The railway companies, initially slow to appreciate the import of the Exhibition business, soon realized that it could be a money-spinner and started organizing special services to the capital. At first they had tried to stick to the Octuple agreement under which they all charged the same fares, but cheap rates offered by steamship companies between Hull and London forced the Great Northern to cut its prices, sparking off a war with its rivals, the Midland and the London & North Western. Soon they responded by offering return fares to London from Leeds or Sheffield for just 5s (a third of the going rate before the price war) and the Great Northern trumped them by promising a John Lewis type ‘Never knowingly undersold’ deal of 6d less than any other railway offered. Despite the collapse of the cartel arrangements, the railways profited from the Exhibition and the London & North Western, as the largest railway, carried more visitors than any of its rivals. Huish reported that his railway had taken three quarters of a million people in and out of London during the period of the Exhibition, 90,000 of whom had travelled in 145 excursion trains and the rest on its normal scheduled services.
While this influx of visitors helped boost the profitability of the various railways, there was a more important longer-term effect: the efficiency with which they carried these millions of visitors to London and back greatly improved the public’s perception of the companies. Without the railways, the Exhibition would never have attracted the volume of visitors or had such a deep and long-lasting impact. The railways had helped to create this huge popular festival which did much to give Britain its sense of identity following the troubled first half of the century. Indeed, the very term ‘Victorian’ began to be used around this time.
With the Great Exhibition, excursion trains and the expansion of the network into the nooks and crannies of rural England, a mere quarter of a century after the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, train travel had become commonplace. In 1854, 92 million journeys were made in England and Wales on a network of around 6,000 miles (which demonstrates nevertheless that the intensity of use was far less than today when over a billion journeys are taken on a system of just under twice the size). By then, virtually every town of any significance in England had been connected to the network, the major exceptions were Luton, Hereford, Yeovil and Weymouth, which would all soon get their stations. The importance of a delay in connection to the network can be shown by the fate of Norwich, which was the ninth biggest city in England at the 1831 census but had fallen to thirteenth ten years later, partly as a result of having no rail connection until 1845. Shrewsbury is a good reverse example, showing how a town that had good railway services could be transformed. Shrewsbury had lost its traditional flannel manufacture to nearby Welshpool and Newtown, but quickly recovered by exploiting its position as a railway centre with the establishment of a major carriage works which, by the 1880s, was producing thirty vehicles per week.
While the railways stood in greater esteem after 1851, that was not enough for the parliamentarians to give them what their leaders, such as Huish, wanted – a monopoly over the areas they controlled or at least the opportunity to rationalize the industry to consolidate their dominant position. Huish’s plan was to merge with both the Midland and a smaller but highly profitable railway, the North Staffordshire. The latter demonstrated that companies did not have to be big or connected with London to make a profit during this period: serving the Potteries with 112 miles of route and centred on Stoke, the North Staffordshire linked at various points such as Derby and Crewe with its larger neighbours, the Midland and the London & North Western, ensuring a healthy level of traffic. Huish wanted to gain control of the railway to give him a short cut to Manchester. However the Knotty – so named because the badge of the railway was a Staffordshire knot – managed to resist both his blandishments and his aggression, and even had the cheek to propose an alliance with the Great Western that would siphon off some of Huish’s traffic. Thanks to its steadfastness, the Knotty in fact survived as an independent railway until the amalgamation of 1923.
The London & North Western’s merger with the Midland would have been an altogether different proposition given the latter’s enormous but rather uncoordinated network. The Midland, whose very name was a misnomer since its lines extended well beyond the Midlands, had survived the departure of Hudson but the railway had not profited from the Exhibition like its rivals because it lacked direct access to London. Of the two possible solutions – building its own line through to the capital or merging with a company that already had one – the second seemed the easier option for the directors who were in something of a panic after the poor 1851 results. The London & North Western and the Great Northern were approached in turn, and both were somewhat lukewarm, but the following year Huish warmed to the idea and a Bill for the amalgamation was tabled in Parliament. Here again, the opportunity to create a more rational and integrated railway system was lost. Parliament stalled in its usual way by appointing a committee, chaired by Edward Cardwell, a prominent Liberal who later became Secretary of State for War under Gladstone, to examine the issue. Despite hearing evidence from many senior figures in the industry who were in favour of the amalgamation, after much prevarication the committee effectively ruled against a merger and the Bill was thrown out by MPs in 1854. So too was a plan to merge the various East Anglian railways which, serving a poor and sparsely populated area, were always impoverished and underinvested. Eventually, however, with the threat of bankruptcy looming, they were finally allowed to create the Great Eastern Railway in 1862.
The thrust of the committee’s reports had been rather contradictory, setting out both the advantages and disadvantages of amalgamation, and another merger, the creation of the North Eastern Railway from three separate railways centred around York, was allowed through in the same year. This grouping, the fourth largest in terms of mileage, took in the famous Stockton & Darlington nine years later, and was to become one of the great railways of the second half of the century, benefiting from the prosperity of the booming industrial area it served.
With its merger plans stymied, the Midland therefore had to make its own way to London. The company revived an earlier scheme to build a line from Leicester to Hitchin, which had previously been authorized but had fallen into abeyance, quickly obtaining parliamentary authorization to build the line but construction proved to be a major burden for the company. The contractor was Thomas Brassey, who had recently built nearly all of the Great Northern from King’s Cross to York and was the most successful contractor of his generation. By the time of his death in 1870 he had constructed a tenth of the mileage of the entire British rail network (and more than double that mileage abroad),9 while retaining the trust and regard of all those for whom he worked. As his Victorian biographer commented, ‘no one, investigating the history of the work that Brassey undertook, has come forward to suggest that it was shoddy, that he broke his word, that his treatment of employees was harsh or mean’,10 quite a testament for a man who spent his life in such a cut-throat and sometimes shady business. Unlike many of his fellow contractors, Brassey, born of modestly affluent yeoman parents, did not do it for the money but for the genuine ambition to create a railway network. Although on his death he bequeathed greater wealth than any comparable self-made man of the Victorian era (£3.2m, say £225m in today’s money), Brassey made no attempt to mix in high society and never stood for Parliament (unlike almost every other contemporary prominent developer and promoter of the railways). He was more than a contractor – typically the builders of railway lines often took part of the financial risk, investing their own money to help bring schemes to fruition – but despite his personal financial outlay, he survived the crash of 1868, unlike his sometime partner, Sir Samuel Peto.
The construction of the line, which began in 1853, posed both physical and financial constraints for the Midland. There were four sets of hills to cross and the original plans had envisaged considerable tunnelling, but this proved expensive and a cheaper route, with more gr
adients and bends, was chosen. The line was being built at a difficult time politically, with the Crimean War in full swing, which not only deterred investors but also pushed up the cost of materials. The Midland limited itself to spending £1m on the line and managed to stick to that budget, a mere £16,000 per mile, which was half the average cost of lines built in the previous decade.11
The line from the north and the Midlands through to Hitchin opened in May 1857, where it connected with the Great Northern’s tracks to King’s Cross, over which the Midland had running rights. Thus, at last, fourteen years after its creation, the Midland could operate its own trains through to London. Yet that still did not solve all its problems. The Great Northern’s tracks were crowded and, quite understandably, its own trains were given preference, despite the generous tolls which the company received from the Midland. The Midland’s lucrative coal trains from the rich south Yorkshire coalfields mostly used the old route from the north on the London & North Western’s tracks between Rugby and London, but those lines, too, were burdened with a heavy load of both goods and passenger traffic. The answer was obvious but it would take another decade before the directors of what had become a very profitable railway were brave enough to decide to build another line to London terminating at that Gothic palace, St Pancras station.
The decision was prompted by the difficulties endured by the Midland in bringing its trains through to the capital. In 1862, ten of its trains were delayed every day by having to wait for Great Northern traffic and, worst of all, during the popular International Exhibition, the Midland had the ignominy of seeing some of its passenger trains routed into the Great Northern’s goods terminal because of lack of capacity at King’s Cross. The Midland’s line to London opened in 1868, though the hotel in the station was not completed until 1873, and caused considerable upheaval. To run lines into London was becoming increasingly costly and necessitated the demolition of ever greater numbers of homes. Here the destructive force of the railway could be seen at its most powerful. Virtually every town connected to the network experienced a certain amount of demolition, though some, rather than face this prospect, pushed the station to the outer edge of the built-up area, a move which was welcomed by the hackney cab drivers but was met with dismay by passengers. London, however, could not be bypassed in the same way and saw by far the greatest level of upheaval. While the 1846 Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini had decided that the railways should be kept out of the centre of the city, there was still plenty of housing in the way of the projected lines as they cut their way to the stations on the boundary determined by the Commission.
Both the Great Northern and the London & Birmingham had already caused destruction and mayhem in a swathe of north London between Camden Town, Euston and King’s Cross but the Midland was to be particularly destructive. The company, with fantastic foresight, designed the line as a four-track railway, greatly worsening its impact. Agar Town, a poor area of rookeries and hovels, was virtually wiped out and the construction of the station at St Pancras alone resulted in 20,0 people losing their homes. Even the dead were not immune as part of the Old St Pancras churchyard had to be destroyed, uncovering thousands of decaying bodies which had to be moved, a task observed by Thomas Hardy, the novelist, who as a young man was employed by the architect to ensure the job was carried out properly.
There was an extra side effect of the creation of these lines across cities. The railways which cut through London and other big cities, especially Manchester12 but also Birmingham and Leeds, were invariably raised on long viaducts or embankments, or buried in cuttings, that split up neighbourhoods and, indeed, the whole city. The railways might have looked fine atop their elegant arched structures but were greatly resented by the remaining local residents who were forced to live, quite literally, under their shadow and the poor usually ended up on ‘the wrong side’ of the tracks: ‘Each of these new railway lines became itself the source of new divisions and demarcations . . . they became the new dialect lines of social distinction, having each of them a right and wrong side.’13
Nor was the destruction as beneficial as the railway companies tried to claim. While they argued that they were carrying out a public service by demolishing the slums, in truth that was promoters’ gloss masking a far more complicated situation; for example, at Somers Town, just north of Agar Town, much of the housing destroyed by the Midland was in good condition, laid out on streets rather than alleys.
Moreover, while the destruction of large numbers of working people’s homes was celebrated as a way of getting rid of slums, there was little consideration of the consequences for the people made homeless as a result. The implication that the destruction of these areas benefited public health was disingenuous since the companies had no obligation to provide rehousing and while the owners received compensation, their displaced tenants were simply left to their own devices. It was not until 1853 that the railways had to take any account of those thrown out of their homes, and even then they were merely required to draw up a ‘demolition statement’ setting out the numbers. A few tenants were given trifling amounts of compensation but those who paid rent weekly rather than monthly received nothing. After much pressure by social reformers, a standing order passed in Parliament in 1874 was supposed to ensure that the poorest were rehoused by the railway companies – but this was largely ignored. The landlords would, in any case, frequently enable the railways to evade the obligation by evicting their tenants a few days before the properties were transferred. Later, further legislation placed tighter obligations on the companies but even these were largely circumvented. A conservative estimate of the numbers displaced in London alone is 120,000,14 but the real figure was undoubtedly higher due to the efforts by landlords and railway companies to get around the law and the lack of information about a very fluid and itinerant section of the population.
Ironically, the railways were eager to provide another form of accommodation – hotels – which were well appointed and frequently luxurious. Although trains were becoming faster, the companies made little effort to reduce journey times in line with this technological progress. Railway travel was so superior to any alternative that the companies did not really need to bother. On occasion they speeded up trains in order to compete with their rivals, such as the Great Western, which briefly ran trains from London to Birmingham fifteen minutes faster than the London & North Western despite the greater mileage, but soon abandoned that strategy as expensive and unreliable. There were still stops for refreshments and ‘comfort breaks’ since there were no corridors or toilets on the trains, as well as for changing the engine or filling the tender tanks, though, later, lengthy troughs, typically 2,0 feet (600m) long, were placed between the tracks to allow locomotives to pick up water without stopping.
Long journeys remained an ordeal. A trip between London Euston and Edinburgh took over twelve hours by day and seventeen by the night mail. Aberdeen was virtually a full day’s journey from London, and none of these trains offered any sort of sleeping accommodation. As early as 1838, the railways had begun to offer a rudimentary aid to people wanting to sleep on the mail trains by providing a cushion supported between the compartment’s seats by poles which could be hired from the guard. It does not sound very comfortable but was probably better than sitting upright all night. Proper sleeping cars were not introduced until 1873 when the North British Railway started offering a service between London and Glasgow, but at first passengers had to bring their own bed linen.
Inevitably, given the discomfort of train travel, hotels sprang up at stations and junctions to cater for the exhausted traveller, and later for tourists. Until the law on companies was relaxed so that other enterprises enjoyed the same ability to raise capital from a multitude of shareholders, the railways were the only businesses with the capital resources to invest in such big enterprises and soon most of the larger railways had branched out into providing hotels. The first hotel to be built by a railway had been opened at Euston in 1839,
the year after the station’s completion. Other hotels serving railway passengers quickly followed at junctions such as Derby, Normanton and Swindon, as the railway companies realized that providing accommodation was an opportunity to boost their income. The South Eastern broke new ground by opening the Pavilion Hotel in Folkestone, catering for travellers using the cross-Channel steamers, and soon similar hotels appeared at many major stations, notably the Great Western Royal Hotel at Paddington – the biggest in the country with 103 bedrooms – and the Great Northern at King’s Cross, both opened in 1854. The classic railway hotel is at a terminus, straddling the platforms, and the first of these was the elegant Royal Station Hotel at Hull’s Paragon station, opened in 1851, which formed two sides of the concourse in an L-shape.
Hotels became an established part of the larger railway companies’ businesses and by the end of the century there were railway hotels in all ten largest English provincial cities except Bristol,15 and at nearly all the London termini. Four Scottish railway companies built hotels for golfers and several companies created ‘country hotels’, aimed solely at tourists, the first of which was at Furness Abbey, near Barrow, built by the Furness Railway, principally a mineral line, in 1847. Many major hotels remained in railway ownership until the privatization of British Transport Hotels in the early 1980s.
The queen of these hotels was, of course, the Midland Grand at St Pancras, opened in 1873, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott to dominate the far more simple yet elegant lines of its neighbour, Lewis Cubitt’s King’s Cross. St Pancras is the most significant urban structure built by the railways. Both its engine shed, the inelegant name given to the enormous glass and iron shelter over the platforms designed by William Barlow, and the George Gilbert Scott hotel would be notable individually, but together they create a world-class terminus that is now enjoying a twenty-first-century renaissance as it has been transformed into an international station served by the Eurostar services to and from Paris and Brussels. The sheer scale is breathtaking in itself as the station is 150 metres wide and twice that distance long, but the Gothic design, with its exaggerated features such as the clock tower, numerous spires and the large statue of Britannia glaring over at King’s Cross make it one of London’s greatest landmarks. The sheer contrast between those two stations, the Gothic St Pancras alongside the simple elegance of King’s Cross, built less than two decades apart, demonstrates both the energy and wastefulness engendered by the emphasis on competition rather than cooperation, which dominated this key period in the history of the railways. Jack Simmons has explained precisely why the Victorians of this era could never have chosen a state-planned system of railway development: ‘The spirit [of the times] was competitive through and through: it was commerce against agriculture, North against South, London against the provinces, the middle classes against the aristocracy – and behind it sits Britain in competition with the rest of the world.’16 The Midland was to epitomize this by embarking on its own, highly successful path to maximize its profits and embarrass and annoy its rivals by abolishing second class and ensure that all trains could carry third-class passengers.
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