Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  The real rush started in the autumn of 1844, the deadline for tabling Bills to be considered in the next parliamentary session. Whereas forty-eight Acts had been passed in 1844, 240 bills were presented to Parliament in 1845 (of which precisely half were sanctioned), representing 2,820 miles, a doubling of the existing network. Had all these railways been built, the capital required – about £100m – represented more than one and a half times the country’s gross national product of £59m for that year. There is no equivalent in modern times of such a major investment scheme accounting for so much of a country’s economic activity, but perhaps the closest comparison would be the allocation of resources to Britain’s defence expenditure during the Second World War.

  With a further 3,350 miles authorized the following year, the peak of the boom was reached and the number declined over the next two years until the mania was brought to an abrupt halt not only by its own unsustainability but also as a result of a downturn in the economic climate. Overall, the total mileage authorized for the four years of the railway mania from 1844 to 1847 reached 9,500,2 which would have needed £250m of capital to build. It represents nearly 90 per cent of today’s total route mileage on the UK rail network of 11,000 miles. Historians tend to view much of this ‘mania’ in negative terms, pointing out that over a third of the mileage authorized in those four years was not built. However, the more pertinent fact is that two thirds of these railways were actually completed within a few years and, indeed, several of the failed schemes were revived and built as a result of the subsequent smaller booms of 1852–3 and the early 1860s. Furthermore, the vast majority of the railways constructed in these years survive today as the backbone of the network.

  The process of building this network was haphazard and chaotic, although for a brief period it looked as if Parliament would adopt a more strategic and consistent approach to the process of passing or rejecting railway bills than simply considering each one in isolation. The sheer volume of railway business had begun to overwhelm any other parliamentary business and to address this problem, Gladstone’s 1844 Act made provision for an advisory board, under the aegis of the Board of Trade, to consider the merits of railway plans before they reached Parliament. The chairman of the five-strong board was Lord Dalhousie, a skilled administrator who, as India’s Governor General, would later be responsible for building the sub-continent’s railways through a combination of state planning and private enterprise. Still, the board had only an advisory role because Gladstone had been too fearful of alienating the powerful and seemingly ubiquitous railway interests to insist on stronger regulation. Despite that handicap, the board succeeded in setting out some clear strategies, which led to a modicum of rationality in the railway system and Parliament concurred with the vast majority of its decisions.

  The board’s remit included rejecting schemes whose primary purpose was to block other more legitimate and viable railways as well as those which seemed to offer little benefit to the public. Moreover, the committee was supposed to discourage unnecessary competition, which was a radical departure from past practice as Parliament had generally supported rival railways battling against each other. Indeed, the laissez-faire ethic of encouraging competition in order to reduce the monopolistic power of the railways prevailed throughout the Victorian era and the board’s more sensible approach to the issue of competition was a short-lived outbreak of common sense.

  The board’s attempt to reconcile the question of whether competition or coordination should be its guiding principle inevitably resulted in contradictions and tortuous language in its reports. For example, while the members argued that existing companies which put forward schemes for contiguous additions to their network should not necessarily be favoured, the board pointed out that incumbents would have a better chance of seeing their scheme through to completion than newer, possibly less financially viable, rivals and therefore should be favoured.

  Dalhousie’s team delivered measured and sensible decisions on groups of schemes, examining, on a geographical basis, about half the Bills presented to Parliament in the 1844–5 session. Then railway interests, angry at the board’s rejection of various schemes, succeeded in forcing its abolition in July 1845. It was ‘the one and only successful attempt to establish a body whose function it would be to guide the development of the country’s railway system on national lines’.3 Its abolition was regrettably short-sighted because ‘the succeeding years brought only uncertainty, waves of promotion being followed by periods of despondency and an absence of vision on the part of the legislature as to the general lines of development of the railway system’.4

  London was to be the one exception where a laissez-faire approach could not be allowed to prevail since there were vested interests in the City even more powerful than the railway promoters. With proposals for nineteen urban lines and termini being lodged in Parliament,5 Lord Dalhousie’s considerable administrative talents were transferred to chairing the Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini, which reported in 1846 and essentially created a rectangle around the centre of London through which railway lines were to be banned because of the potential damage to existing buildings. The report’s findings put paid to the dream of a unique central London station, spouting out lines in all directions in the tradition of a German Hauptbahnhof6, and instead led to the construction of the Metropolitan and District lines of the Underground system along which nearly all London termini are situated.7

  Elsewhere, the vagaries of the parliamentary bill process prevailed and a huge back-office industry emerged merely to service the legal and administrative requirements of the massive influx of promoters seeking to push their schemes through Parliament. There were not only the obvious beneficiaries such as lawyers, parliamentary agents and surveyors, some of whom were reportedly earning up to ‘fifteen guineas per day’,8 but a host of others who serviced the needs of this railway Klondike. For example, there was a shortage of competent printers to produce the highly decorative engraved share certificates, without which no self-regarding promoter would ever attempt to persuade investors to part with their cash. Therefore engravers were commissioned from across the country, and even from France and Germany, to draw up the elaborate certificates that still adorn thousands of studies (and loos!) today.

  Another industry that thrived on the back of the boom, irrespective of whether the schemes came to fruition or not, was the press. At the height of the mania, the leading London papers were earning £12,000–£14,000 per week from the advertisements of railway companies.9 A specialist press devoted to the railways had also sprung up. By the autumn of 1845, there were no fewer than fifteen weekly railway journals, and even a daily, the Iron Times.10 The most prominent were the Railway Times, which claimed a circulation of 27,000 copies in 1842, and the Railway and Commercial Journal whose editor-owner, John Herapath, was so forthright in his views that it was known simply as Herapath’s Railway Journal. The breadth of news on the progress of bills, technical developments and descriptions of schemes was impressive even if, at times, the reliability of the information could be uncertain as owners like Herapath were not averse to speculating in shares themselves.

  This press burgeoned thanks to the interest of a new type of railway investor. No longer were the majority of those putting their money into the railways attracted by local promoters holding meetings in public houses to explain their schemes in the hope of exploiting residents’ selfinterest. This rather quaint method was still the principal way in which promoters initiated schemes, but once they had issued their shares, the certificates were traded in an unprecedented way and the stock market was revolutionized by this huge influx of new railway securities as the volume of dealing soared.

  The range of investors11 was also spreading down the social scale in a way that would have delighted Mrs Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister who extended share ownership through the privatization programme of the 1980s. Given that the number of people rich enough to invest was comparatively small, th
ere must have been few members of the upper and middle classes who did not speculate on the railways, many of whom were to lose their money. The clergy, for example, traditionally poor and frugal, were particularly keen, with 257 ‘Rev’ and ‘Very Rev’ names on the share registers. In fact, all the professions were represented, from ‘the physician who perilled the savings of a life and the well-being of a family’ to the ‘chemist who forsook his laboratory for a new form of the philosopher’s stone’.12 At the other end of the scale, there were the big players, including 900 lawyers and 364 bankers who invested more than £2,000 each (as a broad rule of thumb, these figures can be multiplied by 70 to give some notion of today’s values, though this is a very inexact science). One banker subscribed £240,000 while the largest investment risked by a solicitor was £154,000. If one wonders why Parliament was so ready to authorize dubious schemes, the fact that no fewer than 157 MPs (nearly a quarter of the 658 members) declared a financial interest in the railways (one of whom invested £291,000) suggests there was just a hint of self-interest in their decisions over the future of various bills. Indeed, one of the larger railway companies boasted of being able to command a hundred votes in the House of Commons. The Lords were much sought after as figureheads to give respectability to businesses, much as they are today, and one fortunate fellow was a director of no fewer than twenty-three railway companies.

  Railway shares became far more sought after than the government securities that had been the staple fare of the big brokers and traders. The relationship between shareholder and promoter became more distant and consequently more fraught with risk. The investor had little to go on other than the often sparse information in the prospectus. Yet the momentum of the boom – just like the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century or the dotcom madness of the late twentieth – swept along people who were in too much of a hurry to consider what they were doing. Dealings in railway securities became the lifeblood of both the London stock exchange and the host of smaller exchanges that had emerged in provincial towns, which frequently sold stock at a premium compared to the price in the capital. Investors in Leeds, according to one contemporary account, were particularly prone to having the wool pulled over their eyes: ‘In no town were men more easily duped by the falsehoods which it paid to promulgate. In lines known to be worthless, . . . if a rumour were judiciously spread . . . the Stock Exchange was in a ferment and prices rose enormously, to the loss of the holder when the contradiction came.’13 Shares in one company which sold in London at £21 were traded in Leeds at £25 10s, according to the same account.

  This is the point in the story where it becomes impossible to be comprehensive or to mention any but a small minority of the schemes that were under consideration or being built. Just listing a few of those authorized in 1845 shows the way that the rather sparse network was being filled in and, at times, duplicated. Possibly most important, there was at last to be a connection via Berwick between the English and Scottish railway systems, and no fewer than 423 miles of railway north of the border were sanctioned. Wales, too, which had seen little of the earlier railway expansions, was to get 311 miles,14 including the long Chepstow to Milford Haven line in the south. A route enabling Manchester to be reached without passing through Birmingham – the Trent Valley line – was approved,15 as was a new line from London (on broad gauge) to Wolverhampton via Oxford – the Oxford, Worcester & Wolverhampton railway. The start of the Berks & Hants line, which would eventually provide a route from London to Exeter avoiding Bristol, was authorized, as was the beginning of the Bristol & Exeter as far as Yeovil. The Southampton & Dorchester was another major scheme encompassing sixty miles, and Weymouth was also to be reached for the first time by railway.

  And so it went on, with 1846 seeing the density of the network increasing in many parts of the country and whole swathes of suburban networks beginning to emerge in south London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh, among others. The Cornwall railway was approved to go to Penzance, completed in 1852, and reached Falmouth in 1863. Ireland, an integral part of Great Britain at the time, but still with few railways in 1850, had more than 1,300 miles alone authorized in two years.

  Building a railway seemed such a simple task then, no more difficult than opening a grocery store or throwing up a row of houses. It was rather like building a narrow road, and while it was important to ensure that gradients were minimized, technically there was not much else to trouble the promoters: stations, apart from those serving major towns, were simple, often little more than a raised wooden platform; signalling was by time interval; and maintenance was minimal, and carried out by poorly paid staff. The average cost of building a railway in the 1840s has been calculated16 at just £31,000 per mile – say around £2m in today’s money.

  Take, as a small example, the seven-mile-long Gravesend & Rochester Railway,17 initiated by the Thames & Medway Canal Company in early 1844, which started operating within a year of the idea first being mooted. After a contractor had put forward the idea of turning the canal towpath into a railway, the company decided to do the work itself and commissioned John Rastrick, who had built various lines including the Stratford & Moreton Railway, to be the engineer. While running the line along the towpath was straightforward, the canal entered a two-mile tunnel at Strood and the proposed solution was to put the line on timber supports across the water, leaving just enough space for navigation. This Heath Robinson-like solution was accepted by the Board of Trade, even though the trains passed so near the wall of the tunnel that grilles had to be placed over the carriage windows to prevent passengers seeking a breath of fresh air from being beheaded.

  Work had progressed so fast that the company reckoned it could start running trains as early as September but extra safety requirements required by the Board delayed the opening until February 1845. With three locomotives, the company ran six trains a day in each direction, at a fare of 8d (3.3p) and 1 shilling (5p) for second and first class respectively, including a steamer trip between Rochester and Chatham. But the fares proved too expensive and they were reduced a month later, with the result that passengers flocked to the railway, which then expanded its service from six to twenty trains per day. Even the importance of integrated transport seems to have been recognized as half the trains had horse omnibus connections on to Maidstone.18

  While such small schemes were being put forward and built around the country during this frenetic period of activity, there were also, at the other end of the scale, massive enterprises that would take many years to complete. One of the largest was the construction of the Woodhead tunnel on the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne & Manchester Railway, giving a second route through the Pennines to rival the Manchester–Leeds route. The tunnel was three miles long, took six years to build, and was one of the worst projects in terms of loss of life – at least thirty-two navvies were killed in accidents during its construction, possibly more, and there were 140 serious injuries.

  On the other hand, there was a whole host of schemes that were, quite rightly, rejected because they were put forward on the most spurious grounds and their prospectuses were so blatantly misleading or dishonest that the parliamentarians could not fail to do their duty and throw them out. Adrian Vaughan cites the ‘Somersetshire Midland’ from Frome to Shepton Mallet, Glastonbury and Highbridge which, according to the prospectus, had ‘the peculiar advantage . . . that the greater portion of it will be perfectly level’. Vaughan acidly points out that ‘perhaps one third could have been level, but the rest would have been very steep as it climbed on to and through the Mendips’.19 Worse, a competing company appeared, proposing the Bridgwater, Frome & Central Somerset Railway on a route which was said to possess ‘every facility for railway construction’, whatever that meant. Neither of these survived the parliamentary process, or were ever built.

  This deliberate ignoring of topography was particularly noticeable in the brief fashion for putting forward ‘direct’ railways, as if simply giving a railway that appellatio
n automatically shortened the route. The concept seemed to be based on the fallacy that it was best to avoid any intervening towns even if they were a good source of potential traffic. In September 1845, for example, investors were invited to put up money for the ‘Direct Great Western’ which would go from Reading ‘as near as possible [in] a straight line to Land’s End’, ignoring the fact that no one lived at the westernmost point of Britain or particularly wanted to go there. Plans for a ‘Harwich, Oxford and Bristol Direct’ and a ‘Cheltenham, Oxford, Brighton Direct’ seemed equally far-fetched and unrealistic as they linked relatively modest towns already served by the railway.

  While many fanciful schemes were proposed, there were remarkably few completely unviable railways built during this period. There were certainly some which seemed destined never to attract much traffic, such as the connection from Blisworth on the West Coast line to Peterborough via Northampton, which inevitably succumbed under Beeching. However, the marginal or utterly misconceived railways would mostly come later in the century when the potentially profitable routes had been fully exploited and entrepreneurs were still desperate to wring a few extra pounds out of gullible investors. In fact, most of the schemes built in the period were sensible and one in particular stands out – the Great Northern – providing a second line linking London with the north and finally relieving the bottleneck between Euston and Rugby which, until then, carried all traffic heading north out of London. There had been schemes for a railway running north from London to the east of the existing line ever since the completion of the Stockton & Darlington, even predating what is now the West Coast route, created by the amalgamation of the Grand Junction and the London & Birmingham.20 The East Coast was a natural route for a railway to Scotland, effectively following the long-established Great North Road, but all those early plans had come to naught. The plans were revived by Edmund Denison, a Yorkshire MP and QC, who used his legal skills to put the case for the Great Northern in Parliament and who was to dominate the management of the railway in its early years.