The other source of cheap travel was the excursion train, filled to the brim with holidaymakers and therefore, like charter flights today, very cheap to run. As far back as the early days of the Liverpool & Manchester various groups began hiring carriages or full trains for special events. The first recorded group was an outing of 150 Sunday school teachers who, soon after the opening of the line, hired a train of second-class coaches for a return trip from Liverpool to Manchester. Special trains were run during the Whitsun holiday week and other public holidays, and parties of racegoers travelled to the course at Newton near Manchester. Indeed, trips to the races were a particularly early source of railway traffic: in 1840, 24,000 people were ferried by rail between Glasgow and Paisley for a two-day race meeting.
Vice and virtue seemed to compete equally for railway traffic and it was the latter which, most famously, stimulated Thomas Cook to organize an excursion for the short journey between Leicester and Loughborough. Its purpose was to take people to a ‘temperance fête’, which may have sounded unexciting but attracted no fewer than 500 trippers. The price was a shilling, which included food and was the start of a business that would, by 1872, offer around-the-world trips taking 212 days at a cost of £210. Cook’s short trip to Loughborough was reputedly the first one organized by a travel agent rather than by the passengers themselves and the excursion business took off from that point, becoming an important source of revenue for the railways. These excursions gave birth to what became known as ‘monster trains’, massively long and hauled by several locomotives, rather like those interminably long trains that carry freight across the United States today. An excursion from Leeds to Hull, organized by the Leeds Institute, took 1,250 passengers in forty carriages and another on the same route in 1844 reportedly carried 6,600 passengers in 240 carriages, hauled by nine locomotives4. Further south, the trains were slightly more modest. In the same year, 1,710 went in forty-six carriages from London to Brighton for the day on an August Sunday, with a further 300 being left behind. For the more adventurous, the South Eastern railway organized the first of seven trips that year by rail and steamship to Boulogne in May 1844, which carried a total of more than 2,000 people.
By 1850, in just one August holiday week, more than 200,000 people left Manchester by excursion train. The importance of this phenomenon went far beyond merely giving the masses a day out. It was helping to inculcate the railway habit in millions of people who would not have travelled otherwise. As one early commentator put it: ‘Men who but a few years since scarcely crossed the precincts of the county in which they were born, and knew as little of the general features of the land of their birth as they did the topography of the moon, now unhesitatingly avail themselves of the means of communication that are afforded.’5 Moreover, these excursions grew into the mass seaside-holiday business which previously had been the preserve of the rich; the railways began to make great efforts to serve towns with a strip of beach or a few pleasant coastal views that could be observed from the train. In 1840, Fleetwood, for example, a new port where ‘summer bathing’ was on offer, became the first seaside venue when it was connected to the Preston & Wyre railway, and, more significantly, the following year a branch from the Great Western reached Weston-super-Mare, already an established resort. Scarborough followed in 1845, and between 1846 and 1849 a further fourteen resorts were joined to the rail network by branch lines, including Blackpool, Eastbourne and Torquay. Going to the seaside became a welcome release for huge swathes of the population stuck in their factories working long hours in slave-like conditions and, of course, for many these trips provided a first-ever glimpse of the sea.
At the other end of the social scale, Queen Victoria began to travel on the railways. Prince Albert, her beloved husband, had started using the Great Western regularly but the Queen appeared rather reluctant to use trains at first. Eventually, urged on by the press, her first journey was from Windsor to London in June 1842, an event which ‘opened up a new chapter in the history of the British monarchy’.6 It gave Victoria the opportunity, for the first time, to show herself to the public at large. For centuries, sovereigns had largely been confined to the capital or at best to coach rides conducted at a fast pace to avoid adoring or possibly hostile crowds, but with the advent of rail travel, this changed completely. ‘The monarchy now became a physical reality to many people, not merely an institution.’7 The Queen’s new ability to travel influenced her choice of holiday home as she bought the secluded country estate at Balmoral, which remains a favourite of the present Queen. The castle is 600 miles from London and was realistically reachable only by train, though initially it required a long coach journey from Aberdeen, which had been connected to the railway network soon after she bought the estate, in 1850. The royal entourage must have been rather relieved when a branch line was built to Ballater, nine miles from the castle, in 1866 but apparently the Queen did not want the railway to reach any nearer to her estate so that commoners would desist from visiting it.8
There was some public disquiet at the young monarch travelling on what was seen as a risky form of transport. In France, the briefly reinstated King Louis Philippe was barred by his ministers from travelling from Paris to Rouen in July 1843 because it was considered not sufficiently ‘secure’.9 The British royal family may have begun to use the trains but they were rather nervous passengers. Neither the Queen nor Albert liked travelling at speed and he was in the habit of telling conductors on the Great Western ‘not quite so fast, Mr Conductor, if you please’.10 Victoria then banned any train on which she was travelling from exceeding 40 mph, even if delays caused her to be behind schedule, and protested vehemently when this order was ignored. This insistence on slow travel created even more difficulties for the poor rail companies who had to draw up special train timetables, which were discussed at great length by railway managers in order that the royal train could be accommodated on the network, a task made more complicated by the fact that her long journeys invariably took in several different companies’ lines. For the trips to Balmoral, there was the further difficulty that the Queen, with her vast entourage, had to endure the palaver of changing trains because of Brunel’s different gauge.
As average speeds on routine services rose and the use of lines intensified, royal trains caused severe delays to other travellers. There were strict rules to minimize risk to royalty: no trains, except those carrying (the royal!) mail were allowed to travel in the opposite direction and a pilot locomotive had to be sent fifteen minutes ahead, rather like a royal food taster, to test the track and check for any danger. Arrangements became even more complex when in the later years of the century Irish terrorists began to pose a genuine threat and the routing had to be kept secret. The tradition of special royal carriages was quickly established: the first vehicle was provided by her local operator, Great Western, in 1840 and the London & Birmingham commissioned a couple more coaches two years later. They all ran on just four wheels, ensuring a rather bumpy ride, which perhaps explains the Queen’s dislike of speed, although it was still an improvement on the fast-travelling coach and horses which she had used previously.
Royal trains may have been the ultimate form of personal transport but it was not uncommon for rich people to charter their own ‘special’ if they fancied a day out. They would turn up, usually with their huge retinue, unannounced at a station, demanding that the railway provide a train immediately together with a crew, since self-drive hire was not an option. This hiring arrangement was so common that the rail companies even published set rates which were around 5 shillings per mile (25p) for a single journey and half as much again for a return one, in addition to the normal, presumably first-class, fare. Moreover, those who could afford it were able to make up their own timetable. The Edinburgh Chronicle11 reported that a gentleman needing to get to Glasgow from Edinburgh missed the 9 o’clock train and commandeered a special engine which started half an hour later, which ‘overtook the train at Falkirk at 10 past 10 o’clock, running the 23 m
iles in 40 minutes, 15 minutes of which was occupied in stopping at three of the stations’. Why this chap’s personal train had to stop at the intervening stations is not explained, although probably it was because there was no proper signalling system, and presumably he was charged royally for his indulgence by the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway. But if you were in a rush, there was no better way to travel. The man who trained the horses of Lord Eglinton, a great racehorse enthusiast of the time, chartered a special from Manchester to Liverpool in order not to miss a race and the train covered the thirty miles in just forty minutes.
The military, too, were quick to spot the potential of the railways, both to quell riots and, in the event of war, to transport troops to ports. The Liverpool & Manchester quickly won a contract from the government to carry soldiers and their baggage. It even allowed women ‘belonging to the regiment’ to be conveyed free of charge, provided there was no more than one woman for every ten men. Officer class only, therefore. As early as the Chartist disturbances of the late 1830s, the government used the railways to transport troops around the country.
The mail was another source of revenue. Since the Liverpool & Manchester had established the idea that mail could be carried by train (see Chapter 2), other railways quickly followed suit. On its opening in 1837, the Grand Junction became part of a new postal service allowing mail to be transported by coach from London to Birmingham and then by rail to Liverpool. The government may have been reluctant to involve itself in the planning of the railways, but it quickly realized that the postal service would be transformed by using the network and passed legislation requiring the railways to carry the mail, as directed by the Postmaster General. Rail companies were even required to provide carriages exclusively for conveying mail and even sorting letters while in transit; the railways were left only with the power to negotiate a fair price for the arrangement. The tone of the legislation was rather out of keeping with the usual government attitude of laissez-faire towards the railways but was illustrative of the relationship between the two.
Rowland Hill introduced his penny post for a half-ounce (14 gm) item in 1840, opening up the postal service to anyone who could afford the relatively modest charge, and the railways quickly became a vital part of the Post Office distribution system. By 1842, 1,400 miles of railway, operated by forty different companies, were carrying mail. Special coaches, laid out as travelling post offices in which mail could be sorted on the move, had been introduced on the combined railway route that stretched from London to the Liverpool & Manchester, and quite rapidly these TPOs, as they became known, were travelling around the whole main line rail network and survived until the start of the twenty-first century.
It was not only the government that saw the enormous potential of these iron tentacles gradually extending around the country. Interestingly, while the railways had been conceived principally to handle goods, freight earned only a small proportion of their income on most lines in the early days. In 1843, the Great Western, for example, was collecting £13,000 per week from passengers, more than four times the £3,000 it obtained from freight. On the London & Birmingham the ratio was five to one and on others it was even greater. Broadly, the further north the greater the proportion of receipts from goods being transported, with the Newcastle & Carlisle earning twice as much from freight than passengers, hardly surprising given the need to transport locally produced coal and the paucity of population. In a world which had been so immobile, the railways were truly creating a social revolution. As The Times put it, ‘thirty years ago not one countryman in one hundred had seen the metropolis. There is now scarcely one in the same number who has not spent the day there.’12 While many travellers had been displaced from the turnpikes, the railways generated much of their own business, ranging from the leisure travellers on a day out and people visiting their relatives to commercial travellers and landowners going about their business. In other words, not much different from today’s passengers.
The impact of the goods business on the railways was no less an important factor in changing economic patterns and stimulating growth. The opportunities created for new freight flows invariably disrupted traditional markets, creating new opportunities and destroying long-established businesses. A Cheshire farmer was reported as no longer producing cheese because he could supply the Liverpool market with fresh milk, arriving, at the end of a forty-three-mile journey, at 8.30 in the morning. Wet fish could be delivered fresh in Midlands towns like Birmingham or Derby, which enabled fish and chip shops to start offering their wares throughout the country, where previously the dish had been confined to seaside towns. In Darlington, now connected with the line to London, a new trade had been created. According to the Great Northern Advertiser,13 ‘vast numbers of sheep have been slaughtered by the Darlington butchers and have been sent per railway to London’. The local ‘butter wives’, too, were gratified to find that a London dealer had come up to buy 2,000 pounds (900 kg) of their produce, instantly pushing up the price by tuppence per pound. The railway was also a far better way for farmers to take their cattle to market than driving them along roads, which took days, resulting in serious weight loss. A Norfolk farmer reported that as soon as the Eastern Counties railway was opened, he sent his cattle to Smithfield on the train, a journey that took twelve hours rather than a fortnight during which they lost three guineas (63 shillings) in value.
Already by the early 1840s, the advantages of having a rail connection were widely understood and the arrival of the railway was generally seen as beneficial to local people. On the opening of the North Midland railway in 1840, which brought York within easy reach of the capital, the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent with an eye to Roses rivalry commented: ‘The completion of this vast undertaking which has at last made Yorkshire a sharer in the great advantage of railway communication that Lancashire has for some years enjoyed is no ordinary event. It opens to a million and a half Yorkshiremen a mode of communication with the Midland Counties and the metropolis, such as twenty years ago would have been ridiculed as a Utopian chimera.’14
Yet many people and businesses did lose out. Take the village of Hounslow, a dozen miles from the centre of London and a major staging post where 2,000 horses used to be kept in the various inns. By 1842, a local paper reported that in the ‘formerly flourishing village of Hounslow . . . so great is the general depreciation of property on account of the transfer of traffic to the railway that at one of the chief inns there was an inscription “new milk and cream sold here”’.15 The cattle dealers in Southall in Middlesex, barely six miles from London, complained that as more stock could be brought in from further afield by the railway, their prices had been forced down. Maidenhead, further west, had also suffered greatly with the main hostelry, The Bear, once a flourishing inn, closing its doors. In Reading, the Michaelmas Fair traders had suffered: ‘When the dairymen had their cheese brought up the old road, they used to load the wagons home with brooms; but now, since the mode of conveyance is changed to the railway, it does not answer the purpose of the dealers to pay the carriage for them.’16
There was even the Victorian equivalent of the blight in high streets caused today by out-of-town supermarkets. In Ashton-under-Lyne, Stockport and other nearby towns, shopkeepers were complaining that their customers were going into Manchester to shop. The actual construction of the railways also resulted in much protest from the local residents it displaced. Bringing a railway into town was rather like a slum clearance scheme – ‘creative destruction’17 – as it was inevitably routed through the poorer areas; powerful landowners, and even affluent tenants such as James Watt, were able to ensure that railways did not cross their land.
Although the rail service was becoming well used, by the mid-1840s there was still nothing like a countrywide network, and the capacity of the existing railways was severely constrained with, for example, all traffic for the major towns north of London having to run on a single pair of tracks all the way to Rugby. Given the obvious need for mo
re railways and the rapid impact of the first wave of construction, the lull in building new lines was inevitably short-lived. However, the extent of the second wave of expansion was breathtaking and surprising. The expression ‘calm before the storm’ does not do justice to the events of the middle of the decade when Parliament was inundated with bills and the whole economy of the country was, it seemed, geared towards constructing more and more railways. While there were previous and subsequent periods of booms in railway promotion, the years 1845–7 are rightly known as the period of the ‘railway mania’ because of their widespread impact and lasting effect.
FIVE
RAILWAYS EVERYWHERE
Like all booms, the railway mania started imperceptibly. By the mid-1840s, investing in the railways had become an attractive proposition once again and schemes for new lines began to be drawn up in every region of the country. The financial climate had changed and there was optimism in the air with an upturn in the economic cycle. Interest rates had plummeted, encouraging people to look for a better rate of return on their savings than from government securities, and by the spring of 1844 there was more money available for railway investment than ever before.1 Moreover, the value of existing railway shares had begun to grow and naturally this encouraged promoters to bring forward new schemes which would appeal to the large pool of potential investors eager to make capital gains.
However, no one quite expected the stampede to form new railway companies that was to ensue. As the supply of finance appeared almost endless, with more and more people eager to jump on the ‘get rich quick’ bandwagon, unscrupulous fraudsters entered the fray, pushing schemes whose only aim was to deprive investors of their savings. For example, investors were being sought for schemes whose sole purpose was to pay the bills on previous projects drawn up by the same promoters. While such utterly fraudulent schemes were few, there were many more in which investors lost their money because the economics were as shaky as their prospectuses were woolly. There were, quite literally, schemes for new railways everywhere and promoters were knocking on the doors of Parliament on a daily basis to put forward their plans. The rush to promote new railways had begun relatively slowly with 800 miles authorized in 1844, representing a third of the existing railway’s mileage. To put this in perspective, barely fifty miles had been authorized during the six lean years from 1838 to 1843.
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