Other proposals and piecemeal uses came and went, without amounting to much. Seeking to make better lives for the underemployed urban poor by means of farm colonies, General Booth of the Salvation Army lighted on the railway embankment as an overlooked resource. His reform programme, published in 1890 as In Darkest England, and the Way Out, hailed them as ‘a vast estate, capable of growing fruit enough to supply all the jam that Crosse and Blackwell ever boiled’. Around the same time, F. S. Williams pointed out that the lineside fences of Belgium had been adopted to support espaliered fruit trees, and that the venture promised to have good results. But Britain’s railways were never turned into linear fruit farms in this way. Attempts were certainly made – a correspondent to The Garden magazine in 1875 described having seen half an acre of a London & North Western embankment planted with strawberries, for example – but the practice seems never to have become general. Neither was anything done to follow up the suggestion of a newspaper correspondent in 1847 that the freshly made, south-facing embankment slopes of Gloucestershire and Kent should be terraced for vines. The world was not yet ready for English railway wine.
Cropping for hay had an obvious advantage, because lineside vegetation had to be controlled anyway. There is nothing stable about the botany of embankments; left untended, the open ground alongside the railways in all but the bleakest parts of Britain will revert to scrub. The botanist Oliver Rackham once suggested that the railways may have helped unwittingly in this process by setting up fences along the boundaries: lodging-places for wind-blown seeds and attractions to perching birds, whose bills and droppings also leave seeds behind.
The truth was often more complicated. Each new railway was required by its founding Act to define its territory by means of a barrier. In towns and in certain upland districts the job might be done by a wall. More common, and much cheaper, was a wooden fence (post-and-wire fences became common only from late-Victorian times). On the railway side of these fences a drainage ditch was commonly dug and a hedge planted. The fence protected the growing hedge from grazing and trampling by livestock, which might otherwise stray on to the line. After the hedge was established there was no need to keep both barriers, so the fence was allowed to drop to bits. But this raised the risk that the farmer might stealthily annexe the little field-strip alongside, so many railways also set up boundary posts to record their true extent.
However the railways’ hedges came about, their usefulness as barriers did not apply to trees and bushes growing closer to the track. If an excess of lineside scrub was allowed to build up, it could all too easily be set alight by sparks from passing trains. More dangerous still, unchecked growth could obstruct the driver’s view of the signals ahead. The verges therefore had to be kept clear – a sort of virtual farming, keeping the land in shape as if for a non-existent crop. A common accessory to the platelayer’s hut was a grindstone, to maintain a sharp edge on the scythes used for the purpose. Another method was to burn the growth off, a task commonly kept for a dry winter’s day. Sometimes the sparks and cinders thrown out by locomotives did the job accidentally. The process continues along today’s preserved railways, leaving big blackened patches by the line. A journey during a dry spell may catch one of these fires at work: the crackling orange flames move frighteningly fast through the tawny grass alongside the track, pulled by the slipstream of the train, and the sulphurous smell of steam coal is overlain with a fresher and more acrid vegetable reek.
Barley fields ablaze at Postwick alongside the Norwich to Yarmouth line, August 1949
Inadvertent lineside fires were doubly menacing because they could spread into the crops and fields beyond, for which the company was liable to pay compensation. This was not necessarily a bad deal for the farmer, and suspicions occasionally arose that some such fires were more welcome than not. Christian Hewison, master of the engine shed at Melton Constable in Norfolk in the years just after the Second World War, became convinced that the local barley farmers were ploughing their furrows as close to the line as possible in the hope of lucrative conflagrations. On the Masham branch in the Yorkshire Dales, a dishonest farmer was caught out when he put in a fire compensation claim after steam haulage had been replaced by diesel.
A related question concerned farm animals that had escaped on to the track and were killed by trains. If it could be shown that defective fencing was to blame, the railway was again liable to make recompense. This too was a standing inducement to misbehaviour on the part of the cannier sort of hill-farmer. As remembered by Harry Hartley, who inspected the wildest section of the Wensleydale route every day over many years in the 1950s, the cadavers of sheep that had died by other means were regularly placed on the rails, so that a claim could be put in for their value. To even out the score, Hartley sometimes took a spade and buried genuine railway victims before their owners could spot the loss. Some of these casualties resulted from the farmers’ habit of fence-breaking so that sheep could graze the lineside; other farmers were bold enough to cut illicit hay from there – little skirmishes that reprised the compensation battles of the railway-building years.
The permanent way could itself give a home to some of the tougher sorts of plants. Fresh ballast was not an encouraging environment, but the steady penetration of wind-blown sediment and earth working up from below gradually made the habitat more inviting.** Steam traction was on the railwaymen’s side here, with its constant oily leaks, scalding dribbles and droppings from locomotive ash-pans. The localised ballasting of sleepers with lead-mining waste also kept vegetation at bay, the spoil being so toxic that almost nothing could grow on it. Only in the 1930s did weed-killer come into play, sprayed from the nozzles of slow-moving trains that were steadily extended to cover the whole network by annual rota. Until that time the ballast had to be denuded of growth by the platelayers’ hoes and rakes. As with the verges, this was not a matter of mere tidiness. Plant growth across the track and in the gullies along each side rapidly became an obstacle to drainage, and waterlogged track was potentially unstable. In hard frosts, bad drainage might cause further distortion, as groundwater expands by a factor of one-ninth in turning to ice (a cause of many speed restrictions during the severe winter of 1962–3).
Regardless of regular human clearance and accidental burnings, the railways also accelerated the spread of certain wild plants, including non-native species. Especially fostered were plants with wind-borne seeds, which were pulled along the tracks in the wake of passing trains. This seems to have been one of the chief reasons for the advance of rosebay willowherb. In the eighteenth century its tall purple-flowered stems were reportedly scarce outside gardens, but from the middle of the next century willowherb began zipping through Britain, often using the railway network as its conduit. Each plant can produce some 80,000 seeds, which grow well on land that has recently been burnt. The same factors that allowed this ‘fireweed’ to flourish in the aftermath of the London Blitz also helped it to dominate the lineside.
Clearer still is the claim of Oxford Ragwort to be a railway weed. A hybrid of two Sicilian sub-species, its daisy-like yellow flowers were already to be seen among the specimens of the Oxford Botanical Gardens in Georgian times. From there it spread tentatively until it reached the Great Western’s station, on the opposite side of the town. There was no stopping it after that: the ballast approximated beautifully to its dry and stony native habitat, and Oxford Ragwort made its steady way down to Cornwall, across to Kent and up to northern England. The botanist George Claridge Druce (1850–1932) caught the process in action, as he watched seeds from the plant drift into his carriage at Oxford and blow out again at Tilehurst in Berkshire, over twenty miles away. A linear bed of ragwort still flourishes there, in the gap between the slow and fast lines.
Buddleia, a Chinese species introduced in the 1890s, managed the same trick of dispersal even more quickly. It too evolved to grow in dry and stony territory, with tiny seeds that readily germinate in the decaying mortar of old walls. The tapering purple flow
ers of Buddleia are a well-known favourite of butterflies, sometimes to spectacular effect: in the summer of 2001, trains approaching Norwich passed through swirling clouds of migrant Painted Ladies, attracted by the Buddleia groves around the derelict inner-city station at Trowse. Other alien plants are so invasive that their presence on the lineside constitutes a permanent sump of contamination for the land on either side. Pity the gardens whose fences back on to the route between Brixton and Peckham, which has become a stronghold of one of the most hated of these plants, the near-ineradicable Japanese knotweed. The solid mass of bright green spade-shaped leaves (dry, ugly stalks in winter) stops only where embankment gives way to viaduct, and resumes where the viaduct ends.
These invasions were unknown to the Victorians. Yet the change that would surprise them most concerns not any exotic weed, but something much bigger: the spread of trees along the line. Nineteenth-century photographs of railway routes, or early films, show how their verges were kept strikingly bare (easy to understand why the impulse to farm them repeatedly popped up). Regular mowing of the lineside ceased in 1968. In the absence of livestock to chomp away at any saplings, the trees now have things much more their own way – at least until the slower cycle of felling and removal comes round once more.
Defiles of mature lineside trees, hardy and fast-growing sycamores often dominant among them, change the aspect from the carriage window profoundly. The claim that railways are an unmatched way of seeing the country has, in truth, always been oversold: those elevated perspectives from embankments have to be paid for by viewless stints between the banks of a cutting, and the passenger in a tunnel sees nothing of the unfolding horizons enjoyed by travellers on the roads climbing above. With tree cover, even embankments can no longer guarantee a broad prospect over the land. The effect is strongest on routes without overhead electrification, as this requires a five-metre-wide strip on each side of the line to be kept clear of potentially hazardous vegetation. On a bright day in summer on the Southern lines through Surrey and Hampshire – on the approach to Woking, for example – the sun’s rays rake the carriage interior like a stroboscope through the flickering screen of trunks. Where green crowns of lineside vegetation coincide with the window level, distant landmarks and even whole towns may disappear from view almost completely. The Regency mansion of Penrhyn Castle, one of the scenic excitements of the North Wales route, can hardly be glimpsed at all in the high season. On the Uckfield line that rides high through the Sussex Weald, beech-tree branches may brush and rattle against the carriage windows. Cuttings, too, have been transformed into railway dells. Even the electrified approach to gritty Bradford, down the valley of the Wharfe from Shipley, is tree-lined and occluded for much of its length.
Autumn delays attributed to ‘leaves on the line’, the traditional bane of the Home Counties commuter, are one consequence of this arboreal turn. The hazard is not exclusively railway-grown: even if wholesale line-side clearance were to resume, autumn leaves would still drift down in their billions from trees growing beyond the boundary fences. The slippery paste that results is an intractable problem of railway operation. Special trains are run to blast away the leaf-mush using high-pressure water jets, and leave behind a coating of Sandite (fine sand, aluminium and glue) to help the wheels of following trains to get a grip. On some lines a special timetable is even introduced for a fixed period each autumn, giving trains slightly longer to travel through the worst-affected areas. The inconvenience is part of the price of living in a leafy, rather than a bleak, part of Britain.
There is another railway landscape which concerns us here; two landscapes, rather. They may be seen whenever towns and cities are approached, especially where the route is unconstrained by cuttings or embankments. One is a landscape of reclamation. Its dwellings are much more recent than those of the streets beyond; in bigger settlements, they may be of the distinctive slab-like type which have their smallest windows towards the line, in order to shield residents from noise. Its open spaces are car parks, its greater monuments are the giant sheds of retail parks and distribution depots. The other landscape is one of dereliction, of abandoned sidings and yards disappearing under shrubs and saplings, of enigmatic structures awaiting demolition or collapse. This second landscape type is often transitional, an extended prelude to the creation of the first. Why did the railways need so much land in the first place? Much of the answer lies with their handling of freight. For an understanding of how this worked, what has disappeared is more important than what little remains.
Footnotes
* It is 6,031.
** Membranes are now laid down to prevent the latter.
– 13 –
GOODS AND SERVICES
Seen from a spy plane in the Cold War years, the most conspicuous parts of the British railway system would have been neither its earth-works nor its running lines, still less its bridges or its stations. In terms of individual impact on the land, none of these could rival the great marshalling yards. These were huge enclaves of parallel tracks and reception lines, designed solely for transhipment: trains of wagons came in, were uncoupled, rearranged into new formations, and sent on their way. As the yards did not need to be placed cheek by jowl with sites of production or of consumption, they were mostly established where land was cheap, in the rural intervals and debatable lands between major settlements and industrial sites. Collectively, they represent the last great land grab by the railways on a national scale.
Nearly all of these giant marshalling yards have now closed, and of the handful that remain not one is still operating as originally intended. Yet they were relatively late additions to the network. All but a few were constructed after the Second World War; the latest to open, at Scunthorpe, was not finished until 1971. Some of the abandoned sites have reverted to scrubland, some have become housing estates, retail parks or big-shed distribution centres. Others are still recognisable but largely derelict, such as Tyne Yard (opened in 1963), which stretches along the East Coast main line a few miles south of Gateshead.
To understand why these yards were built is to grasp the ultimately fatal trap the twentieth century set for the railway system it had inherited from the century before. To remain viable – the point cannot be made too forcefully – the railways had to carry freight, huge quantities of it, as well as passengers. They were also obliged by law to take pretty well anything that anyone wanted them to carry. That was all right as far as heavy and regular flows of traffic were concerned, such as the conveyance of coal from pithead to ironworks, dock or quay. But much of the traffic in goods was in much smaller consignments, no more than would fill a single wagon, often less. Each wagonload could not travel singly behind its own locomotive, so the average goods train was composed of wagons or groups of wagons with different starting points and destinations, many of which might have to be uncoupled and recoupled several times over before their journey was done. The marshalling yards were laid down to streamline and accelerate that process.
One of these installations may stand for many. Thornton Yard in Fife opened in 1956, after four years of building. It replaced ten smaller yards or groups of sidings dotted around the coalfields of east and central Fife, abolishing in one stroke an inefficient mass of short local trips back and forth between them. There was even a direct link from a freshly built colliery to the new yard, which had thirty-five classification roads (the separate tracks into which the wagons were sorted) and a total of twenty-six track-miles altogether. The yard had space to hold up to 2,311 wagons, and the total extent of its site from end to end was one and a half miles.
Like most of the later marshalling yards, Thornton was worked on the principle of hump shunting. Each incoming train of wagons was pushed steadily up a single track to the summit of a man-made slope or hump, the couplings having first been undone to separate its wagons or groups of wagons (known as ‘cuts’) according to their onward destinations. At the summit gravity took command and each wagon or cut began to trundle down the other side.
The descending line split in two, each branch then subdividing again and again until the full complement of parallel sorting roads was reached. Here the incoming wagons rolled to a halt, in lines ready for recoupling into trains set for departure. Fast work in switching the points this way and that, overseen remotely from a control tower, ensured that everything ended up where it should. At the ‘king points’ where the descending line first divided, the interval between passing wagons or cuts might be as little as three seconds.
This exploitation of gravity came with a catch. Wagons could be made to ascend the hump at a standard speed, but the same was not true of their descent. Different weights might accelerate at different rates. Another variable was the state of lubrication of the axles. Strong winds might make a difference to speeds too, as if the wagons were ships at sea. Nor did all wagons have the same distance to travel: some rolled straight down the central roads, others were directed round the curve to the tracks along the outer edges of the yard.
These mixed outcomes would have risked chaos in the reception roads as wagons bashed unpredictably together, except for the presence of bar-like braking devices known as retarders, placed alongside the rails of the downward slope. Powered by compressed air, these were pushed firmly against the wheels of the wagons as they passed. The force employed was variable, in order to slow each consignment sufficiently to prevent over-running or a heavy collision with the buffers of the wagon it would encounter further on. Retarders were not a British invention, but were modelled on Continental practice. At Thornton, for the first time in a British marshalling yard, a secondary set was provided further down the bifurcating track layout, to allow fine-tuning of the momentum of the wagon speeds as they continued on their way. The degree of force applied was derived from a combination of measurements of weight and speed: the former determined by passing the incoming wagons over a weigh-bridge, the latter by means of VHF radar, like a fixed version of the police speed gun. This measurement of speed by radar at Thornton was another new practice for British Railways.
The Railways Page 47