The Railways

  Perdonnet glosses over the distinction between those who were preparing to travel and those who had merely come to say their farewells, assist with boarding, greet a new arrival or just to watch the passing show. Whether such people should be allowed on the platform at all and, if so, under what circumstances, are questions the railways of Great Britain have never conclusively settled. The central problem has always been the risk that some people might try to sneak a free ride. Before tickets could be checked on board trains, there was also a chance that passengers might award themselves an illicit upgrade to a higher class of carriage. This was one reason the Great Western preferred to lock its passengers in their compartments, tickets being inspected as the seats were taken. In 1842, when the Board of Trade directed the company to keep the doors unlocked during the journey for safety reasons, the company promptly set up ticket barriers instead. Passengers now showed their tickets as they left the station.

  At first, these new rules were implemented so strictly that non-travelling members of the public were barred from the platform altogether. The result was a popular outcry. As a correspondent to the Bath Chronicle put it, ‘No “little last attentions” can now be paid at parting – no friendly smile and welcome nod of recognition can now greet the arrival of the stranger at the Station – no faithful old domestic can now pounce on the well-known carpet bag …’ Within a few weeks, the Great Western relaxed its rules to allow friends, companions and servants to meet or see off its fare-paying passengers, at the discretion of its staff.

  Similar tussles recurred as the passenger-only policy was taken up and dropped again elsewhere. One objection to ‘closed’ stations was that the discretionary power to admit or exclude individuals was being used in arbitrary ways. A traveller on the Eastern Union Railway in 1850 protested to the local paper that he had lately been refused entry at Ipswich when seeing two children on to a train, even though he had been allowed through when doing just the same two weeks before. Norwich’s main station closed its platforms to the public in 1858 unless they had first got hold of a platform ticket, but the staff were said to issue these only grudgingly, or else the tickets could not always be got hold of quickly enough to make it through the barriers in time to meet the train – and so on.

  The earliest platform tickets or passes are described as things of paper, which were issued on a discretionary basis. These arrangements appear to have changed shortly after 1900, when platform tickets went on general sale, at a standard price of one penny. Because they could be issued from machines, the new type also released the station visitor from the need to queue at a ticket window. Platform tickets now brought in a worthwhile income, while reducing the numbers of motley non-travellers milling obstructively around the platforms. By placing a ticket collector at the platform barrier, a watch could also be kept for pilferers, loiterers, drunks and other undesirables, with or without a penny ticket. The practice of halting main-line trains at lesser stations or special ticket-platforms shortly before their final destination, so that tickets could be checked and collected, began to fall out of favour at the same time; instead, tickets were examined when passing through the platform barrier and sometimes also during the journey, when the train was of corridor type. Respectable London commuters were spared inspection at first, the murmured phrase ‘season ticket’ being enough to pass muster, but in 1917 the duty of display was imposed on them too, as part of a clampdown on fraudulent wartime travel. So the establishment of barriers and platform tickets accelerated the flow of passengers in some areas, even as they slowed it down in others.

  Platform tickets were commonly marked as valid for one hour only, and sometimes were specific to a particular platform. At first they were of cardboard, of the standard Edmondson shape and size. Even London Underground stations sold them. Extra-long souvenir tickets could be bought at Llanfair station on Anglesey, spelled out in all its tourist-pleasing fullness as Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. By the 1970s the standard type in the slot machines took the form of paper slips torn from a perforated coil, like bus tickets. The venerable penny charge remained inflation-resistant until 1958, when British Railways doubled the price to 2d, and the Railway Magazine lamented that ‘one of the last penny facilities’ had gone from British life. By ‘D-day’, alias 15 February 1971, when the currency went decimal, the cost had increased to 5d, converted as 2p. On the Sunday prior to the great event, a man from The Times accompanied Lord Fiske of the Decimal Currency Board to the newly rebuilt Euston station, where he bought a platform ticket with the unfamiliar new copper coins, as well as two ordinary tickets to Kilburn and a cup of British Rail tea.

  Platform tickets, new and old style, with the popular souvenir ticket formerly available at one North Welsh station

  The choice of purchases for Lord Fiske’s public relations exercise shows that the platform ticket was still an everyday item in 1971. No one would make that claim nowadays; and yet platform tickets are not quite dead. The price in 2014 – at the dwindling number of stations where they can still be had – is 20p. But the once-familiar slot machines have gone, and the tickets must once again be obtained by queuing at a staffed ticket window (there is now apparently no option to buy a ticket to ‘platform’ in the ticket machines’ software displays). Barriers between the platform and the outside world are more likely than ever to be electronic and automatic, and the tickets which operate them are less and less likely to have been bought by a face-to-face transaction rather than printed out from a machine. As these automatic ticket machines can be placed anywhere around the station – even, as at the renovated Paddington, facing the street outside – the booking hall or ticket office is of dwindling importance in the life of a major station. So the communal experience of railway travel has diminished slightly, even as its inconveniences and delays are reduced. The recent edict that has closed the ticket offices of the London Underground network suggests where this process might ultimately lead.

  Even before platform tickets began to disappear, the railways had lost the once-standard custom of ringing a bell to give notice when a train was due or about to depart. Five minutes was the standard interval for this. The practice explains why some inns and pubs built within easy reach of stations were named The Railway Bell, the sounding of which must have prompted some hasty drinking-up within. Before electric bells were available the instrument was rung by hand, like ‘the shining bell, who lived in a little tray on stilts by himself’, noted by Dickens at Carlisle in 1857.

  Max Beerbohm had fun with the railway bell in the opening scene of his Oxford novel Zuleika Dobson (1911), which is set amid ‘the grey eternal walls of that antique station, which … does yet whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age’. Fans of Matthew Arnold may have spotted the subverted quotation from his Essays in Criticism (1865), and perhaps the banal echo of Oxford’s much-romanticised choir of church bells. They may also have called to mind the Great Western’s distinctly unimpressive buildings at Oxford, a collection of single-storeyed weatherboarded structures, like Adlestrop writ large, which somehow managed to escape rebuilding until 1972. Facilities at a station as sizeable and busy as Oxford were more likely to reflect the division of travellers by class; and sure enough, the bell in Zuleika Dobson finds the Warden of Judas College standing at the doorway of the first-class waiting room.**

  Stations with more than one class of waiting room are now rare. First-class waiting rooms still exist at some main-line stations, relabelled ‘lounges’ in imitation of airports, but these are so few, and often so tucked away, that most standard-class passengers probably fail to notice them. Oxford certainly manages without one, as do all but two of the stations – namely, Paddington and Cardiff – now served by the trains of First Great Western, operational heirs to the old GWR. Yet the designers of stations in the nineteenth century commonly went to great lengths to ensure that the different classes could wait, as well as travel, in separate enclosures. There was even a sumptuous super-class
of royal and ducal waiting rooms, at such stations as Windsor, Wolferton (for Sandringham), Ballater (for Balmoral) and Redmile (for the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle, Leicestershire).

  The complexity that could result is illustrated by the stations built in the 1840s by the York architect George Townsend Andrews (1804–55), who had the good luck to form an alliance with his fellow citizen George Hudson. Even stations as modest as Andrews’s Richmond or Tadcaster were equipped with three separate waiting rooms, each with its own entrance from the platform side. The third room was not, as might be guessed, for third-class passengers – as yet, dedicated third-class waiting rooms were provided only at a few city stations – but for the exclusive use of ladies. This was no Hudsonian quirk: a ladies’ waiting room was then a common feature of any station of appreciable size. Where just two waiting rooms were provided, the division was as likely to be by sex as by class. So the formal segregation of male and (unaccompanied) female passengers that never quite took hold in the railway carriage was nonetheless a central principle of station planning.

  There were variants galore. Sometimes, first class was divided into separate waiting rooms for gentlemen and ladies, and a general waiting room served for all the rest. Waiting rooms might be duplicated where there was no easy connection between the platforms; Andrews’s station at Malton had three waiting rooms on one side and two on the other. These conventions help to explain the characteristic planning of medium-to-large station architecture in Britain, with sequences of relatively small, individually heated apartments stretching along the platforms. Behind many of those mysterious doorways, now bricked up or used only by station staff, the separate classes and sexes once waited for their trains. It was different on the Continent and in America, where a single big hall often combined the functions of concourse and shared waiting room.

  With class divisions came graduated standards of furnishing and finish. What the traveller actually encountered nevertheless seems to have differed wildly from station to station. Carpeted floors were not unknown, if not especially practical. In 1858 the North British Railway board addressed the question of whether to order a new carpet for the first-class waiting room at Berwick, in which case the old one would be passed on to the waiting room for second class. Other decorative grace notes are recorded. At the Midland Railway’s terminus at Bath, opened in 1869, the ladies’ first-class waiting room featured a blue, white and gold chandelier and the gentlemen’s had a marble chimneypiece painted with flowers. Elsewhere things were not so alluring. At Leuchars in Fife in 1866, the gentlemen’s and ladies’ rooms were both so grim that some passengers chose instead to seek refuge in empty carriages kept in an adjacent shed. Big towns did not necessarily do better. A member of the Portsmouth Chamber of Commerce expressed dismay in 1894 at the facilities offered by the London & South Western to the town. In the first-class waiting room were ‘an old table and one or two wooden chairs. The walls were decorated with advertisements inviting people to go elsewhere.’ As for second class, the room was

  the worst kind of place he had ever seen. One end of it was the way from the ticket office to the platform, so that it was always open, and people must suffer from cold. The furniture consisted of an old oblong table and a couple of wooden settees, which could scarcely be found in any public house in the country.

  Such complaints have a way of showing up in the records where satisfaction leaves no trace. Even so, there is much to suggest that the average waiting-room experience was closer to Portsmouth-type privation than to Bathonian luxury. Among the malcontents was Anthony Trollope, whose work for the Post Office required him to linger for a connecting train at many a remote junction. By the time he wrote The Belton Estate (1866), waiting-room hours were obviously getting to him quite badly: ‘Everything is hideous, dirty, and disagreeable, and the mind wanders away, to wonder why station-masters do not more frequently commit suicide.’ In an address to the Society of Civil and Mechanical Engineers in 1886, the architect Alfred Cole Adams (1844/5–1909) described a typical interior at a lesser station in more sober detail: ‘Bare floor, bare table, bare wooden chairs … eternal varnished or grained woodwork, French-grey walls, and dead-white ceilings.’ For visual diversion, there was nothing except advertisements, mostly the company’s own.

  Cole’s remedies included the introduction of warmer tints, painted or stencilled dadoes and friezes, simple wallpapers and picture rods, from which ‘the better class of framed and glazed advertisements’, or photos of local attractions and interesting places, might be hung. Whether or not these suggestions had any direct result, the railways did at least take up the idea of pictorial decorations (counterparts to the framed pictures in their carriages). John Betjeman evoked the results in a radio talk in 1940. He asked his listeners to imagine a waiting room on a wet evening, as it might be encountered at a hundred junctions: ‘the vast interior, the black horsehair benches and chairs, the mahogany table, the grate with its winking fire, the large framed photographs of yellowing views of crowded esplanades and ivy-mantled ruins, the framed advertisement for the company’s hotel at “Strathmacgregor”.’ Betjeman suggested vaguely that this ensemble might date back to eighty years before, but the framed views fix it firmly in the late-Victorian or Edwardian era.

  The winking fire is a significant detail too. Complaining letters from travellers to the Victorian press often mention the failure to heat waiting rooms adequately, if at all. On a chilly night, cosy first-class must have had rather less appeal than fireless second-and-general, and vice versa. How effectively the station staff were able to police the use of waiting rooms, especially at busy junctions, must be open to question. Ladies’ waiting rooms, barred to male travellers of every class, were a different matter. These in turn open the way – literally and figuratively – to the diverting subject of station lavatories.

  The plan of Adlestrop station indicates a little projection opening off the waiting room, coyly identified as the ‘ladies room’. This linkage of waiting room and ladies’ lavatory was common, yet far from ideal. Cole Adams’s lecture drew attention to what everybody knew: that it was embarrassing to cross the waiting room to use the facilities under the eyes of fellow passengers, especially when the company was mixed (just like the awkward conjunctions of lavatories and compartments in some carriages of the period). Yet the plan-type continued in use. The smaller stations on the Great Central’s London extension of the 1890s adopted it, for example, and the results can still be visited on the preserved section of the line, at Rothley and at Quorn & Woodhouse in Leicestershire.

  Male passengers were provided for at these Great Central stations by means of a separate building further down the platform, robust enough in construction to recall the popular simile of the brick shithouse. There is a particularly large, glass-roofed example at Loughborough, a full-scale town station that has been lovingly preserved in its 1950s state. The result is intensely atmospheric, a sort of distillation of the drab urban existence in the Midlands or the north portrayed by the angry young novelists and realist film-makers of the day. It could stand in for the station at Strad-houghton, fictional home town of the hapless hero of Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar (1958). The final scene of that novel finds Billy and his suitcase in the waiting room after midnight, planning to escape to a new life in London but already losing his nerve, with a vomiting drunk and three elderly prostitutes for company. In a similar downbeat spirit, the Lough-borough toilets now display a 1950s poster from the Ministry of Health warning of the perils of venereal disease.

  These Great Central lavatories had cubicles as well as urinals. This was enough to mark them as superior to a small station such as Adlestrop, where the male facilities comprised a urinal only, likewise placed some way from the station building. Again, similar arrangements may be seen on preserved railways. One of the most rugged was at Oxenhope, terminus of the Keighley & Worth Valley line. Its stalls were squeezed into an awkward corner at one end of the main building, sheltered by an angled roof or
canopy with a wide gap below it and lit by a single lamp on an iron overthrow. They were replaced in 2013 by a conventional toilet block, reportedly after complaints by visitors whose notions of a trip back in time were not quite so all-embracing. Other stations featured doorless urinals of cast iron, often incorporating finely patterned openwork panels reminiscent of the mashrabiya lattices of Islamic architecture, and manufactured in most cases by such Glasgow firms as Walter Macfarlane & Co., or the Sun Foundry of George Smith & Co. There is a good Macfarlane’s specimen at the East Anglian Railway Museum at Chappel and Wakes Colne station in Essex, embossed on its inner sides with the customary injunction PLEASE ADJUST YOUR DRESS BEFORE LEAVING.

  The situation for the modern traveller on the national network is sometimes better, sometimes worse. Station lavatories now have cubicles for both sexes, sometimes for those with impaired mobility too, and gentlemen are no longer banished to separate structures on the platform. The awkward conjunction of ladies’ lavatory cubicle and general waiting room has become rare; March station in Cambridgeshire is among the survivors in 2015. But fewer stations now have lavatories at all, just as fewer have waiting rooms rather than mere shelters. In which case, calls of nature must be answered on the train, and not at the station: a complete reversal of the arrangements that confronted travellers in the past.

  The absence of lavatories on long-distance trains was easier to bear thanks to the nineteenth-century institution of the refreshment stop. A fixed interval was allowed, so that passengers could eat and drink something, and (although this was not spelled out) relieve themselves too. Even more than the patrons of today’s motorway service stations, travellers at these stops were a captive clientele. The railways could have milked them directly, but mostly chose instead to contract out the service to private caterers. These deals were sealed by guarantees that all trains would stop at the station in question, or at least that specified trains would stop in sufficient numbers to make the trade worthwhile.