Opposition to the London & Birmingham Railway was also widespread and an earlier version of that scheme had been rejected by Parliament. As with the Liverpool & Manchester, much survey work had to be done under cover of darkness to avoid attracting the attention of landowners and their often violent servants. Robert Stephenson described the kind of attitude he had to contend with when he met a ‘courtly, fine-looking old gentleman, of very stately manner’. This was a certain Sir Astley Cooper, an eminent surgeon and the owner of land at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, through which the railway had to pass. The old doctor called the scheme ‘preposterous in the extreme’ and could not understand why ‘our estates’ had to be ‘cut up in all directions for the purpose of making an unnecessary road’. Why, he concluded, if ‘this sort of thing be permitted to go on, you will in a very few years destroy the noblesse’.3
There was really only one way to counter this sort of opposition: buy it off. Railway promoters realized that to push their schemes through Parliament they had to simply open their chequebooks and bear the pain. Between them, the Grand Junction and the London & Birmingham paid more than £700,000 in payments to the landowners to acquire what in effect were narrow slivers of land used, if at all, for agriculture. This enormous sum represented a fifth of the two railways’ combined initial share capital of £3.5m.
Work on the two railways started very soon after authorization. The Grand Junction involved four major viaducts and a two-mile cutting at Preston Brook which also required the construction of an aqueduct to carry the canal over the railway.4 The most impressive of the new structures was the Dutton viaduct over the river Weaver, which is nearly 500 yards long, a distance covered by twenty red sandstone arches that reach sixty-five feet above the river. It took 700 men two years to build, without the loss of a single life. The projects for major structures on the line were undertaken separately and simultaneously by a variety of contractors, since the scale of the railway had put an end to the notion that Stephenson or his fellow engineers could both organize and oversee the work themselves without the intermediary of a contractor. It was to be the start of a boom period for railway contractors, one of whom, Thomas Brassey, became the greatest and most efficient of all (see Chapter 6). Brassey completed the Penkridge viaduct in Staffordshire on time and on budget. Indeed, the cost had been greatly reduced with Brassey’s agreement, when Joseph Locke had spotted that the viaduct had originally been greatly overpriced relative to the cost of others on the line.
The construction of the Grand Junction was a great engineering success, thanks to Locke’s skills as he, rather than Stephenson, saw the scheme through. However, it was the London & Birmingham that was to catch the public imagination and attract the plaudits. Partly that was because the construction of the railway meant that, at last, London would have a main line railway which immediately opened up large swathes of the country to travellers from the capital. It was also the scale of the task which had impressed people, along with the magnificence of the engineering. Apart from the initial mile out of Euston which, as at Liverpool station, was operated by a cable system because of the 1 in 70 incline,5 Robert Stephenson created a virtually level railway all the way to Birmingham. Aware that the line would be heavily used as soon as it was completed, Stephenson designed the route for ease of operation but that meant spending extra sums on nine tunnels and three long deep cuttings. It was a stupendous engineering achievement, created in five years by, at its peak, 20,000 workers. The Victorians themselves had difficulty in grasping the scale of the task and one contemporary writer, Peter Lecount,6 worked out that it outstripped the achievement of the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza. He calculated, laboriously, that while the pyramid only required the raising of 15,733 million cubic feet by one foot, to build the railway required lifting 25,000 million cubic feet, two thirds more and, moreover, the task was undertaken in just five years, a quarter of the time it took to build the pyramid. The precise figures may be rather fanciful, but such calculations demonstrate that the building of the railways was by far the biggest construction feat of modern times and arguably the greatest in human history. The London & Birmingham ensured Robert Stephenson’s lifelong reputation as the most renowned railway builder in the world and while the work was carried out by contractors, Stephenson himself was reckoned to have walked the length of the line twenty times during the five years of construction. Even he could not prevent the occasional disaster, most tellingly at Watford, where a group of navvies was killed during the tunnelling when the gravelly ground gave way.
The London & Birmingham opened in sections – with stagecoach connections linking train journeys at either end while the Kilsby tunnel was being completed – and through-running along the whole line started in June 1838. The journey between the two cities took six hours as the locomotives commissioned by the railway were rather under-powered for the task and had to be changed at regular intervals. There were surprisingly few intermediate stops, partly because the aim of the railway was long-distance travel, rather than serving the villages – which had yet to become suburbs – on the outskirts of London. The first station was Harrow, eleven miles out of London, and it was many years before the development of any closer to the centre of the capital. These early railways made little effort to serve even quite sizeable towns that were near the line as the promoters were interested in rapid connections between the main conurbations. Thus on the Grand Junction line, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Northwich were simply ignored even though they were all under five miles from the railway.
The inaugural one-way fares between London and Birmingham were £1 10s (£1.50, or around £100 adjusted for inflation) in first class, and £1 (£67) in second. Dogs were an outrageous 10s, though you could put a two-wheel carriage on a wagon for a mere £1 17s (horses extra!), rather like the car sleeper services still widely used in Europe. The additional 10s for first class must have definitely been worth the money given the primitive conditions of second-class, which still had open wagons for a journey that was three times longer than that on the Liverpool & Manchester. These high fares suggest that the railway companies were still making no attempt to serve the working classes for whom a pound would easily represent a week’s wages or more. They enabled the wealthier middle classes to live far away from their work and to flee the unpleasant centres of cities more easily, while not offering any such opportunity for the poor. However, as we see later, with the advent of cheap fares both for workers and leisure travellers, the railways did become a catalyst for wider social change and even some rapprochement between the classes.
Despite the high fares, the ride on these long journeys was not necessarily enjoyable. The author of an early guide to train travel, Francis Coghlan, may have been trying to be helpful in advising second class passengers where to sit in their ‘wagons’, but after reading his advice they might well have decided to stick to the stagecoach or pay the extra for first class where ‘all the seats [are] alike . . . comfortably fitted up’: ‘Get as far from the engine as possible – for three reasons: first, should an explosion take place, you may happily get off with the loss of an arm or a leg’ whereas nearer ‘you would probably be smashed to smithereens’. Secondly, he continues, ‘the vibration is very much diminished’ and third, ‘always sit with your back towards the engine . . . to avoid being chilled by a cold current of air which passes through these open wagons and also saves you from being nearly blinded by the small cinders which escape through the funnel’.7 Perhaps this explains why first-class carriages are always those furthest from the direction of travel at London termini.
Coghlan goes on to explain how once passengers were aboard their carriages, having been helped up by a ‘stone platform, protected from the weather by a light handsome shed’, and the ticket offices were closed, the train was at last ready to depart. The porters and police then had to push the train, ‘which was attached to a thick rope worked by a [stationary] steam engine’ for two hundred yards before the line would become taut
and drag the train up the incline to Camden where it was attached to a locomotive. The slope is still there, of course, and was an operational hazard, frequently causing wheelslip to engines starting off from the platforms. I remember vividly as a child seeing the stuttering of the huge wheels on the massive Duchess locomotives before they could get a grip on wet rails, and wheelslip remains a problem even on today’s railway.
The rather unwieldy process of using ropes, which continued until 1844 when locomotives were deemed to be sufficiently strong to climb the incline under their own steam, rather diminished the grandeur of Euston station. The station entrance was a Doric portico, a clear statement of the importance of the railway, and within a few years a great hall built in a classical style with a sweeping double flight of stairs leading to upstairs offices was added.8 Euston would retain its status as the sole ‘gateway to the north’ until the completion of the rival Great Northern in 1852 with its King’s Cross terminus. With the opening of the Birmingham & Derby Junction Railway, which connected with the London & Birmingham at Rugby and then went on to join the North Midland Railway, both Stephenson père enterprises, passengers could also reach various Midland towns and, indeed, travel all the way to Leeds from Euston by 1840. Within a decade of the completion of the two railways, they had merged – together with the successful Trent Valley railway which bypassed Birmingham (used today as the main route for trains between London and Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow) – to form what later became the biggest railway company and, for a time, the largest business concern in the world, the London & North Western Railway.
The third major Bill passed in the busy parliamentary period of the mid-1830s authorized another of Britain’s major railways, the Great Western, which, right from the beginning, established a monopoly over a large swathe of the country. At last this was a railway with which the Stephensons had little connection and only because of an abortive attempt to run it into Euston. The moving spirit behind the railway was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose grand name showed remarkable prescience on the part of his father, Marc, a French emigré and himself a notable engineer. Brunel vies with the younger Stephenson for the title of the greatest railway engineer and, apart from his achievements on the railway, he designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, three large steamships and much else. Unlike his engineering contemporaries who tended to be self-taught and often rather eclectic in their backgrounds, Brunel had received a formal training in engineering as an apprentice, initially in France and then working on the first tunnel beneath the Thames, under the tutelage of his father who designed it. Brunel’s self-confidence and drive would have been called arrogance in anyone less talented but his achievement in creating the Great Western railway, known fondly to its supporters as God’s Wonderful Railway (its detractors later called it the ‘Great Way Round’), speaks for itself.
Brunel came early to the project. The idea of a railway between London and Bristol, at the time the nation’s most important port, had been mooted as far back as 1824 but it was not until January 1833 that a group of Bristol businessmen formed a committee to take action on the project. The first idea had been to follow the route of the rather windy coach road (the present A4), but Brunel, who learnt of the scheme, rushed to Bristol to argue the case for a much more ambitious project. Indeed, Brunel was not going to have any old railway built by the cheapest contractor to minimum standards. No, he was going to have the best railway, so perfect that rivals would never venture on to its territory through fear of being outshone by its excellence.
Sometimes pure chutzpah pays off and by a majority of just one the committee appointed Brunel as surveyor even though he had little experience on railways, having previously failed to obtain a similar post he had sought from the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway. The committee was rewarded with what one railway historian calls ‘a masterpiece of strategic planning . . . with easy gradients which would pass over a summit at Swindon half the height of that at Marlborough [on the coach road route]’.9
There were the usual parliamentary struggles. While the landowners again extracted every penny they could, receiving £750,000 in compensation, the most fanciful objection expressed in the forty days of parliamentary hearings came from John Keate, the headmaster of Eton College. He suggested that London’s riff-raff would travel to the town and ruin its college and, worse, that the scholars would be tempted to travel into the capital, where they would fall into ‘degrading dissipation’. For some reason, he was even worried that the railway would result in an ‘increase in floods’ that would endanger the life of the boys. Such nonsense could easily be dismissed but Brunel’s initial idea of having the terminus at Vauxhall Bridge fell foul of various landowners with parks on the fringes of London and the first Bill had to be dropped. It was replaced with a scheme that would have gone to Euston and was accepted by Parliament, but following a dispute over the gauge with Robert Stephenson, the eventual project with a grand terminus at Paddington received parliamentary assent. The railway was, indeed, ‘Wonderful’. Not only were there few gradients, but on the principle that expense should not be spared in seeking perfection, Brunel decorated stations, tunnel mouths and viaducts playfully with all kinds of mock castles, using an eclectic range of classical, Tudor and Jacobean styles. The two most difficult structures, the Maidenhead Bridge with its flat arches, at the time the widest in the world, and the 1.75-mile-long Box tunnel near Bath, were both great achievements in their own right.
There was more in this desire to create an elegant railway than just engineering showmanship. The railways were a tremendous imposition on the British countryside, unprecedented in scale and extent, and they needed to blend into the environment. The railway pioneers like Brunel realized the importance of winning over the public and to have merely built structures such as bridges and viaducts in the cheapest and most shoddy way would certainly have alienated the more affluent and influential section of the population whose support they needed. Railway stations, too, were designed on a far grander scale than the size of their location might have required in order to appease and flatter local interests. With few exceptions, these railways enhanced the local landscape, rather than destroyed it, unlike the roads and airports of the twentieth century. As Michael Robbins comments, ‘the railway etches in fresh detail to the scene. It rarely jars and usually pleases.’10 That is in no small measure due to its great early builders.
It is hardly surprising that Brunel’s engineering brilliance has survived the passing of time and his designs have proved robust, but that does not mean he was always right. His decision to go for a different gauge from any other railway was to prove one of the great blunders of railway history. It was born of the same self-confidence that resulted in Brunel’s masterpieces and since so many of his ideas proved to be successful, it was a brave man who stood up to him. Virtually all the railways authorized up to that point had been built to Stephenson’s favoured 4ft 8½ins but to Brunel, ever the perfectionist, that was not good enough. He had once ridden on the Liverpool & Manchester and had found it wanting because he could not draw freehand circles and lines in his notebook due to the bumpy ride. He vowed to create a railway on which ‘we shall be able to take our coffee and write whilst going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 mph’.11 He rather forgot about the coffee bit, and train refreshment services would have to wait until long after his death – the first dining cars were introduced in 1879 – but he pressed ahead with his choice of gauge, which was to be 7ft,12 half as wide again as Stephenson’s ‘standard’ gauge.
Brunel was also concerned with safety, having seen steam locomotives derail and concluded that their centre of gravity was far too high. To lower it meant putting the bottom of the boiler between the main frames, and consequently the wheels had to be further apart. Brunel did not underestimate the inconvenience of creating this new gauge but was foolhardy enough to believe that his would prevail over the others and that the older railways would end up having to fall into line with the Great Western.
He was to be proved wrong, at great cost to the company, as his decision not only increased the expense of building the railway but after he died resulted in the need for conversion initially to mixed, and later to standard, gauge.
The choice of gauge was no mere technical detail. It meant that no through trains would be able to proceed on to another company’s tracks once the limits of GWR’s own territory were reached, causing great inconvenience to passengers who were forced to swap trains. Brunel had rather airily told his directors that passengers would simply be able to walk from one train to the other while their luggage would be conveyed mechanically, though he omitted to outline the nature of the device to be used, which presumably was some notion of a primitive conveyor belt. In the event, nothing emerged and the resultant chaos with hordes of porters and passengers struggling to manhandle luggage from one end of the platform to the other at Gloucester were highlighted in a famous Punch cartoon.
Fire and Steam Page 9