Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  Despite such mishaps, Trevithick built an improved steam engine in 1802 and took the crucial next step of putting it on rails at Coalbrookdale, an iron works in Shropshire,6 which not only obviated the need for steering but also provided a more stable base than the road. Rails, too, had progressed from the simple wooden planks of the seventeenth century by strapping iron to the wood. L-shaped rails were developed to keep the wheels aligned, but the crucial idea of putting a flange all around the wheel – a lip to prevent derailment – only began to be developed in the late eighteenth century. In 1803, travelling on these crude early rails, Trevithick’s engine managed to haul wagons weighing nine tons at a speed of five miles an hour at another iron works, Pen-y-Darren in Wales. This was certainly a world first even if the locomotive proved too heavy for the primitive rails and was soon converted into a stationary engine.

  This suggests the answer to a fundamental question about the history of the railways: why did these iron roads (as they are called in every language other than English) evolve and spread across the United Kingdom and the rest of the world some sixty years before self propelled vehicles, what we now call motor cars? The main reason was that the roads were awful. The well-engineered highways built by the Romans had been allowed to decline for more than 1,000 years and it was only in the early eighteenth century that any attempts at maintaining trunk roads properly began. The old system of making parishes responsible for the maintenance of roads, even major through routes, within their area, with free labour having to be supplied annually by the parish folk, was replaced by a network of Turnpike Trusts, groups of local people who would maintain a road in return for the payment of a toll by anyone using it. By 1820, virtually all trunk routes and many cross-country roads came within this system which led to great improvements. For example, the journey between London and Edinburgh took less than two days compared with a fortnight a century previously. Exeter could be reached from London in seventeen and a half hours, an average speed of 10 mph, and for a brief period, with the introduction of the mail coach in 1784, stagecoaches enjoyed a heyday thanks to the network of rapidly improving roads, catering to the small minority who could afford such travel.

  This progress had been made possible as a result of the improvement in road-building methods developed by pioneers such as Thomas Telford and John Macadam. Telford tried to build sturdy – and consequently expensive – roads which, he hoped, would be able to take the weight of steam locomotives on metal wheels trundling up and down. However, it was Macadam’s lighter techniques that became almost universally accepted and his success meant that a network of decent paved roads extended quickly and relatively cheaply around the country.

  The wider question of why the railways dominated land transport for the rest of the nineteenth century is rather more complex. Steam locomotives for use on roads continued to be developed but were hampered by the heavy tolls charged for using turnpikes – sometimes up to fifteen times the cost of a horse-drawn vehicle – precisely because the road owners recognized that they caused far more damage to the surface. Moreover, the Locomotive Act of 1865, popularly known as the Red Flag Act, killed off any hope of road vehicles rivalling railways as it set a speed limit of 4 mph in rural areas and 2 mph in towns and required a man with a red flag to walk sixty yards ahead of each vehicle warning horse-riders and pedestrians of the approach of a self-propelled machine.

  However, it was more than the simple opposition of the turnpike owners and legislators to these embryonic cars that prevented them from posing any serious challenge to the railways until the end of the nineteenth century. The answer lies in the technology. Britain may have been the world leader in developing steam coaches, several decades ahead of any rival, but these vehicles were simply not good enough to compete with railways. Quite simply, rails could bear a much heavier weight and locomotives required little springing because they travelled on a hard, smooth surface. The development of flanged wheels meant there was no need for steering7 and the design of the axles ensured there was no requirement for differential boxes8 to cope with curves. Moreover, steam locomotives on rails could pull a number of carriages and wagons, which would be impossible for a road carriage due to the sharp gradients and curves.

  A road carriage, in contrast, had to be light enough to spare the surface while having to carry all the paraphernalia of its own machinery in addition to the passengers or freight, all crammed into the same vehicle and perhaps, at most, one trailer. Steam road carriages ‘were lacking, despite all efforts, in a number of technical respects’.9 Designers had to try to make simultaneous major improvements in steering, suspension, transmission, boiler and engine. Not surprisingly, they failed.

  Since technology was at the root of this failure, it may well be that had the pneumatic tyre or the internal combustion engine been developed just that bit earlier, history might have been very different. Given, too, legislation which favoured roads rather than imposing restrictions such as the Red Flag Act, then we might never have had the railways at all. Or at least their rapid expansion would have been stymied. It was partly happenstance that gave railways their technological advantages: the use of rails happened to fit perfectly with the available traction technology and this, fortuitously, gave the railways almost a century of domination across the world.

  At the time of the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester railway in 1830, there were more than 1,000 turnpike companies in England, which maintained 20,000 miles of road. Stagecoach travel had reached its peak and was now an industry employing more than 30,000 people – a significant number, but less than a tenth of the workforce the railways would require thirty years hence – carrying both passengers and mail. For the rich there was an efficient but expensive network of post chaises which radiated out from the London Post Office to various provincial centres. Both the stagecoach services and the roads on which they ran would begin to decline from 1840 as railways achieved their stranglehold. By the early days of the nineteenth century, there were already some transport undertakings which called themselves ‘railways’, mostly developments of the ‘waggon ways’, and their principal function was to take heavy material from mines and quarries to the nearest navigable waterway as that was the cheapest form of haulage. A horse that could pull one ton on a road could haul a barge carrying a load weighing 25 tons with the same effort.

  The first line that could be used by anyone prepared to pay the toll was the Surrey Iron Railway which opened in July 1803 and therefore became the first public railway.10 It was a freight line serving the industrialized area between Wandsworth and Croydon and was double-tracked throughout to accommodate the heavy traffic. The nine-mile route,11 which mostly followed the valley of the Wandle, had only a very gentle slope and horses could haul half a dozen wagons, each weighing 3.5 tons, at a speed of 2.5 mph, far more efficiently than any alternative on the road or the river. It was, of course, horse-powered and the developers installed L-shaped rails in order to keep the wagons on the track, since the idea of flanged wheels was still not universally accepted, not least because wagons fitted with them were useless on muddy roads and therefore could not be used off the rails. The promoters had ambitions to extend the line all the way to Portsmouth, some fifty miles away, but eventually managed to build only a few more miles out to Godstone and Merstham.

  The first passenger service is widely reckoned12 to have been on the Swansea & Mumbles13 Railway built, originally, to connect the docks at Swansea with the mines and quarries at Mumbles five miles away. The wagons were to be pulled by horses, and for a time, remarkably, helped by sails. Interestingly, the Act authorizing the construction of the railway allowed for other forms of power, such as the locomotives developed by Trevithick, who happened to be on good terms with the owners of the line, but they chose to stick with horses. While the Swansea & Mumbles Railway missed out on being the first to use steam power (not introduced on the line until the 1870s), it can lay claim to being the first in the world to carry fare-paying travellers. On its com
pletion in 1806, one of the shareholders of the line, Benjamin French, had the inspired idea to run services for passengers. He bought the rights for a mere £20 (say around £1,200 in today’s money) and began operating coaches on the line in March 1807, charging a shilling (5p and equivalent to around £3 today) for the ride.

  There is little record of these early journeys. The main surviving account is by a writer, Elizabeth Isabella Spence, who clearly enjoyed her trip in 1808, although it suggests her previous life must have been unexciting: ‘I have never spent an afternoon with more delight than the one exploring the romantic scenery at Oystermouth (Mumbles). I was conveyed there in a carriage of singular construction built for the conveniency [sic] of parties who go hence to Oystermouth to spend the day. This car contains twelve persons and is constructed chiefly of iron, its four wheels run on an iron railway by the aid of one horse, and the whole carriage is an easy and light vehicle.’14 Indeed, it must have been a lot more comfortable than riding in a carriage along the notoriously bumpy roads of the time, although Richard Ayton, who travelled on the line in 1813, disagreed, perhaps because the track had deteriorated by then. He reported that the sixteen-seater carriage made the noise of ‘twenty sledge hammers in full play’ and described emerging from the experience ‘in a state of dizziness and confusion of the sense that it is well if he recovers from it in a week’.15

  Despite the success of the Mumbles railway, it was nearly two decades before the next notable advance towards anything approaching a modern railway. In the meantime, the idea of railways as an exciting new form of transport was beginning to take hold and the notion that one day, possibly quite soon, there might be a network of ‘iron roads’ across the country no longer seemed absurd. The nineteenth century was full of people intent on exploiting the new technologies, even if many of the schemes proved fanciful. Some of the projects that did later come to fruition, such as the Metropolitan Railway running under London or the construction of the Crystal Palace, initially seemed as bizarre as many of those heroic failures. Even before the turn of the century, William Jessop, who built the Surrey Iron Railway, had suggested a ‘waggon way’ between Liverpool and Manchester, and there were many far more ambitious suggestions. Thomas Gray, a native of Leeds who had lived for a time in Brussels, suggested a plan for a network throughout Britain, and indeed Europe, of a ‘general iron railway’16, which received widespread attention, helped by his tireless campaigning. Gray, too, had the prescience to realize that locomotives rather than horses were the obvious power source. Another early proponent of the railways was William James, who in 1808 put forward the idea of a ‘general rail-road company’ which would have required capital of £1m (rather optimistic given the eventual cost!). While nothing came of that idea, James, who was variously known as a miner, engineer and surveyor, later became one of the pioneers behind plans for the Liverpool & Manchester.

  There was even an idea in 1821 for a monorail, promoted by an engineer, Henry Palmer, who suggested that ‘a single rail should be supported in the air on stout wooden posts’17: two systems based on his idea were actually built during that decade. Little is known about the first, completed in 1822, which linked the Thames with the Royal Victualling Yard in Woolwich, but the second, at Cheshunt, had a grand opening in June 1825 with a specially constructed carriage in the elegant ‘barouche’ style for passengers. The wagons used to carry bricks from a pit to the Lee Navigation were best described as a pair of panniers strung over a fixed rail at a height of 3ft, hauled by a horse with a tow rope. Since this was not a journey that would ever attract much patronage after the initial opening, it could hardly be called a passenger railway and the barouche carriage, sadly, disappeared.

  The origins of the Stockton & Darlington stretch back to the longstanding problems moving coal from pitheads to navigable waterways. The north-east of England, and particularly County Durham, had long been a mining area interspersed with a host of wagon ways that took the coal to water. Transport was always the major component in the cost of coal – except at the pit-head or very close to it – and there were constant efforts to try to reduce that expense through faster or cheaper forms of transport. One particular irritant for the coal owners was the ability of any landowner fortunate enough to be sited between the pit and the nearest river to hold them to ransom by charging ‘wayleave’, as the rent was called. It was the announcement by the Earl of Strathmore in May 1818 that he intended to build a canal to the Tees from his colliery near Stockton that was to prove the spur for the alternative proposal of a railway line. While Stockton’s townspeople were happy with the canal plan, those in neighbouring towns were worried that their own businesses would decline as a result and while initially they campaigned for an alternative canal, they soon started raising support for a railway line instead. By November a committee to promote a railway had been formed which drew up a plan for an ‘iron way’. The plan proceeded swiftly and within a couple of months the promoters had prepared a Parliamentary Bill. There was, however, no shortage of objectors, and such opponents were to be the bane of railway developers for the rest of the century. The Stockton & Darlington set the pattern by giving every self-interested Luddite the opportunity to press their case, pushing up the legal bills which were to become a major expense for promoters of railway schemes. In this instance, the two main objectors were Lord Eldon, who was profiting from the extortionate wayleave payments he was getting from pit owners for crossing his land and could not see why it was necessary for the railway to impose compulsory purchases on the land it required; and the Earl of Darlington, later the Duke of Cleveland, who was terribly concerned about his favourite pastime, fox-hunting, being jeopardized. The Bill was rejected in Parliament so the promoters drew up a new route, avoiding the Earl’s precious fox holes. This was passed in April 1821 but only thanks to a last-minute loan of £7,000 by the key supporter, Edward Pease, to fulfil the requirement that 80 per cent of the capital should be deposited by the time the Bill was presented to Parliament. Thus the route of the world’s first public railway had to be moved to accommodate the pleasures of an Earl. The Industrial Revolution may have been in full swing, but society still had its feudal elements and they were to have a lasting impact on the development of the railway.

  Edward Pease and his son Joseph, both Quakers, were the driving force behind the construction of the line and its eventual commercial success. Pease père was not only the largest contributor of the £113,000 (around £6.8m today) investment in the railway but also used his network of Quaker friends, particularly bankers in Norwich such as the Barclays and the Gurneys, to raise further funds. Pease was motivated by far more than a desire to make money as he understood the tremendous social benefit for local people that came with the railway’s ability to provide cheap coal.

  The scheme was ambitious. The Bill authorized the construction of nearly thirty-seven miles of single-line track which was to be a public highway, rather like a turnpike road on rails, open to anyone prepared to carry passengers or freight on payment of a toll (or access charge as it is known today). In reality the line was the ‘Stockton to three collieries near Bishop Auckland line via Darlington’18 since the latter was at the halfway point of the twenty-six-mile main line which then ran towards Bishop Auckland with branches to a couple of other pits. Therefore, the promoters of the Stockton & Darlington Railway were already required to balance the convenience of having branches against the extra expense and complexity of junctions that entailed – which would invariably reduce performance on the main line – a dilemma that would face many of its successors.

  With the route settled to the satisfaction of the local gentry, there were still a host of decisions to be made. After all, no one had built or operated such a transport system before. The first concerned the method of traction: should it be the long-established tradition of using horses or the new technology of locomotives? It was the equivalent of the choice in the 1960s between the card index and the computer, and the result was inevitably to be
a compromise. There was also the gauge – the distance between the two rails – to be settled upon. It is unlikely that any of the promoters of the railway realized that the decision they were to make over the gauge would determine the size of most of the railways around the world, stretching hundreds of thousands of miles. In fact, what is now called the standard gauge – 4ft 8½ins – had been in use for a long time on many wagon ways, particularly those in the north-east of England. There is an often repeated story that the 4ft 8½in width was determined by the size of the backsides of horses pulling chariots in Roman times, suggesting the horses’ rumps determined the width between the wheels of the vehicles that were used on ‘rutways’ with a gap of 4ft 8ins, however it is really little more than an urban myth, as the Romans did not use chariots much other than in races and their roads were smooth without ‘ruts’, as can still be seen from the odd surviving section. However, as with all myths, there is just enough truth to keep it going. As far back as in Ancient Persia, grooves were cut into roads to prevent chariots driven by messengers from toppling over mountainsides when going fast around bends, and these are 4ft 8ins apart. Moreover, carts from time immemorial have been built with their wheels around 5ft apart because that suited the dimensions of a horse.

  The reason why 4ft 8ins – the half inch was added later – was chosen therefore remains unknown though many of the wagon ways serving the mines for which George Stephenson first developed his locomotives doubtless used that gauge because of its convenience in relation to the size of a horse’s rear end. If Pease had been left on his own to sort out the form of traction, his conservative and cautious Quaker instincts would have pushed him towards using horses rather than steam locomotives. However, George Stephenson, eager to be involved in what was by far the biggest railway project to date, turned up on Pease’s doorstep in Darlington in April 1821 to argue the case for locomotives.