For the metropolitan huntsman, a new way of life began. Saved from miles of hacking across country, or from the need to send horses ahead overnight, he and his mount could now hunt in Leicestershire or the New Forest by early morning train and horsebox, and still be back for dinner. Huntsmen were noted at Euston by Samuel Sidney in 1851, waiting for Buckinghamshire trains ‘with their pinks just peeping from under their rough jackets’. By the 1860s this tribe of itinerant, non-attached huntsman was numerous. Anthony Trollope was one of them. The sporting press began to include articles on hunting-tourism, with advice on where to go and what to expect. A Londoner could hunt six days a week in season, meets being arranged on different days in different counties; Birmingham and Leeds men could pick and choose too. The journals of the hunting obsessive William Chafy record over 2,822 hunting days, most of which were rail-borne and ended back home in time for tea (thus saving the cost of a night at the inn). Attachments to particular hunts were encouraged by special season tickets, available by the 1850s, which offered repeated journeys at a reduced rate. Rich huntsmen for whom time was at a premium learned to exploit the railways too. Henry Chaplin, a junior minister (in office 1864–71) and master of fox hounds, was known to charter a train to draw up at a point on the track where his stud groom and mount awaited.
Such was the rush to hunt that the number of packs rose markedly, from 99 in 1850 to 137 in 1877. As with racing, some of this growth was sponsored directly by the railway companies: the London, Brighton & South Coast subscribed £25 to the South Downs Hunt in the 1850s. In heavily hunted areas, foxes became scarce; many hunts now tried not to kill their quarry at all. A Devon huntsman claimed that one of his foxes, ‘the Bold Dragoon’, had been caught and reprieved by a well-trained pack no fewer than thirty-six times. The shortage became so acute that live foxes had to be brought in from Scotland or the Continent. Huntsman, hounds, mount and prey must sometimes have been carried to the meet on the same train.
To understand the railways’ impact on the landscape – the subject of huntsmen’s early misgivings, and those of the Northamptonshire gentry of 1830 – it is worth considering how their surveyors and engineers approached virgin terrain. Bogs and marshes excepted, it was easy to push a railway across level ground, nor was a great deal of land needed to do it. The straighter and more level the line, the simpler it was to operate too. But much of Britain is gently rolling, hilly, or even mountainous. The surveyor or engineer confronting such a district had to strike a balance between the ideally straight and level route – physically achievable perhaps, but prohibitively expensive – and the practicable alternatives, as well as watching for pitfalls arising from ownership and compensation.
The Great Western Railway’s cutting at Harbury, Warwickshire, in the course of widening in 1884 to reduce the occurrence of landslips. Here the navvies’ task is eased by the use of a locomotive to remove the wagons of spoil
In the first instance, trains are not good at climbing hills. Gradients along the line were therefore softened by means of cuttings. To even out the slopes better, spoil taken from the cuttings was transported along the route and tipped into the depressions, creating embankments. As long as the subtracted mass did not greatly exceed the deposits required, the engineer would be spared the extra cost of ‘putting to spoil’ thousands of tons of surplus rock and soil, which usually had to be done by dumping it in rampart-like ridges along the cutting edges. The angle of the embankment sides might also be varied, sometimes going beyond the minimum cut in order to generate enough spoil to build up the embankments safely. Any shortfall could be made good by ‘side cutting’, excavating some blameless piece of land within range of the route (the Great Western once bought a whole hill just for this purpose).
This basic equation explains why any longish railway journey is normally neither all cutting, nor all embankment. When a new route is made purely by subtraction, as in the case of underground railways, special measures are required. The English share of spoil from the Channel Tunnel was mostly dumped at the foot of the White Cliffs of Dover, to form a seventy-acre public facility called Samphire Hoe Country Park. The Crossrail route below London, lacking a nearby sea coast, has sent much of its spoil by train and ship to a blank expanse of farmland on the edge of the Essex marshes. In a reversal of the usual Victorian transformation of marginal land into productive use, this is being remodelled into what is described as the largest man-made nature reserve in Europe.
Engineers and surveyors were expected to master the complicated geometrical calculations required to quantify these huge volumes before breaking ground. To make the task easier in the age before electronic calculation, published tables were available. Some of these were compiled by George Parker Bidder (1806–78), a gifted engineer who was also a mathematical prodigy. Bidder’s life is another illustration of how the railway industry repeatedly drew out the best from men of talent. The son of a Devon stonemason, he showed enough precocious mathematical skill to be taken on tour by his father as a fairground attraction, the ‘Calculating Boy’. In his ninth year the infant was introduced to royalty. To answer Queen Charlotte’s request for the square root of 36,372,961 took him eighty seconds.* The astronomer-mathematician Sir John Herschel arranged for the boy to be properly schooled, whereupon Bidder Snr tried unsuccessfully to remove his son to get him back on the touring circuit. Bidder’s education continued in the 1820s at Edinburgh University, where he befriended a fellow student named Robert Stephenson. When Stephenson’s career as a railway engineer took off, he engaged the assistance of his old friend, beginning with the London & Birmingham Railway project in the 1830s. Bidder proved to be a gifted engineer in his own right: he is credited with designing the first balanced swing bridge, built in 1844 for the Norwich & Brandon Railway. The early skills of the Calculating Boy were not neglected: Bidder had a sideline as an expert witness to Parliament’s committees on railway bills, when he was able to trounce rival schemes by exposing and mercilessly quantifying flaws in their engineering data.
Decisions also had to be made concerning the profiles of the cuttings. The steeper the sides, the less spoil had to be removed and the narrower the strip of land that had to be bought in the first place. But if the slopes were made too steep, the risk of landslips increased in proportion. Had Brunel sloped the sides of his Sonning cutting more gently, the fatal accident of 1841 might never have occurred. Brunel was certainly attentive to the challenge of how to give a stable finish to cuttings and embankments, and his notebooks include details of grass species most suited for consolidating earthworks comprised of various soils. The usual method was to set aside the topsoil from when the ground was first broken, so that it could be spread over the finished man-made terrain. As well as grass seed, clover was a common choice for sowing after the job was done, or the original turf was simply kept and re-laid. But the crucial threat came not from superficial slippages in the topsoil, but from more deep-seated collapses.
It was therefore important to understand the nature of the earth and of the underlying geology. Often the true state of affairs below ground emerged only after work began. Seams of clay, shale or sand were all potential weak points. F. S. Williams cited a cutting in northern England, predicted to require the extraction of 50,000 cubic yards, which proved to contain soft earth sitting on a seam of shale. Once the seam was cut the earth slipped and slipped, until the total extraction reached ten times the estimate. Nor did the deposits required to make an embankment always behave as expected. Another engineer’s nightmare described by Williams concerned the 100ft-high Intake embankment on the Settle and Carlisle line. Here tipping went on for twelve months before the leading end of the formation could be taken forward at all; the stuff just slipped all over the place. Even after new earthworks had apparently been made secure, it was difficult to predict exactly how these huge gougings and dumpings of loose soil and rock would behave under the action of rain, drought and frost. Fissured clays, of the kind that slipped at Sonning, were especially pron
e to move without warning.
Chalk was a kinder material. It could be cut both cheaply and steeply and then largely left to itself. At one point where the chalk cliffs of Kent met the sea, at Round Down between Dover and Folkestone, the engineers of the South Eastern Railway simply blew up the unwanted parts, letting the waves take care of the surplus. (As it happens, very near the Samphire Hoe Country Park.) The job was beautifully done. Three shafts were sunk and filled with 18,500lb of gunpowder. The simultaneous detonations were overseen by an officer of the Royal Engineers and watched by crowds who came by excursion train. The Times described how the cliff sank with ‘a low, faint, indistinct indescribable moaning rumble’. However, the open texture of chalk made it water-absorbent and thus prone to frost damage. In hard frosts, Merstham cutting in Surrey had to be watched night and day in case any great masses of North Downs chalk tumbled on to the tracks.
Drainage was another aspect of the engineer’s duties. It was essential that a cutting did not simply fill up with water. The usual safeguard was to make the line on a sufficient slope to allow rainwater and groundwater to run away. On the other hand, the gradients should not be too steep. The steepest part of any line, known as the ruling gradient, determines the minimum power required to operate its trains. The degree to which the engineers succeeded in reducing these ruling gradients can be judged by listening for changes in pitch in the engines or traction motors of a moving train. Keeping an eye on the train speed, and on the rise and fall of the embankment sides as they pass the window, is also instructive. Often the deepest point in the cutting will coincide with a summit in the gradient, where the line crosses a ridge or a watershed, at which point the noise of hard mechanical work will fall off as the train begins coasting on the downward slope. Steam-age travel made these transitions much more noisily explicit.
The conjunction of two gradients at a summit also allowed the water to drain from both ends of the cutting. That was not the end of the matter. As the gentlemen of Northamptonshire had understood in 1830, all this cutting and embanking was immensely disruptive to the established hydrology. The railways therefore had to make arrangements to carry water away from the lines and into existing watercourses, as well as building in their own drainage systems to protect the track itself. To keep the permanent way dry required more than the usual drainage ditch along each side: catchwater ditches might be needed along the tops of the cuttings, and extra drains too within the embankment slopes (commonly composed of rubble-filled diagonal trenches). Embankments demanded drainage ditches at the foot, and plentiful culverts running through the bank itself – or they might act like dams after heavy rain, trapping sheets of water on the higher side. These basic geophysical challenges were no less central to the successful running of the railways than the fast-changing technologies of steam, steel and telegraphy.
On coastal routes, railway embankments also established hard lines between dry land and the tidal zone, often reclaiming a large acreage from the sea. The results can be seen especially well on Ruskin’s regular section of the Furness line between Ulverston and Cark and again where the River Kent flows into Morecambe Bay, and on the Cambrian Railways’ line along Cardigan Bay, the second of the three greatest seaside routes on the British network (the old South Devon Railway, the site of Brunel’s atmospheric debacle, is the third). But the most spectacular instance of the phenomenon in the British Isles is in Ireland, where the embankment of the Londonderry & Coleraine Railway was routed through the silts of Lough Foyle in the 1850s so as to reclaim 22,000 acres from the tide. Over half of this Ulster polder was then enclosed and sold.
A deep cutting is often a sign that the train will shortly enter a tunnel. A depth of some sixty feet was the average point at which it became cheaper to take a railway through the earth, rather than removing the overburden altogether. There were exceptions to the sixty-foot rule. The line to the coast of central Wales crossed the watershed dividing the rivers Severn and Dovey by means of a mighty cutting at Talerddig, 120ft deep, which opened to traffic in 1863. Trains from the coast had to climb for fourteen miles, subject to a ruling gradient of 1 in 52, to reach the precipitous man-made cliffs of gritstone at the summit of this excavation, itself fully three miles long. This remained for some years the deepest railway cutting in the world. Here the decision to make a cutting rather than a tunnel was taken partly because of the need for good building stone for structures elsewhere on the line. This use of cuttings as quarries was common practice, so that the viaducts and stations along many lines seem to belong as profoundly to the land around them as the farms, cottages and boundary walls that are native to the country.
Elsewhere, deep cuttings have sometimes been formed by abolishing existing tunnels, so that a big slice of land above and on each side of the line has been swallowed up by the railway after all. Chevet Tunnel on the old North Midland Railway route to Leeds, one of the nastiest postings recalled by the tunnel inspector W. T. Thornewell (met in Chapter 9), was done away with in the 1920s, in order to widen the line. The resulting excavation, though unequal to Talerddig, is still among the network’s deepest, at nearly 100ft.
Perhaps the most drastic of these operations concerned the Lime Street Tunnel in Liverpool, made in 1836 by the Liverpool & Manchester Railway to serve its new terminus in the heart of the city. In 1881 all but a short section of its total length – more than a mile in all – was opened up to the sky by means of sheer-sided cuttings through the solid rock, without closing the line to traffic during the operation. Locomotives could now work more easily along what had originally been a cable-hauled route, at the cost of rending the city’s fabric through by a mysterious smoky chasm, bridged at intervals by a dozen pre-existing streets. These cuttings truly are sheer-sided, of tarnished red sandstone adorned with little acid-resistant ferns, and stitched here and there with masonry reinforcement courses that slope up or down according to the bedding planes of the rock. A similar composite of red sandstone and coursed brick infill – the natural patched and mended with the man-made – appears at Chester, where Robert Stephenson shaved away some of the Castle rock to accommodate his line to Holyhead.
All this cutting, blasting and tunnelling of the bedrock had profound consequences for geological knowledge, especially for stratigraphy, the study of sedimentary rocks. In the peak years for railway building geological science was still essentially the preserve of amateurs, and it took time for any central agency for collecting or co-ordinating discoveries to be put in place. The first geological map had been produced in 1815 by the self-taught William Smith (1770–1839), drawing on his observations as a canal surveyor, but the scale and extent of railway excavations exceeded anything undertaken on inland waterways many times over. The first grant to support geological research at railway workings was made by the British Association in 1840, and the decades that followed were busy. Some new routes opened up entire regional geologies: the Caledonian main line through the Scottish lowlands chopped its way into formations that could previously be glimpsed only from scattered local exposures at small quarries and burns.
A few engineers took an enlightened interest themselves. When a petrified forest from the coal measures was exposed by the Manchester & Bolton Railway in the 1840s, the line’s engineer John Hawkshaw had a shed built over them and casts and models made. The Geological Society’s Proceedings for the decade include multiple reports from F. W. Simms, the resident engineer directing the South Eastern Railway’s progress through Kent. On occasion Simms took his excavations beyond what was strictly necessary, purely in order to clarify a stratigraphic problem. In 1853 geology even acquired a railway martyr, when the distinguished amateur Hugh Strickland was hit by a train near Retford in Nottinghamshire. On his way back from a meeting of the British Association, Strickland had stopped off to examine the rocky cuttings near the mouth of Clarborough Tunnel. Notebook in hand, he stepped away from the rails to avoid a coal train. An express on the other line then burst from the tunnel, killing him.
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sp; Fossil-dealers hung around some railway workings, hopeful of finding saleable specimens, but the big money was in minerals. George and Robert Stephenson made a fine profit from the coal of Snibston Colliery, which they established in 1831 in connection with their work for the Leicester & Swannington Railway. George repeated the venture at Clay Cross in Derbyshire in the 1840s, here with a new ironworks and lime-works for good measure. Fresh ironstone beds of workable quality were exposed in 1857 by the Midland Railway’s line from Leicester to Hitchin. Going much deeper, coal deposits were identified in East Kent in 1882, in borings made for the first serious attempt to construct a Channel Tunnel. The tunnel was abandoned unfinished, but the Kent coalfield was mined until 1989.
Where a steep cutting was desirable but the terrain was too unstable to allow it, the tracks were commonly sunk between retaining walls. That applied especially in towns, where land was expensive. When brick was used for these walls, it was often the bluish-purple Staffordshire type, made of dense clays from the coal measures that can be slow-fired at high temperatures to obtain a very hard, water-resistant finish. The railways took avidly to these, and imperishable surfaces of ‘Staffordshire blues’ still line the approaches to many stations up and down the country, often laid to form blind arched panels for extra strength. There is a characteristic sequence on the long and dispiriting approach to Leicester station from the south, and an even grander sequence in the enormously broad trench by which the railway finds its way out of London from Euston. At Euston, as at the reconstructed Birmingham New Street, these blue brick walls are the last tangible link with the Victorian railway builders.
The Railways Page 44