In the more industrialized south Wales, a large network of railways built up in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire to service the coal, iron and steel industries. Incredibly, this became the densest network of lines anywhere in the UK (and possibly the world) outside London. Again, competition rather than consolidation was the prevailing ethos, and by 1900 seven companies ran into Merthyr Tydfil while Swansea boasted six passenger termini. Between 1863 and 1867, Brecon was connected to the rail network via four branch lines but no main line railway linked it to the outside world (the quickest route would have been along the Usk valley where it could have connected with the Newport–Hereford main line at Abergavenny). This strange state of affairs was partly a result of a campaign by a canal company, the Monmouthshire Railway &Canal Company, to block the rail route along the valley, one of the few instances in railway history where canal interests prevailed.12 During this period several narrow gauge railways emerged in Wales, notably the Ffestiniog (see Chapter 10).
Ireland was part of Great Britain, under direct rule by London from 1801 until the Irish Free State’s establishment in 1922, and its railways exhibited many of the same characteristics as those on the mainland, thanks to the same emphasis on competition rather than coordination. Dublin eventually had six termini, and Londonderry, a small town in the north, four (two of which were narrow gauge). Cooperation between neighbouring railways, which for the most part did not duplicate each other’s routes directly, was often minimal even when it would have been advantageous for both parties. Because of the sparseness of the population and their poverty, there was considerable state funding of the railways, albeit much of it hidden through the indirect payment of grants.
The Irish railways were mostly built to an odd gauge – 5ft 3ins – after the early lines tried various sizes ranging from 6ft 2ins to the standard 4ft 8½ins used on the other side of the water. While the first lines were completed in the 1830s, railway construction really took off once the gauge had been agreed in 1843 and the bulk of the main line network was created in the ensuing twenty years, despite the horrors of the great potato famine of 1845–8 which reduced the population by a third through death and emigration. Usage at the best of times was intermittent and without government support many of the lines would not have been viable. As David St Thomas puts it wryly, ‘Travelling first class might be a solitary and prosperous priest breviary-reading in splendid isolation. In the rest of the train . . . there would be people the railway would only carry once: emigrants and soldiers serving the Empire on their way out of Ireland.’13
The best source of business for the Irish railways, other than on the Dublin–Belfast route, were the passengers using the steamer services across the Irish Sea and by the end of the century no fewer than four English railways were vying for that traffic: the London & North Western, the Midland, the Lancashire & Yorkshire and the Great Western all offered competing services on different shipping routes. There was also a network of smaller gauge railways, built in remote rural parts of the country that never had a hope of being viable. St Thomas cites the improbably named Schull & Skibbereen (with an intermediate stop at Ballydehob) in the far south-west, ‘a district especially hit by famine and decline’.14 It was a fifteen-mile narrow gauge line built beside the road at a cost of £57,000, with dividends of 5 per cent supposedly guaranteed in perpetuity by the council, but in fact never paid. There were just two trains per day, taking over an hour for the journey to Skibbereen where there was not even a connection to the main line. With such out-of-the-way branches, the network of lines in Ireland eventually reached its maximum of 3,450 miles in the 1920s, excessive for such a small island with a population of barely half its peak of 8 million and, not surprisingly, less than half the mileage survives today.
As well as widening their network deep into the countryside, the railways were becoming a mass form of transit, extending their reach through all the social classes. They simultaneously created the need to commute – by allowing people to live further from their places of work – and then met that need by providing a service, particularly workmen’s trains, to ferry people to and from their jobs. In the early days, accommodation for poorer passengers had mostly been designed to put them off using the railway: the Eastern Counties had run ‘truck platforms with eight open seats’ while on the Great Western the poorer classes were simply dumped into goods wagons without windows, little different to the trains used by the Nazis to transport Jews to their deaths a century later. The very term ‘class’ came into circulation at this time; earlier forms of transport, such as the stagecoach and ships, had different terminology to distinguish between their types of passenger, for example, ‘inside’ and ‘cabin’ accommodation, or ‘outside’ and ‘deck’. Despite Gladstone’s 1844 legislation which had forced all railway companies to provide at least one cheap service each way per day, the trains were largely used by the middle and upper classes, much like aviation before the advent of the charter and low-cost airlines, while the poor were confined to an annual excursion to the seaside and the odd essential trip when they could afford the fares. The Midland, the most aggressively competitive of the big companies, set out to challenge that orthodoxy, seeing the potential of attracting the masses on to the railway by providing plenty of cheap accommodation.
Many express trains had no third-class accommodation as the companies developed them as an exclusive service for the well-to-do, although there were exceptions such as the Great Northern which had introduced it on some of its express London–Bradford trains in 1860. At the time, the Midland had responded by putting third-class carriages on all its trains on the same route, but in general third-class accommodation was very limited on faster trains, which greatly reduced the potential market for train travel. In 1872 the Midland took the radical decision to provide third-class carriages on all its express trains. As the historian of the Midland, Hamilton Ellis, points out, this was ‘thought to be shocking by some other companies who considered that an express train was something for which travellers should be made to pay handsomely’.15
The change was part of a new philosophy introduced by the very forward-looking James Allport, who joined the Midland in 1849 as general manager in the wake of Hudson’s demise. Allport, the son of a small-arms manufacturer, who remained general manager for over thirty years, showed considerable commercial acumen in developing new markets for rail travel but was also something of a social reformer who saw it as his duty to provide for the less well-off. Three years later, in 1875, he shocked his rivals even more by abolishing second class on all the Midland’s trains. The second-class carriages were immediately turned into third-class accommodation and he ensured that all seats were upholstered rather than making passengers endure the hard wooden benches of the third-class carriages, which he sent to the scrapyard. Passengers were to be given more leg-room so that they did not play knock-knees on crowded trains and the partitions dividing the carriages into compartments were to be built up to the roof, creating a feeling of greater privacy. Hamilton Ellis reports that the move was met by other companies ‘with squeals of dismay and disapproval’ as it was seen as ‘pampering the working classes’.16
Allport, who had a keen service ethic long before that became accepted business practice, was also responsible for improving the facilities at the other end of the social scale by copying the idea of deluxe carriages from the United States. In 1872 he crossed the Atlantic on a fact-finding tour to observe how the Americans catered for their passengers and decided to introduce the carriages provided by George Pullman’s eponymous company. For an extra fee on top of the fare, the Pullman coaches offered hotel standards of comfort, initially in restaurant cars with waiter-served meals, and later provided carriages with sleeping accommodation as well. The carriages and attendants were supplied under contract by the Pullman company but the locomotives and the rest of the train remained the responsibility of the Midland. The idea was well received and other railway companies followed suit, including, amazingly, the Metropo
litan Railway, now part of the London Underground system, which ran a Pullman train from the remote Verney Junction in rural Buckinghamshire, offering breakfast in the morning and returning with a dinner service in the evening.
The other method through which poorer people were attracted on to the railway was through the provision of workmen’s trains. The first service offering cheap fares for workers travelling to their jobs started running as early as 1847 when the Eastern Counties railway provided early-morning services for dockers. The illustrious Stockton & Darlington innovated, too, with cheap trains linking Middlesbrough with the iron-working village of Eston five years later. In a way it was incumbent on the railways to provide such services since, as we have seen, they demolished swathes of housing in the inner city during their very construction, displacing tens of thousands of people. However, it was not until the 1860s, when employment started to soar, intensifying the demand for labour, that the concept really developed.
The nascent Underground was another early pioneer of cheap trains for workers. The first line between Paddington and Farringdon in the City was opened by the Metropolitan Railway in 1863 and the following year the company realized that there was a huge potential market and started running two early trains on which workers could travel for just 3d17 rather than the usual 9d return. These cheap trains, which unlike some workmen’s trains allowed the return journey to be made on any service, proved immensely popular, and contributed to the Metropolitan’s high profitability in its early years. That year, too, the House of Lords decided that all railway bills for new lines into London must include the provision of workmen’s trains and similar services were operated, though on a smaller scale, in other major cities, notably Manchester, Birmingham (where some trains carried people out of the city centre in the early morning to big factories like Cadbury’s Bourneville plant), Liverpool and Glasgow.
However, the railway which most thoroughly exploited the concept of workmen’s trains, and in doing so speeded up the development of a whole swathe of London, was the Great Eastern, which set itself up quite deliberately to become ‘the poor man’s line’.18 When it obtained authorization to build Liverpool Street station, a process that started in 1861 but took three years, permission was granted only on condition that it would run workmen’s trains from Edmonton and Walthamstow to London at a return fare of just 2d, which enabled poorly paid workers to live in distant suburbs up to eleven miles from the City. The Great Eastern made a virtue out of necessity, providing a comprehensive schedule of early-morning trains that helped it to become a profitable railway, despite its early travails of serving a sparsely populated part of England.
As a consequence, a finger of development stretched out around its stations on both sides of the railway in much the same way that many towns grow as a ribbon along major roads. Vast areas of cheap housing sprang up in these north London suburbs, consisting largely of small jerry-built brick boxes, the Barratt Homes of their day, and ‘chopped off at the ends where another street crossed at distances prescribed by by-law’.19 Tottenham doubled in population between 1871 and the following census ten years later, and again by 1891, reaching nearly 100,000. Similarly, Edmonton tripled in size during that period and Walthamstow also doubled at each succeeding census. Originally most of the workmen’s trains charged the same 2d for a return fare, a real bargain for up to twenty-two miles’ travel, but later there was a differentiation between times, with earlier trains before 6.30 a.m. remaining at tuppence while the later ones, catering for a more affluent clientele who could be in their offices a bit later, cost 3d, 4d or even 5d return.
The workmen’s trains may have helped the great cities to expand and their workforces to live in better conditions, but they were not a panacea. The poorest labourers, a significant proportion of the workforce, who were paid meagre rates and were hired and fired by the day, could not take advantage of these services. Even those who could often struggled to pay the tuppence or so for their daily fare, and many people suffered great inconvenience because the cheap trains were timetabled only to run very early in the morning, which meant that many passengers had to hang around near the termini, possibly in the wet and cold, until their places of work opened.
In other parts of London, too, the railways stimulated the expansion of what was then the world’s biggest conurbation. The Great Northern, serving places like Hornsey, Wood Green and Southgate from King’s Cross, concentrated on attracting more upmarket passengers, the lower middle classes, to whom it offered cut-price season tickets. In the west and south-west, it was the Metropolitan District, the rival Underground line to the Metropolitan, which spread out into green fields and villages that quickly became suburbs, such as Richmond, Ealing and Putney, all connected by 1880. In north-west London, it was the Metropolitan, whose chairman Edward Watkin had grand visions about turning the railway into the core of a network that linked Manchester and Sheffield to Paris (see Chapter 10). He pushed the Metropolitan Railway far out into the Middlesex and Hertfordshire countryside, stimulating the developments that would eventually become ‘Metroland’ in the 1920s and 1930s.20 The Metropolitan was unique in that it had the power to act as a developer itself, building houses through its subsidiary, Metropolitan Railway Country Estates. Unfortunately, other railways were precluded by legislation from carrying out their own development, a restriction that has proved enormously damaging to the country’s transport infrastructure. There is an obvious logic in allowing a railway company to fund its investment through the additional land value it creates by providing easy access to town centres, a planning process used in other countries, notably Japan.
There were failures too: the construction of a railway into greenfield sites did not automatically lead to its development, as the Great Eastern discovered when it built a huge loop running through Fairlop and Chigwell, which attracted few passengers and even less development. Railways, therefore, were ‘a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for outer suburban growth’.21
The other area where the overground railways prompted rapid suburban growth was in the south-east of London. Here the story is dominated by competition and rivalry which prevented an ordered development of the railway system and resulted in a complex and underinvested network that still causes distress to commuters today. Little mention of the railways south of the Thames has been made up until now, so a bit of backtracking is necessary. The early railways from London into Kent were developed by the South Eastern Railway, but the territory it served bore no resemblance to the dense suburbs stretching out from central London in a huge swathe from Greenwich to Bromley and across to Croydon that provides such a lucrative market for the railways today. Instead, as Hamilton Ellis points out, there was no suburban sprawl, and a place such as Orpington, now a huge dormitory commuter town, was simply ‘a dainty village noted for its chickens, for the Squire’s peacocks and for the brook down one street’.22 The South Eastern had built its railway somewhat on the cheap, with several tunnels between Tonbridge and Hastings that had not been properly lined by its cheating contractors, which meant that for many years special rolling stock had to be used to negotiate them safely. Moreover, its meandering lines connected several towns by very indirect routes. To reach Canterbury, a mere fifty-one miles from London, required a journey of thirty miles longer from London Bridge station, taking in Croydon, Redhill, Tonbridge and Ashford among others.
Until the mid-1850s, at least the South Eastern had a monopoly of Kent and shared in the lucrative London–Brighton traffic with the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. However, this monopoly ended when a small company called the East Kent Railway built a line from Strood to Canterbury, and was soon authorized to extend it to Dover and, towards London, to St Mary Cray. This was also the eastern terminus of another new railway, the Mid-Kent, which opened from Lewisham to Beckenham in 1857 and thence to Bromley the following year, with a gap filled by the intriguingly named but small West End & Crystal Palace railway. This illustrates the way that many Vict
orian railways built up incrementally, earning a bit of revenue on an initial stretch to help fund expansion and consequently becoming more and more attractive to a wider market, at the same time as building alliances by obtaining running powers over neighbouring lines.
The East Kent then revealed its true ambitions, changing its name to the London, Chatham & Dover Railway and, in 1861, it started running services between the capital and those two destinations, deep in the heart of the South Eastern’s territory. Moreover, the run to Dover on the ‘Chatham’, as it quickly became known, was ten miles shorter than the South Eastern’s route. So by stealth a rival to the South Eastern had emerged, creating a rivalry that was to be one of the most fiercely fought on the rail network. Its legacy today is that this important commuter area remains served by a slow railway, with sharp gradients and countless flat23 junctions, which make for difficult operation and insufficient trains at peak times. Even worse, many towns had two stations, which did not connect with each other, serving the rival railways.
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