Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  At first, given the railway was largely self-contained, the Great Western’s separate gauge did not create too many problems, but as various railways interwove its network, the situation became increasingly intolerable. Bizarrely, Brunel had not really taken advantage of the opportunities afforded by his wider gauge, which was supposed to allow a better quality of ride for his passengers: the carriages he ordered were barely an improvement on those of other railways. Brunel appeared to have misunderstood the key issue: it was not so much the distance between the wheels, but the overall width of the carriage, which in practice was not much greater on the Great Western because platforms and bridges had been built closer to the tracks than on other railways.

  Parliament finally resolved the gauge issue in 1846 through a commission which decided, after hearing at great length evidence from proponents of both gauges, that all future railways should be 4ft 8½ins. Gradually the Great Western installed an extra rail to enable mixed gauge running and eventually converted fully to the standard gauge in May 1892 (see Chapter 9), marking the end of Brunel’s failed experiment.

  Brunel made another, less well-known mistake, but one that would also cause great stress to the railway’s directors long after his death in 1859. Inevitably, during construction, costs soared: the original estimate had been £2.5m but running to Paddington, further into London, and building that superb terminal had added £1m. With other additional costs, notably difficulties with the Box tunnel, the total bill came to more than £6m. Consequently Brunel was under great financial pressure and during the construction of Swindon station and works, he agreed to a deal with the contractors, a pair of brothers called Rigby, that was to compromise the efficient running of the railway. The Rigbys agreed to build the station and the housing for the workers at their own expense, in return for the rents and a lease on the station refreshment rooms, with the obligation that Great Western stop all trains there for ten minutes for the next hundred years and refrain from offering alternative catering! There was the exceptional very fast train which only stopped for a minute, but mostly, for half a century, trains made unnecessarily lengthy stops at Swindon until in 1895 the company bought itself out of that disadvantageous contract.

  Brunel was always seeking innovation and that led him to pursue one of the many technological dead-ends that were all too prevalent given the inventiveness of the Victorians and their readiness to experiment. He undertook the survey for the fifty-three-mile South Devon railway from Exeter to Plymouth, and decided that the railway, which opened in 1847, should be powered by stationary engines and pneumatic power by creating a vacuum in a tube between the rails that would pull the train along. There had been a couple of other such experiments, but ‘they were a brilliant near miss’.13 To seal the vacuum, leather flaps and grease were used but the results were always unsatisfactory. Although the often-repeated tale that rats ate the flaps is now accepted as a myth, the vacuum was impossible to maintain and the railway reverted after barely a year to using conventional locomotives. Brunel’s failed experiment cost the company £500,000.

  All this is being a bit tough on Brunel. He had created a veritable speedway that enabled the company to run the world’s fastest train services, and his legacy, in terms of structures, is arguably the greatest of any railway engineer. Brunel was fortunate in that he had an equally brilliant mechanical engineer, Daniel Gooch, younger brother of Thomas Gooch, Stephenson’s assistant on the Liverpool & Manchester, who was the company’s locomotive superintendent from its creation until 1864. Gooch developed several types of engines for the broad gauge railway that enhanced the company’s reputation for reliability, although it was not long before the Great Western’s reputation as the country’s fastest railway was superseded.

  The fourth major railway to be constructed in this busy period of the mid-1830s was the London & Southampton, which soon became the London & South Western. Southampton was an odd choice of destination for the first railway to run southwards out of London and its history demonstrates how the decisions of the railway companies about their routes were already having a profound impact on the economies of the regions they served. The contrast between two towns with sports teams nicknamed ‘The Saints’ illustrates this neatly. Northampton, which was already the prosperous centre of the country’s shoe industry, did not get a railway early on, but Southampton, which at the time was a sleepy little seaside resort greatly dwarfed by neighbouring Portsmouth, did. That was the fault of Northampton’s Luddite inhabitants.

  The town would have been on the most direct route for the London & Birmingham, but its inhabitants were so adamantly opposed to the railway that Robert Stephenson was forced to choose a more expensive alignment, necessitating an extra tunnel at Kilsby, nearly a mile and a half long and costing £300,000. The opening of the line was also delayed because of the huge amount of sandy wet soil that had to be pumped out. The opposition had been spurred on by the gentry and in particular the long-established local shoemakers who were apparently worried that smoke from the railways would discolour their sheep. Indeed, wherever the railway went there were similar concerns about cattle being put off their feed, horses bolting wildly into rivers or even vegetables failing to flourish.

  However, it was not long before Northampton’s residents changed their minds, presumably noting the absence of discoloured sheep, and the town’s movers and shakers began pressing hard for a branch from the main line, which was eventually completed in 1845. Still, it meant that Northampton suffered from being off the main line and to this day has a far inferior service than, say, Rugby, which is on it.

  In many other places, the effect of the railway was much more immediate and several towns were actually created by the arrival of the railway. Crewe was a hamlet of just a few houses, rather like Middlesbrough, until it became the junction of three railways: the Chester & Crewe, the Manchester & Birmingham and the Grand Junction, which also established its main locomotive and carriage works there. Within a few years, there were 800 people living at Crewe in 200 houses, and by 1871 the town had 40,000 inhabitants with virtually the entire male population employed at the works. The local football club, Crewe Alexandra, is still nicknamed ‘the Railwaymen’. Swindon, on the Great Western, was also a tiny hamlet before the arrival of the railway, which was followed soon afterwards by the massive workshops that were to be the town’s principal employer until well after the Second World War.

  Southampton was chosen as the southern terminus of the first main line south of London because local interests had promoted it effectively, even though it was by no means the obvious choice. For a time the railway – exploiting its monopoly by charging high rates for a poor service – did not help it grow. In 1892, however, the London & South Western railway, having seen the huge potential of the port, bought Southampton Docks and was instrumental in building up a vast transatlantic passenger and freight trade. The promoters of the London & Southampton made the mistake of not appointing Stephenson or any of his acolytes like Joseph Locke, and instead chose Frank Giles, an experienced engineer but a poor organizer, who did not manage to keep control of his contractors. Eventually he was replaced by Locke, who designed a fine railway, straight and with very slight gradients, still considered essential at the time, given concerns about the inability of locomotives to handle inclines.14 Because of Giles’s failings, progress was far slower than on other, more ambitious projects to the north. By 1839, five years after work had started, only the first forty-seven miles, from London to Basingstoke, had been opened. At the same time, a branch line to Portsmouth, a far more substantial port at the time, was given the go-ahead, but it went to Gosport on the wrong side of the harbour, necessitating a ferry trip across the water. While the burgesses of Portsmouth had to put up with an inadequate service, they could not tolerate the idea of being a branch off the London & Southampton and insisted the name be changed to London & South Western. The line finally reached Southampton in 1840 and Gosport the following year.

  The railway
s were still largely being funded by the great burgeoning industries of the north, whose entrepreneurs contributed a substantial part of the investment in all these schemes apart from the Great Western. Remarkably, even the London & Southampton obtained 40 per cent of its initial capital from Manchester business interests. As for the London & Birmingham, more of the money came from Lancashire and Cheshire than from the two cities which gave the railway its name, and Lancashire capital was prominent in funding railways as diverse as the small Canterbury & Whitstable and the Great Western as well as projects in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dublin.

  By the end of the 1830s, then, the railways had established themselves. Trains hauled by steam locomotives were accepted as the dominant new form of technology of the age, having beaten off alternatives that ranged from steam road vehicles and balloons to atmospheric and cable railways. The imagination of the public had been caught and investors began to be lured by a series of stock exchanges that popped up in places as diverse as Halifax, Leicester and Bradford. The railways had begun their long spread across Britain, but it was to be a stuttering process, with times of rapid expansion alternating with periods of little or no construction.

  FOUR

  CHANGING BRITAIN

  By 1843, just thirteen years after the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, Britain had the makings of a railway network. The year was a notable one because it marked the end of the first phase of construction and the start of a brief hiatus before the railway mania of the second half of the decade began. There was, too, a lull in activity by the promoters. Once again, times were bad, both economically and politically, following a severe depression in trade caused by a series of failed harvests and the terrible Irish potato famine.

  There were also genuine doubts about whether Britain needed any more railways. A long article in the literary magazine the Athenaeum in May 1843 argued that several million pounds had been wasted in building parallel railways, such as the Midland Counties and the Birmingham & Derby, which both ran north out of Birmingham. It questioned whether both ‘the Manchester and Sheffield, and the Manchester and Leeds should have been made as separate railways’ and advocated that the government should have determined the structure of the railway network, as in Belgium, thus preventing this sort of duplication.

  The Athenaeum article might have had a point had it been written twenty-five years later, when, as we shall see, many unnecessary and uneconomic railways were laid, but at the time the magazine was simply plain wrong. In 1843, there were 1,800 miles of railway open for traffic, a sharp rise from the 250 miles in 1838 but still less than a tenth of the eventual high point reached in the Edwardian period.

  Even though there were still large gaps in the network, the railway system offered the population the ability to move around the country in a way that had never been possible before and most of the main lines in use today had begun to be built. Passengers could travel from London to Birmingham and then on to Liverpool and Manchester, and there were now branches that stretched to Chester, Lancaster and Leeds; and to the east they could reach Hull and Darlington, albeit by a pretty circuitous route. In broad terms, the West Coast main line had been largely developed, but the East Coast had not even been started, and there were no connections through the hilly border country between England and Scotland. South of the Thames, the South Eastern was open to Folkestone, the Brighton line was complete and the South Western ran through to Southampton and Gosport, but much of the huge complex of lines in suburban south London and the south-east had yet to be built. In the east, quite remarkably, the Eastern Counties railway opened its Norwich to Ely and Cambridge railway in one stage in 1845 and later that year started running all the way between Norwich and London. Two rival railway companies, the Northern & Eastern, and the Eastern Counties, were setting out from London and both lines would eventually reach Cambridge (which explains why even today there are trains to the great university city from both Liverpool Street and King’s Cross stations). These eastern railways were, however, venturing into sparsely populated country, which meant they would always struggle for profits, at least until the spread of the London suburbs eastwards in the final quarter of the nineteenth century.

  There was, too, a scattering of railway lines that had no connection with any part of the growing network, some just a few miles long like the Bodmin & Wadebridge, but others quite substantial, notably the Newcastle & Carlisle. Even where lines appeared to be linked on the map, they might not be physically connected and, as in Birmingham, serving different stations quite far apart. There were a couple of short lines in Ireland; Scotland’s two main cities, Edinburgh and Glasgow, were connected and there were various local lines around Dundee. Wales had only the Chester & Holyhead railway along the north coast, and a few very short lines, leaving the Principality without any effective railway communication.

  Train travel was very slow by modern standards but, of course, amazingly quick compared with any contemporary alternative. It was not so much the potential speed of the locomotives that pushed up journey times, but their constant need for water and the necessity of making lengthy stops for refreshments and for what we now call ‘comfort breaks’. Express and through trains on the main lines were timed to run at between 20 and 30 mph, including stops, and journeys around Britain were rather akin to long-haul aeroplane trips today. The first train to Liverpool, for example, left Euston at 6 a.m. and reached its destination, after changing at Birmingham, at 4 p.m., an average for the 210 miles of 26 mph. The hardy passenger could reach Darlington from London, having gone by a roundabout route which involved changes at Birmingham, Derby and York, by 7 p.m., a thirteen-hour marathon compared with a journey of under two and a half hours today.

  All the information on these lengthy trips and every other railway journey could be found in Bradshaw’s, the railway timetable. This was first printed as a monthly publication in 1842 by George Bradshaw and quickly established itself as the only guide that set out all scheduled rail services in the country. It was notoriously difficult to use because the publishers had no editorial control; the companies simply provided the list of services in a non-standardized way, with countless incomprehensible notes and annotations. Nevertheless, despite later imitators like ABC and the information produced by the railways themselves, Bradshaw’s survived until 1961, well after nationalization. It was then replaced by British Rail’s own timetable, which was continued by Railtrack and Network Rail, and only ceased to be published in paper form after 2007, replaced by the web and the excellent National Rail Enquiry Service.

  According to Bradshaw, the fastest trains in the 1840s were, by far, on the Great Western. For example, by October 1852 the company was running an express service from Oxford to London in sixty-eight minutes at an average speed of 55 mph and, most impressively, it had one daily express to and from Exeter which, as it was exempt from the ten-minute refreshment stop at Swindon, averaged a very commendable 43 mph for the 193-mile journey. Brunel argued this was a justification for his broad gauge but in fact these speeds were soon to be matched and bettered on standard gauge main lines.

  Of course these were the scheduled times and there was no Passenger’s Charter – John Major’s invention – to assess the actual reliability of the trains in relation to the timetable. The Victorians were as wont to moan about train delays as we are today, though most of the timetables had a lot of slack1 which meant that time could easily be made up. This was especially true for the few trains that were earmarked solely for third-class passengers, which averaged far less than 20 mph. However, the lot of these passengers was greatly improved by the Railway Regulation Act of 1844, brought in by William Gladstone, who was President of the Board of Trade.

  Amazingly, given contemporary suspicion of state interference, Gladstone’s principal ambition was to regulate and even nationalize the railways, and the original draft of the Bill he presented to Parliament would have given the government a powerful range of controls over the management and working of train ser
vices, including the idea of eventually nationalizing them. However, the howls of protest from the railway owners led to the Bill being watered down. A partial notion of nationalization was retained, with the government having the right to take over new railways, but this power, which came into force in 1865, was never actually exercised – though of course the whole industry would be taken into public hands some eighty years later.2 Crucially for poorer passengers, Gladstone’s Act required the train companies to guarantee at least one train per day on every line, running at a minimum speed of 12 mph and with a fare of not more than 1d (0.42p) per mile. Notionally these parliamentary trains, as they became known, had to be provided only by new companies, but in practice all the existing railways quickly fell into line, even if some, like the Great Western, did their utmost to make the services unattractive by scheduling them for the early hours of the morning. For example, the first train out of Paddington to the West Country for many years was the parliamentary train departing at 6 a.m. Some railways, notably the Great Western, Manchester & Leeds and the Edinburgh & Glasgow, resorted briefly to operating fourth-class trains with open-sided wagons but eventually the success of third class made the railways realize it was in their commercial interest to provide these cheap services. Within five years, more than 50 per cent of passengers were paying the third-class fares of a penny per mile.

  There were other bargains to be had as well. While the numerous changes of train required for a long journey resulted partly from the existence of so many different companies, passengers could also benefit from the competition when there were alternative routes. Derby had a grand station served by three companies, two of which ran trains down to Rugby by different routes. As the railway historian Jack Simmons put it, ‘Cut-throat competition is a mere stale phrase to describe the vigour of the rivalry between the two companies. For three glorious years, the traveller made merry at their expense as stage by stage they cut their rates, each trying to secure his patronage by the cheapness and alleged superior convenience of its trains.’3 As Simmons points out, this was commercial suicide and the services were eventually amalgamated in 1844 into the Midland Railway.