The Railways

  Vertical circulation of goods at the King’s Cross granary was by hydraulic lifts and hoists. Hydraulic power is one of the great forgotten factors in technological history. It was developed a little later than locomotive-hauled railways and was avidly taken up in dockyards and inner-city warehouse districts. Power was transmitted by means of water mains conveyed in iron pipes, which were maintained at a constant high pressure. At first the force was procured by pumping the water up to a tank in a lofty tower. Grimsby docks has the outstanding example of this type of structure, erected shortly after the granary at King’s Cross was commissioned; it rises 309ft high and finishes marvellously with battlements and machicolations that have a wholly deliberate look of medieval Tuscany. There would have been many more such towers, smokeless cousins of the mill chimneys of Yorkshire and Lancashire, but for the invention of the hydraulic accumulator, by which a much shorter column of water was kept under heavy weights within a giant cylinder. When pressurised water was drawn off from the mains, fresh supplies were pumped into the cylinder to replenish the losses. The power source for the pumps – the electricity to recharge the batteries, as it were – was steam from coal-fired boilers. Hydraulic mains could extend surprisingly far; by 1900 several cities were favoured with public networks with whom businesses could sign up for a connection.

  Railway companies arranged their own hydraulic supplies for major London installations, and made good use of it at some split-level termini. The Midland Railway deployed a hydraulic lift to lower wagons loaded with Burton ale from the station deck at St Pancras for emptying and storage in the cool undercroft below, where passengers now muster for Euro-star trains to the Continent. London’s meat market at Smithfield likewise communicated with its basement storey by hydraulic lift, although here the railway entered below street level, via the sub-surface lines of the Metropolitan Railway. Hydraulic capstans and other equipment also allowed wagons to be moved around quickly and easily on the level, without risking the entry of smoky, spark-spewing locomotives to the realm of unprotected cargoes and timber floors.

  The approach to St Pancras station in London, c. 1930, seen from the summit of the train shed. In front of the central signal box is the hydraulic lift for lowering beer wagons into the station undercroft. Giant railway goods depots lie ahead and on either side, beyond the edges of the image

  There are striking parallels between hydraulic power and the Atmospheric Railway essayed by Brunel and others. As developed in the 1840s, each anticipated the modern use of steam-generated electricity to operate machinery cleanly and at some distance from the source of power. The founding genius of the hydraulic method was another of the great Victorian engineers, William, 1st Lord Armstrong (1810–1900). Hydraulic equipment from Armstrong’s Tyneside works was duly incorporated in the goods depot Brunel built in 1851–6 on the vacated site of his first, short-lived passenger station at Paddington.

  The demotion of the first railway site at Paddington to the goods department was far from unique. Quite often, the original station buildings were kept too. Among them was the London & Southampton’s London terminus at Nine Elms, opened in 1838, which closed to passengers after a mere ten years in favour of a bigger and more conveniently placed new station at Waterloo. The old facility then put in over a century of service as a goods depot, incongruously combined at first with occasional use by that creature of habit Queen Victoria, who had become used to travelling from there to Windsor and did not want to change. In the 1950s the British Transport Commission earmarked the old terminus for use as a national railway museum. It was not to be; in 1963 the train shed and its fine early-Victorian frontage building that Betjeman had admired, ‘classic, stuccoed and deserted, amid the gasworks, goods yards and factories’, were razed to the ground.

  Outside London, these déclassé passenger stations have survived rather better. A nondescript storage depot at Selby in Yorkshire turns out to be the Leeds & Selby Railway’s terminus, built at the amazingly early date of 1834 and dedicated from the outset to handling goods and passengers side by side. The goods lines ran right through the building via sliding doors, to finish at staithes or jetties on the River Ouse. Rapid relegation also protected the Curzon Street terminus of the London & Birmingham Railway, constructed in 1838 to designs by the architect Philip Hardwick. This is the Ionic-porticoed counterpart to Hardwick’s lamented Greek Doric ‘arch’ or propylaeum at Euston in London, destroyed with the rest of the old station in its 1960s rebuilding. The Birmingham site and its building may yet come back into passenger use, if the proposed HS2 route goes ahead. Meanwhile Hardwick’s building sits boarded up on waste ground, in full view of the tracks to its successor station at New Street. Then there is Durham’s first station, a terminus built in 1844 at Gilesgate, north-east of the old city, which lasted only thirteen years in its original use before the goods department took over. The modern traveller uses its replacement, set at the northern end of the fine viaduct that crosses the western edge of the old city. (This helps in turn to explain why the railway approaches to Durham are so modest and tidy, having escaped major colonisation for goods traffic.) Now the old buildings are shared between a Travelodge hotel and a restaurant chain, which has hung mock-Victorian lamps from the plain iron arcades and roof bracing above where the wagons once stood.

  More extraordinary still, the original Manchester terminus of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened in 1830 and deserted by passenger trains fourteen years later, still exists in something close to its original form: both the buildings for travellers (of which more later) and the three-storey warehouse that stands parallel to them on the opposite side of the tracks. In order to clear the River Irwell for navigation, George Stephenson had to carry his new railway into Manchester on a viaduct. As a result the tracks at the station were at first-floor level, so the goods building ended up with one storey for warehousing at a level above the railway and another storey below. The structure has been interpreted as a sort of railway translation of a building type developed for canal-served warehouses, with sidings in place of a dock. In that sense, the warehouse at Liverpool Road (as the Manchester station is known) already demonstrates an understanding of how specialist buildings could be reshaped to suit the railway’s needs.

  Buildings of more than one storey were also a response to the constraints of urban land. When the Great Northern constructed a new general goods depot for Manchester at Deansgate in 1898, it took the type to new heights. As at King’s Cross, there was a canal-served basement storey, for Manchester was threaded through with canals well before the railways came, and their relationship was often as much symbiotic as competitive. Two storeys were given over to rail-to-road transhipment, one at ground level, the other served by a viaduct, with ramps as well as lifts to connect them. Above were two storeys of warehousing. At the top of the building, the legend GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY COMPANY’S GOODS WAREHOUSE may still be read, picked out in imperishable white brick just below the cornice. Despite the contribution of the canal network, Manchester had surrendered 7.3 per cent of land in its central area to the various public railway companies by 1900, even without including independent enclaves such as the city’s big locomotive-building works.

  As might be expected, the buildings of Manchester’s primeval station at Liverpool Road have something of an improvised air. The passengers’ part takes the form of a two-storey range of stuccoed buildings, appearing like a pair of near-twin terraced houses. These sit alongside an older and plainer house, constructed in 1808–9 for the master of a nearby dye works. This dwelling was included with the property bought in order to build the station, and the company decided to retain it as the residence of its ‘station agent’, as stationmasters on the line were known. This was by no means the only instance of making an existing structure do duty at a railway station, especially in the railways’ infancy. In its early years the Stockton & Darlington did not bother with buildings at all, but followed the stagecoach practice of selling tickets at inns. Other stations
operated at various times from a handily placed gentry house (Red Hall at Bourn, Lincolnshire), redundant theatre buildings from a pleasure garden (Norwich), the poop of an old Dutch trading ship (Hartlepool) and even an enormous hollow oak tree (Moreton-on-Lugg in Herefordshire). Nor did the Liverpool & Manchester at first feel the need to build anything at its intermediate stations. Trains simply stopped at acknowledged places, usually a level crossing. A policeman – of the railway variety – would be on hand to halt the approaching train for the benefit of any passengers, by raising a red flag or showing a lamp. It did not matter that there were no platforms; for that matter, the main stations at Manchester and Liverpool did not have platforms when they opened either. Passengers climbed up into the carriages, as they would do at a coaching inn.

  In other respects, the station at Liverpool Road established some enduring principles. At the most basic, the building combined the functions of the sale of tickets, a place to wait and the point of departure for the train itself. It also controlled access to the railway side, by the simple fact of its elevation above street level. There was no way up to the trains except through the building and the staircases it contained. As one bumptious early account had it, ‘a moment ago we were in the midst … of a busy multitude … anon we find ourselves, as it were insensibly, translated to another equally sublunary scene, from which to discern the self-same beings of a previous companionship still plying the self-same stern activity …’

  Wherever there are stations on an urban railway that is raised up on a viaduct, the experience may be repeated; Manchester and inner London, especially to north, east and south, have some of the highest concentrations, and Liverpool’s Overhead Railway, while it lasted, was entirely of this kind. All these are the children of Manchester Liverpool Road and all offer the same amplified sensation of having left the world outside the railway behind, even before entering the carriage to begin a journey.

  Another notable feature of Liverpool Road station was its strict class separation. First- and second-class passengers each had separate entrances, separate booking halls and staircases and separate waiting rooms at rail level. The arrangement was reflected in the design of the frontage, with its division into two not quite equal elements, and the greater architectural emphasis on the doorway of the first-class part. (There was no need to provide for third-class passengers, because the company did not carry them until compelled by Gladstone’s Railway Act of 1844.) Station design soon retreated from this extreme segregation, and communal entrances, circulation routes, platforms, and (usually) booking facilities – but not waiting rooms – were provided at all but a few stations.

  Stations without platforms were usual in the 1830s. The consequences may still be seen along the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway, the first line to provide station buildings at the stops along the way. The earliest of these date from 1835–6. Several were placed at a distance from the running lines, sometimes at a skewed angle, and were separated from them by a siding. When platforms came to be added, they were sometimes treated as detached structures placed some way from the buildings, with steps or ramps for access. The results may still be seen at stations such as Haydon Bridge and Bardon Mill, where the platform levels roughly correspond to those of the older buildings’ window sills.

  Railway platforms are such commonplace things that it may require a visit to lines beyond Britain or Ireland to stimulate any thoughts about them. Platforms in these islands now have a standard height of 915mm, the metric equivalent of 3ft. On most of the Continent the historic dimension has been not much more than half that, sometimes rather less. Because the British railway loading gauge is less generous than those abroad, its carriage floor levels also tend to be lower. So the British traveller must take only a step or two up in order to enter the train. By contrast, passengers on most other European lines, and those on other continents, are usually faced with a steep climb up to the carriage door.

  The curious traveller may notice other distinctive features of the British railway platform. If its trackside face is a simple vertical surface of brick or masonry, the structure is of relatively early date. By the early twentieth century, the Board of Trade’s regulations for new platforms included an overhang at the top. This was safer, for it allowed railwaymen more space to manoeuvre when wrestling with couplings and brake pipes down at buffer level. The overhang rule in turn encouraged the use of materials other than stone or brick. The Great Western introduced concrete platform-edge slabs in standard 6ft lengths, which were cast at its depot in Taunton. Or the whole platform might be assembled as a framed structure using timber, or the more durable twentieth-century material of reinforced concrete. The Southern Railway preferred concrete, despatched in prefabricated sections from its factory at Exmouth Junction. To step from a third-rail electric train on to a concrete platform of the 1930s, with its slight but distinctive ring underfoot, is to experience what might be called the Southern’s terroir, if railways were wines.

  Older platforms are more likely to have been built lower than the standard three-foot height. Where the shortfall is pronounced, these low platforms may have acquired a ‘Harrington hump’. The title – which sounds unsettlingly like an aristocratic deformity – commemorates the first of these lightweight modular additions, installed at the Cumbrian station of that name in 2008. Sitting on top of the existing platform surface, with shallow ramps for access at each end, the humps or decks allow wheelchair users and other passengers with impaired mobility to use the trains more easily. Until their humps arrive, other low-platformed stations must make do with the next best thing, in the form of chunky, yellow-painted blocks of steps that can be moved to line up with the train doorways. Partly raised platform surfaces are also being created on the London Underground to give wheelchair users a more level entry to its trains, and here the raised areas are solid rather than of the Harringtonian kind.

  Ramps of a different type terminate the ends of most railway platforms. Their gradient was standardised by the Board of Trade at one in eight. A platform ending with a straight drop protected by railings is almost certainly of no great age; it may be among the modern network’s many prefabricated steel structures installed (‘delivered’) by Corus Infrastructure Services since 2002, often as extensions to allow the use of longer trains. Ramped ends were formerly necessary in part because the everyday routines of a station involved a great deal of barrowing and transference of packages, luggage and equipment between platforms. To make the crossing easier, boardwalks were laid over the ballast and sleepers. Passengers, too, were routinely expected to cross the running lines by means of these walkways.

  There were obvious drawbacks to traversing the lines in this way, and several ways of avoiding it. Sometimes the requirement for dual or multiple platforms was done away with by handling all the services on a double-tracked line by means of a single platform. At these stations the trackwork was arranged so that trains using the far line could cross over and back again, like ships drawing up at a quay. The practice survives at Maryport in Cumberland, and something like it still happens at Cambridge. Here the original platform is not far short of a third of a mile long and can handle two full-length trains at once. Another variant was the double one-sided station employed by Brunel at Slough, Reading and elsewhere. These consisted of two single platforms placed alongside the same track, one for up services and the other for down, each with its own buildings. Any passenger changing trains – for example, to take the Windsor branch after arriving at Slough from the west – had to leave one station and walk a short distance along the road to reach its next-door neighbour. It was not one of Brunel’s most robust or influential ideas, and all these stations have been rebuilt with multiple platforms instead.

  As trains grew faster and more frequent, the permissive attitude to passengers walking across the tracks became untenable. Instead, the footbridge joined the family of structures that, variously selected and combined, made up the railway station. A snapshot of the process is given by the deaths
of two passengers who were struck by a train while changing platforms at Nuneaton station in 1868. In his accident report, the Board of Trade’s inspector noted that these platforms were so low that people did not even stick to the designated crossings, but stepped down wherever they pleased. He concluded that a footbridge was the only safe alternative at Nuneaton, where movements by trains and locomotives already numbered 143 each day.

  Railway footbridges seem to have proliferated from around the time of the Nuneaton report. These structures are so familiar that it is easy to forget how outlandish the type must once have seemed. Outside railway territory, any pedestrian using a bridge would expect to share it with road vehicles. These required a crossing on the level, or by means of an arched rise that was made as shallow as possible. Bridges carrying railways or canals needed decks that were more level still. There were also the little humped footbridges on the canals, but these did not rise very high. Now the railways introduced passengers to another new kind of spatial experience, a parallel to the dislocating sense of having to climb the stairs at a station in order to travel on an elevated line, or the still weirder descent below ground level to take the underground trains of the new Metropolitan Railway.

  A covered footbridge typical of the Great Western Railway, photographed at Langport East station in Somerset shortly after its opening in 1908. The train is one of the company’s self-propelled steam railmotors