The Railways

  By the time Sir Francis Head visited in 1849 the RCH had moved to a purpose-built new home. Inside was a hall 78ft long, in which 110 clerks worked at thirteen parallel desks. Daily submissions were made from 684 stations on forty-seven participating companies, detailing tickets issued and goods sent or received. Any irregularities were resolved and a monthly division of receipts was calculated and paid. Companies subscribing to the Clearing House were required to use the Edmondson system of numbered and printed tickets, which simplified record-keeping a good deal; but this was only one aspect of the ‘astonishing system of minute detail’ that Head described. Another concerned the handling of parcels. These were carried by passenger train and had to be accounted for by a different department from that dealing with goods. Eight clerks were engaged exclusively on working out the division of the spoils for each parcel fee; Head noted that a single consignment from London to Edinburgh incurred a four-way split. For a parcel sent as far as Arbroath, seven companies came in for a share. Other clerks dealt with enquiries about lost property, circulating descriptions of untraced items to larger stations. Tides of correspondence flowed in and out each day; five boys were employed just to open incoming letters. Over 50 million items of one kind or another were tracked over the course of a year.

  Not all the employees of the Clearing House in 1849 were based in the London office. At every junction between company territories, one of its number-takers stood watch. Unlike the trainspotters of a later age, these number-takers ignored the engines in favour of the carriages and company-owned wagons behind, and also the big white numerals on any tarpaulins that might be covering the wagons, since these too were the property of individual railways. Similar returns were made from each of the 684 participating stations, where the details of any non-native vehicles and tarpaulins were recorded and notified daily. The information was required so that demurrage payments could be calculated when vehicles were not sent back within the permitted period. Even the company-owned ropes that secured the tarpaulins were subject to mileage and demurrage charges.

  The existence of the RCH helps to explain how Britain’s railway network grew and flourished with a minimum of official external control. The Clearing House did what it could to standardise equipment and operation between companies. Its endorsement of Greenwich Mean Time in 1847 was influential. Another early success concerned the three-link couplings used between wagons. Some versions of these were fully detachable and had a way of ending up in the hands of the local scrap-man. The RCH therefore promoted a standard design that was permanently anchored to the hook of the buffer beam. It was also the RCH which secured the use of standard signal bell-codes. In costly or technically difficult matters such as the choice between brake types or the provision of passenger alarms, however, the RCH failed to give a lead to the stubbornly independent companies on whose subscriptions it depended. Nor did it achieve fast results when it tried to raise the woefully low standards of the private British coal wagon, from the 1880s onwards. The RCH shared the same handicap as the Board of Trade, that it could recommend best practice but could not enforce it.

  The bustling organisation portrayed by Sir Francis Head represented the Railway Clearing House in its lusty infancy. By 1883 there were 2,100 clerks, working in much-extended buildings. A major part of these happens to have survived: a very long, very austere block in Eversholt Street north of Euston station, looking like a terrace of giant Georgian houses with mysteriously few front doorways. Within its walls the payments were settled for 2.5 million consignments annually. The comparable figure on the passenger side was 2.75 million – less than might be expected, perhaps, except that most journeys were short-distance affairs that did not cross company boundaries (the proportion that did so has been calculated at around 14 per cent). Another account from the period puts the number of oversize sheets of accounts and statistics that were prepared each month, by hand and in triplicate, at 16,000. The material for these sheets was extracted from the returns received from every participating company, compiled every day for every station on the network, listing all transactions and movements into the territories of other lines.

  Sorting tickets at the Railway Clearing House, c. 1930

  Another reason the numbers of payments rose proportionately less than the total volume of traffic was the practice of amalgamation. The first nine companies to join the RCH in 1842 ended up within a few decades as constituent parts of four larger companies, including George Hudson’s Midland Railway. Other big creations followed, such as the Great Eastern Railway, founded in 1862 by the union of Hudson’s hard-up Eastern Counties Railway and four other East Anglian lines, which had been manoeuvring and wrangling with one another ever since the hectic 1840s. The new company had most of East Anglia as its exclusive territory, at least for a while. Another regional bloc was formed by the North Eastern Railway, which steadily took over all the other passenger lines in County Durham, as well as most of those in Northumberland and northern Yorkshire. The Durham contingent included the famous Stockton & Darlington, which disappeared as a separate company in 1863. The process would have gone much further if public and parliamentary opinion had not turned against large-scale amalgamations around the time that the Stockton & Darlington was absorbed, nervous that too many regional monopolies were being created. So when the LNWR and the Lancashire & Yorkshire tried their best to merge in the 1870s, the proposals were twice thrown out by Parliament, and the number-takers continued their vigilant work at Ardwick Junction, Bootle Junction, Bradley Wood Junction and all the other places where the two companies’ lines came together.

  As if all this were not intricate enough, many lines were jointly owned, and often jointly run as well. Some of the largest joint companies had all the outward signs of separate railways in their own right, with their own headquarters, works, senior staff, uniforms, liveries and rolling stock. The Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway was one such line. Another was the Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway, which originated in an attempt to break the Great Eastern’s monopoly of East Anglian traffic by connecting Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire with new or amalgamated lines running across Norfolk. As competition turned to collaboration, the Midland & Great Northern later went into partnership with the Great Eastern to create the Norfolk & Suffolk Joint Railway – a joint line part-owned by another joint line, truly a case of wheels within wheels. This new joint company constructed two short, physically separate lines to serve Norfolk’s fashionable holiday coast, around Cromer and between Yarmouth and Lowestoft. Elsewhere, the Great Eastern and Great Northern embraced one another directly in their own joint concern, the Great Northern & Great Eastern Joint Railway: 123 miles of cross-country route across Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, joining the Great Northern’s operational headquarters at Doncaster. That railway-dominated town was itself the nodal point for two more joint lines (as well as four big independent companies). An Edwardian holiday party with a good grasp of Bradshaw could have journeyed all the way from Wakefield to Lowestoft without passing over more than three or four miles of route owned wholly by a single concern.* The larger the company, the more likely it was to be entangled in the business of shared ownership: the London & North Western was operating twenty-five separate joint concerns just before the amalgamations of 1923, from the eighty-three-mile web of lines radiating from Shrewsbury, shared with the Great Western, to the little Middlewood Curve, held in common with the North Staffordshire Railway.

  On top of these complications, there were also a great many jointly owned stations, which were operated under a plethora of differing agreements up to and including special Acts of Parliament. Like the joint lines themselves, these shared stations had mixed origins: some were the result of friendly co-operation, others reflected a reluctant truce between competitors. Methods of management varied bewilderingly. Some joint stations were subject to periodic transfers back and forth between their owning companies at fixed intervals, others changed hands according to alternating powers of a
ppointment. In some cases the stations were subdivided between owners, either in terms of duties and responsibilities or by separate areas, rather like royal palaces with their distinct courtiers’ fiefdoms. Even when ownership was not shared, stations and routes could be opened up to other companies by means of running powers, by which a foreign concern might operate services in return for a fee. For instance, the way to Lowestoft from Wakefield began at the Yorkshire town’s Westgate station, joint possession of the Great Northern, Great Central and Midland railways, but trains from the Lancashire & Yorkshire also ran in and out. By 1914 there were some 800 instances of running powers in force across the network. Altogether, in their confounding diversity of ownership, statutes, rights, duties, fees, privileges, exceptions, liveries, uniforms and general paraphernalia, Britain’s railways at their zenith call to mind the unreformed societies of ancien régime France or the Holy Roman Empire when compared with the networks of other countries, where joint lines were all but non-existent.

  However admirable the Railway Clearing House as a response to the challenges of this interwoven, fragmented, overlapping system, its size and complexity also pointed to the benefits of reducing those divisions. The pooled usage of wagons introduced during the First World War, followed by the amalgamations of 1923, brought this process to its first great climax. Yet there remains something awe-inspiring about the RCH – not so much the scale of its work, which is trifling by the standards of today’s digital technology, but the means by which it was carried out. The lost routines of the thousands of anonymous clerks at Eversholt Street – the endless, patient exactions of mental arithmetic in fractions and non-decimal units, even the neat copperplate writing – seem almost beyond the powers of the modern desk-worker. The same goes for the endurance and vigilance of the overworked engine drivers, firemen, shunters, signalmen and others who kept the Victorian network running. Part of the fascination of the railways is their permeation with memories and traces of obsolete working routines, and the human lives and destinies they shaped. The physical record is often patchy, because different aspects of the system have changed and developed at wildly varying speeds. The modernised freight network envisaged by Dr Beeching is already utterly lost; the diffuse and small-scale system which he knocked for six is more remote still. Yet the bridges, tunnels and earthworks that carry the twenty-first-century traveller are still predominantly those the Victorians witnessed taking shape. This confrontation of the modern network with its own embodied past continues where journeys begin and end – at the railway station.

  Footnote

  * Great Northern & Great Central Joint to Doncaster, Great Northern & Great Eastern Joint to Spalding, Midland & Great Northern Joint to Gorleston, then Norfolk & Suffolk Joint for the final stretch.

  – 15 –

  AT THE STATION

  This book began with an imagined journey in 1862. It is easy to picture a station of that era, especially one of small to medium size, in terms of its main building. This typically presents a public face to the street or station forecourt, with an entrance to the booking hall somewhere near the middle. On the far side of the booking hall a doorway opens to the platform side. Beyond may be another, parallel platform; perhaps more than one. Thousands of stations were built to this basic form, and hundreds remain in use. But the station house is best understood as only one of a collection of structures, serving different needs and often united by mere juxtaposition rather than integrated design. In this sense a station of the historic kind was a microcosm of the railway itself, a single organism composed of disparate structures, machines and equipment, all with their own distinctive forms and histories.

  Some of these structures, such as the mechanical signal box, have already been encountered. Space was found for signal boxes close to the ends of the platforms, or sometimes further off, when track layouts or sight lines favoured a more distant situation. Less commonly, they might be placed on the platform itself, or on a gantry over the platforms, like the North Eastern Railway’s wonderfully commanding boxes still to be seen at Hexham and Wylam in the Tyne Valley. But the signal box, as an innovation of the 1860s, was a relative latecomer to the station’s family of buildings. The goods shed – no less crucial to the station’s economy than the passengers’ facilities – was almost always there from the start.

  Smaller goods sheds typically enclosed a single siding, with enough space to hold two or three wagons and a platform or loading dock along one side. Wagons could be unloaded securely and under shelter, aided when necessary by a manually operated crane with a swivelling boom. Often there was an awning along one side, to protect the cargoes as they were transferred to or from road vehicles; or the sidings might run alongside the building, with an awning on the rail side too.

  The timber-built goods shed at Highworth station in Wiltshire, creaking ‘like a yacht in full sail’, served as an improvised shelter for John Betjeman and his son as they picnicked there on a blustery day in 1950. This one has long gone, in common with an estimated 90 per cent of goods sheds from the steam age. Many of the survivors have found new uses, especially those built sturdily of brick or stone. Quite a few now house just the sorts of trades – builders’ merchants, farm supplies, fuel depots – that depended on the railways’ freight service in former times. There is an especially good sequence on the Furness Railway’s route along the Cumbrian coast, recognisable by their unusual half-round lunette windows; the one at the bedraggled seaside resort of Seascale now does duty as a sports centre, with a basketball hoop presiding from the inner gable wall.

  Like signal boxes, goods sheds tended to stand at a short remove from the main station building, with plenty of space around them so that road vehicles could gather and manoeuvre. Other facilities were installed round about. A weighbridge, commonly accompanied by a little hut-like yard office, allowed road-borne cargoes to be evaluated correctly. A stable building was common too, where a station offered a collection and delivery service, or required horse power for shunting, or both. Coal and the wagons it came in, a major business on almost all railway lines, entailed separate handling to avoid dirtying the other cargoes. At small stations the coal wagons usually had a dedicated siding. The old private-owner wagons might be left standing there until their contents were sold, but as this practice declined the coal merchants increasingly used bunkers instead, rented from the railway and typically made of old sleepers or similar rough timber. Station staff sometimes had to measure the chargeable area of railway land occupied by each trader’s deposits; at Rothwell in Yorkshire during the 1950s, this was done on an unannounced day every month to forestall cheating. In the North Eastern Railway’s territory the stationmasters themselves were encouraged to trade in coal, on the understanding that everything they could sell represented guaranteed traffic for the railway.

  A raised platform for outdoor loading of wagons was another regular feature. Many were equipped with pens where livestock in transit could be held, at a polite distance from passengers’ eyes and nostrils. Only rarely was agricultural traffic catered for by means of a private siding away from any station. Loads too large for easy handling within the goods shed might be managed by means of a separate crane that stood out in the open. To ensure that outgoing cargoes did not exceed the loading gauge, a gibbet-like device was usually provided next to the track, from which an arched measuring bar was suspended on chains over the rails. Wagonloads that struck the bar were not safe to convey on to the running lines and would be adjusted. One of these simple devices – confusingly, itself called a loading gauge – somehow lasted long enough to be designated as a historic structure by English Heritage in 2013; it is at Thetford station in the Norfolk Brecklands. Lamps were another fixture, required by the safety rules for outdoor working introduced after 1900 (see Chapter 13). Besides what passed through the station yard, high-value consignments were carried by passenger train – typically, parcels, mail and newspapers, but also certain perishables – under the supervision of the guard.

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bsp; The typical village or small-town station thus helped to make visible the relationships between the railway and its surrounding district; it was almost an epitome of the economic life of the district. Cities and large towns were a different matter. As the amount of freight carried by rail increased, especially from the 1850s onwards, so the option of handling it all through the same buildings and approach roads as those used for the passenger traffic effectively disappeared. Extra land was acquired nearby and the railways began building. Often, this meant building upwards. The result was a new family of hybrid structures, with goods handling below and warehousing above.

  One of the earliest depots of this urban monster type is the Great Northern Railway’s grain warehouse of 1850–52, just north of King’s Cross station. The building has now been adapted as the home of the University of the Arts London, but its mighty slab-sided form remains imposingly clear. The structure stands six storeys high above a basement, which originally contained docks that were served from the adjacent canal. Attached on either side were lofty single-storey transit sheds nearly 600ft long, one for receiving goods discharged from incoming wagons, the other for loading trains ready for departure. Stabling for railway horses occupied part of the basements of these sheds. Horizontal movements at railway level were managed by means of little wagon-sized turntables from which tracks ran off at right angles. The ability to transfer and shuffle wagons easily was essential, because the great marshalling yards did not yet exist; trains had to be laboriously uncoupled and reformed at the depot itself, either within the building or using the tracks nearby. Traversers, which were short sections of track that could be moved laterally, were sometimes used as an alternative to these miniature turntables.