being erected through the Vale of the White Horse too; but these no longer have anything to do with signalling and telegraphs. The reason is the spread of overhead electrification, which covers a steadily growing proportion of the network. On such lines the railway reasserts its presence within the landscape and against the sky, as in telegraphic days, and the trains travel within an uninterrupted metallic grove of wires, masts and gantries.

  A hundred years ago, overhead power installations of this kind were still rare; trams, not trains, made up the vast majority of rail-borne vehicles powered in this way before the First World War, and for many years afterwards. Early systems showed the same localism and indifference to standardisation that we have seen regarding signals, brakes and alarms. Some were also surprisingly short-lived. The London, Brighton & South Coast Railway began running suburban electric trains in 1909, using an overhead supply of alternating current. In the 1920s the Southern Railway decided to get rid of this in favour of an electrified third rail alongside the running lines, on a similar principle to the four-rail system already established on the London Underground. By 1931 all the Southern’s wires had been taken down. At the other end of England, the North Eastern Railway’s mineral-heavy line between Shildon and Newport (Teesside) was electrified in 1915 with overhead direct current, only to revert to steam haulage twenty years later. Elsewhere in the north, third-rail systems were favoured; the North Eastern chose this method for its Tyneside suburban lines. Thus a single company was willing to deploy two incompatible systems at different ends of its own territory, as if heedless of the prospect that they might ever join up.

  Finally, in 1956, British Railways standardised overhead supply for fresh electrification at twenty-five kilovolts of alternating current, at the same frequency used in the National Grid. The Southern Region was exempted, however, and the routes running south from London use the operationally inferior third rail to this day. The system now extends as far west as Weymouth in Dorset, with an odd little satellite line on the Isle of Wight, where superannuated Tube trains work out their final years (standard mainland designs being too large to fit the Island’s loading gauge). Until a dedicated new line with overhead wiring was opened, the Channel Tunnel trains crossing Kent had to use the third rail too. In 2012 it was announced that overhead wiring is to be installed on the existing third-rail route between Southampton and Basingstoke, but the enormous costs and relatively modest benefits of converting all the other lines make it difficult to envisage that the larger job will ever be tackled. So these two systems can be expected to endure as long as there is still electricity to run Britain’s railways. It is a similar story with the cluster of third-rail lines on Merseyside, incidentally the first place in Britain where a line built for steam locomotion was converted to electricity, back in 1903. But at least the choice of standard overhead system has proved well founded.

  This is partly because the power can be conveyed by means of lighter and more efficient overhead line equipment, informally known as ‘catenary’. A catenary curve describes the form taken by a cable or chain that is suspended at each end, but the curves of the overhead wires are not as obvious to the eye as the old, hypnotically swooping telegraph wires. In fact, the lowest wires above the tracks – the contact wires, which carry the current for collection – are kept taut by means of insulated weights suspended at each end (or, in more recent installations, by springs). To support each contact wire along its length, thin vertical hangers descend from a second wire immediately above, and it is this upper wire that adopts something like a catenary curve. Keeping the lower wire in tension ensures that a safe and resilient contact can be maintained with the sprung pick-up or pantograph apparatus on the roofs of the trains. The horizontal alignment of the wires is not completely straight: to even out wear to the pickup on the pantograph, the wire follows a gentle zig-zag course or ‘stagger’ from mast to mast, so that the contact point slides constantly back and forth across the pick-up surface. Electric flashes, pops and bangs from the pantograph are a sign that this physical connection has been momentarily interrupted, making the current jump directly across the gap.

  The weights that keep the contact wires from sagging are easily spotted, hanging in stacks from pulley wheels against the upright support masts. Well before each wire is diverted towards the trackside and its terminating anchor-weight, another wire slants across to take its place in the live catenary over the track, providing a continuous power supply. Thermal expansion applies to wires as well as to rails, so the weighted wires are arranged so that they can move gently up and down over their pulleys, according to the temperature. Each length of wire is also anchored at midpoint, to prevent it from being pushed gradually forward by the pantographs in their direction of travel.

  By contrast, the supports for the wires are kept as stable as possible: the masts and gantries require sturdy foundations, and many are anchored additionally by means of diagonal cables. The supports must remain firm against the forces transmitted by trains, which nudge the contact wires upwards so that the whole cat’s cradle of wiring stirs visibly up and down in their wake. Part of the load is due to the insulators suspended between the live and the earthed sections of the catenary, each of which is fashioned like a long ridged cylinder or stack of discs. It is not just the contact wire that is alive with current: anyone on a station platform along a route with overhead electrification can observe where these insulators are placed, and work out how much of the steel cage overhead is invisibly charged at twenty-five kilovolts. Most travellers probably never think this far into the matter, for the catenary belongs among those technologies that are at once exposed and somehow invisible. Likewise, the energy it conveys is generated by power stations that are mostly out of sight and miles away, for the benefit of trains that lack the visible and
audible drama of steam haulage, running under colour-light signals controlled from drab, bunker-like buildings that turn their backs on the track.

  So we go on taking for granted the extraordinary achievement of running the railways safely, at ever faster speeds and closer intervals, on routes mostly designed by long-dead generations for much lighter, slower and less frequent trains. Until something goes wrong, that is; in which case, information may be received that ‘signalling problems’ are to blame. Many such incidents are not the railways’ fault at all, but arise from the vulnerability of grounded signal cables to thieves attracted by their copper content. The annual cost to the railways in terms of delays and repairs peaked at £16 million in 2011–12; steps since taken to regulate the scrap trade have improved matters. It is also fortunate that modern catenary uses steel and aluminium cable rather than copper, and that twenty-five kilovolts make a persuasive deterrent to pilferage. Meanwhile the railways do what they can to keep in repair the walls and fences that mark off their territory, a world like no other.

  Footnotes

  * In the following year the Ministry of Transport turned its attention to road traffic lights, recommending the three-colour code of red, amber and green: a clear echo of railway practice.

  ** Signalman’s Morning, 1981; Signalman’s Twilight, 1983; Signalman’s Nightmare, 1987.

  – 11 –

  RAILWAYS AND THE LAND I

  The railways did much to change the land, both physically and in the ways it was used and experienced. From the outset, railway building also raised profound issues of ownership and control over space. To understand some of these constraints, we can look first to the United States.

  American steam locomotives are not hard to tell from British ones. Even in cartoon form, the transatlantic iron horse is never without a big, angled skirting, sloping out diagonally in front of the buffers. These attachments are known colloquially as cowcatchers, because they served to push aside any large quadruped that strayed on to the track. Candidates for such a collision numbered in the millions, for the railroads that crossed the plains and prairies were not usually fenced in. On lines built after 1850, huge expanses of land alongside the line commonly belonged to the railroad company anyway, having been granted by the federal government as an inducement to start work. The exact route was often left to the engineers on the spot, so that minor obstacles – a rocky outcrop, a patch of bog – could be swerved around. All being well, towns, depots, houses and freight yards might follow. The railroad barons thus grew fat at least as much from their property holdings as from the profits from traffic on the lines themselves.

  A British railway was an iron horse of a different colour. Each route was planned with great precision, across land that in almost every case belonged to someone else. Legal preliminaries required the railway’s take of this land to be surveyed and mapped precisely, so that ownership of each square foot could be established. Acquisition could then start promptly, as soon as the line received the hoped-for parliamentary assent.

  Whether or not their attitude to the coming of the railways was favourable, landowners in Britain were generally wary of the companies themselves. Among their concerns was the risk that a railway might cannily buy up so much land that it could control the best sites for development along the route, just as the American railroad barons would. To guard against this outcome, an Act of 1845 required any railway to sell off unused land above a certain limit within ten years of its completion. This helped to keep British railway landholdings to a limited, if hardly minimal, scale.

  Exceptions existed to the usual model. A railway company need not buy land for its line at all. This was common practice for many years in north-east England, where colliery waggonways were laid down on the wayleave principle. A wayleave permitted the right of passage to be licensed by the landowner, without the company having to acquire the ground beneath the tracks. This avoided expensive legislation, since no compulsory purchase was required, and also kept capital costs down during the construction period. On the other hand, wayleave fees could be punitive. The limitations of the practice are shown by the case of the Stanhope & Tyne Railroad, opened in 1834, with a route over thirty miles long. The company found the Bishop of Durham willing to accept a reasonable £25 per annum in return for the right to cross his lands at Stanhope Fell. Further east, it was stung for an equivalent rate of £800 per mile where the route clipped a few fields whose owners had seen the railway coming. Worse, these costs remained fixed regardless of the company’s income from traffic, which shortly nosedived. The Stanhope & Tyne sank so far into debt as a result that it had to be dissolved and recapitalised within seven years of opening. Long leases were another alternative to outright purchase, and these too were common in the north-east, although not elsewhere.

  At the opposite extreme was the Metropolitan Railway. Originally an urban concern, the company soon pushed a tendril out to Harrow-on-the-Hill and into rural Buckinghamshire beyond. It also managed to secure exceptionally generous clauses allowing development of freehold land along this route. After 1919, the company invoked these to exploit its holdings in such places as Ruislip and Wembley, as no other British railway was able to do. The ‘Met’ could hardly lose: its estates were developed at a handsome profit, and incoming owner-occupiers provided the line with a continuing reward in the form of new traffic.

  Development on such a scale required promotion, and the company proved adept at this. The label ‘Metro-land’ was first used by its publicity department in the unpromising year 1915. Thereafter, the Metropolitan issued cheap, seductively illustrated yearbooks extolling the rustic charms of the districts which were, in truth, being steadily fenced off and parcelled up, interspersed with advertisements for available houses and plots. Even the door-plates in Metropolitan carriages were inscribed ‘Live in Metroland’, in a bold cursive script.

  The brand was officially dropped when the Metropolitan was swallowed by the new London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, but English literature has refused to let it die. Evelyn Waugh invented a Viscount Metroland in his first novel, Decline and Fall (1928), and married off this tedious self-made peer to the dangerously sexy Margot Beste-Chetwynd. John Betjeman captured the lingering atmosphere of the line in a characteristically bittersweet poem, ‘The Metropolitan Railway’, and expanded on the subject in what is easily the best of his television films, Metro-Land (1973). Julian Barnes dropped the hyphen for his first novel, Metroland (1980), whose hero finds himself reclaimed by his native suburbs after youthful excitements fizzle out into a life of comfortable convention.

  So a slogan that had an active commercial life of only eighteen years has marvellously outlived its inventors, becoming a period signifier for a certain type of inter-war Home Counties prosperity: domestic cosiness bordering on the twee, with weekends of golf and cocktails and mowing the lawn thrown in, all underwritten by the daily grind to and from the Smoke. Betjeman’s film also makes play with the social stratification within Metro-land, which encompassed the regimented streets of Neasden as well as the more expansive semis of Pinner (where the poet, in deadpan mode, commends the thoughtful provision in front of each house of ‘a tree, for the dog’), not to mention the outer zones of stockbroker villas and the still unviolated country beyond the Chilterns. Just as in its carriages, the Metropolitan understood that it had to cater to more than one class in order to make the most of its assets.

  As a large-scale speculative exercise, Metro-land remained unique in Britain. In terms of its physical presence, however, the Metropolitan was just like any other line, set apart from the outside world behind walls and fences. The portion of the earth’s surface within these limits belonged to the company – exclusively so. The farmland, moor, heath or waste through which Britain’s railways ran might be liable to inadvertent trespassing, but it was much harder for an intruder to pretend that he or she had somehow strayed by accident on to the wrong side of the railway’s boundaries.

  There was more than one e
xplanation for these hard boundaries. Landowners were keen that barriers should be fixed, to prevent livestock straying and to discourage incursions from the railway side. The railways had to keep their tracks clear, and guard themselves against malicious damage or pilfering. The early lineside supervisors were called policemen in recognition that they were there in part to prevent such things happening. An internalised version of this wariness required the men of the Great Northern Railway to carry little brass pass-tokens when walking along their own routes, even for such everyday errands as a porter’s journey to take a message to a signal box.

  In case of any doubt, the companies set up thousands of trespass notices alongside their crossings and bridges. These were typically of cast iron, often bolted to lengths of old rail for signposts. Their texts often shunned brevity in favour of legal incantation, like the earliest recorded example, dating from around 1845–6:

  MIDLAND RAILWAY. 7 VICT. CAP 18 SEC 238 ENACTS “that if any person shall be or travel or pass upon foot upon the Midland Railway without the licence and consent of the Midland Railway Company every person so offending shall forfeit and pay any sum not exceeding ten pounds for every such offence”. NOTICE IS THEREFORE HEREBY GIVEN that all persons found trespassing upon this Railway or works thereof will be prosecuted as the Law directs.