Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  While the legislation passed after the Armagh accident may have ensured that the companies took safety seriously, in fairness it really only speeded up improvements which the railways had been putting in place anyway. The rate of accidents tailed off immediately and in 1901, for the first time since the 1840s, and then again in 1908, no passenger was killed in a railway accident during a calendar year.

  If Armagh was the accident that had the greatest long-term impact, the one which made the deepest and longest impression on the public was the Tay Bridge disaster a decade before. This not only highlighted the risks of taking short cuts in engineering, but also ensured that the much more ambitious project of crossing the Firth of Forth was carried out successfully. The Tay Bridge was not bridge to collapse, a dubious honour which went to the three-span structure designed by Robert Stephenson to cross the river Dee in Cheshire that plunged into the river in early 1847, killing five people, but it was by far the most spectacular in railway history.

  The scheme to build a bridge across the Tay was attractive to the North British Railway as it would not only provide direct access to Dundee from Fife, rather than having to detour via Perth, but it also allowed the company to compete for traffic against its old rival, the Caledonian. It was an ambitious enterprise. Two miles long, the bridge was then the longest construction in the world and it took several years for the manager of the North British, Thomas Bouch, to convince his employers that the project was worth while. However, with its passengers facing the unpleasant choice of a ferry ride or a sixty-mile detour, the company eventually agreed and the bill to build a bridge costing £300,000 (say, £22m in today’s money) was passed in 1870. Bouch designed the bridge and oversaw the work, which started two years later. The single-track bridge, which consisted of a steel box on stone piers, was completed in 1878, having cost the lives of twenty of the 600 men who built it.

  In the summer of 1879, Bouch was knighted by Queen Victoria, whose annual journey to Balmoral was shortened by the new bridge, but within months he was to be vilified for having caused the worst-ever disaster resulting from a structural failure on these shores, an unhappy record that remains to this day. The bridge, which had eighty-five spans, rose slightly from the banks to ensure there was space for shipping and it was this high section that was to collapse on the stormy night of 28 December 1879, killing all seventy-five people travelling on the train which plunged into the murky water below. The weather was so foul that when a signalman found that communications with the other side had been lost he attempted to walk across the bridge to check on the train, but was beaten back by the weather. On descending to the shore he realized that the whole centre section, known as the ‘high girders’, had vanished.

  The precise cause was never ascertained although Bouch appeared to have greatly underestimated the structural requirements needed to resist the Force 10 gales that blow regularly in the Firth of Tay area. The train may have derailed, dislodging one of the ‘high girders’, all thirteen of which collapsed into the Tay, but in a recent assessment of the disaster, researchers concluded that the fault lay principally with Bouch’s design. In a way the Tay Bridge disaster was timely. Bouch had been commissioned to design the even more ambitious Forth crossing which, while only having to cross a mile and a quarter of water, was much grander in scale and conception. Bouch had even laid the foundation stone for a suspension bridge, but not surprisingly work ceased immediately after the Tay disaster while the design was reassessed and the discredited engineer was promptly removed from the project.

  The Forth Bridge,12 which was to become the most famous single structure on Britain’s railways – portrayed on everything from £1 coins to biscuit tins and advertisements for ladies’ stockings – had long been discussed as a vital connection between Edinburgh and Fife but such a huge enterprise was beyond the means of a single railway company. Therefore, in 1873, four companies which stood to profit from a quicker route through Scotland – the North British, the North Eastern, the Great Northern and the Midland – joined together to form the Forth Bridge Railway Company which, after aborting its first effort following the Tay Bridge disaster, obtained a new Bill in 1881 authorizing the construction of the bridge. It was the Midland, eager to boost traffic on its newly completed Scottish route using the Settle & Carlisle line, that was the most enthusiastic supporter of the project, tossing a cool £1m, a third of the required capital, into the kitty, and work started in 1883.

  The elegance of the bridge, using a novel cantilever design with spans far longer than anything previously attempted, is testimony to the engineering skills of its designer, Benjamin Baker. In truth, the bridge was probably overspecified to withstand the winds, but that was understandable given the Tay disaster and does not detract from the sheer beauty of the structure, which is perhaps best illustrated by haunting photographs of the cantilever sections standing separately in the mists of the Firth during construction, looking like the skeletons of three vast ships growing out of the water. The bridge is supported by three huge towers standing on bases sunk into the water. However, the cantilevered design enabled the enormous structure to be self-supporting while being erected, avoiding the expensive and risky need to build temporary columns in the water. The dangers during construction were so obvious that boats were on permanent duty below to pick up men who fell off the structure, but many of the workforce (a total of 4,600 at its peak) took ridiculous risks like jumping from one girder to another while drunk. The eventual death toll of fifty-seven, which included seventeen men who worked in compressed-air chambers to build the support columns, seems relatively low given the constant level of danger.

  The Forth Bridge, which cut thirty-one miles out of the journey between Edinburgh and Dundee, was opened by the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, an eager supporter of things new; six months later he cut the ribbon on the City & South London railway, the world’s first deep-level underground line. At the party following the opening of the Forth Bridge, Edward and his guests celebrated by gorging on a pie containing 300 skylarks, a favoured delicacy of the time.

  With the new Tay Bridge – built to higher standards with twin rather than single tracks – also now open, the East and West Coast companies could indulge in a new race – this time from London to Aberdeen – and the competition was conducted with even fiercer rivalry than the one seven years previously. The contest broke out in the summer of 1895, coinciding with the start of the grouse season, which brought the lucrative traffic of the hunting brigade up to Scotland for the Glorious Twelfth, along with the court hangers-on who moved up to Scotland with the Queen for the summer. ‘They were the most valuable passenger traffic on the English railways . . . They travelled with perhaps their wives – certainly a female companion – plenty of servants, dogs, guns and luggage. Above all, they paid their lavish way in golden sovereigns and out of their own pockets.’13 They were known irreverently by railway workers as ‘The Grouse Traffic’.

  The rival companies had broadly kept to their agreement of timetabling the East Coast trains at fifteen minutes quicker than those on the West Coast until on 1 June 1895 the West Coast companies brought forward by ten minutes the arrival of the overnight 8 p.m. train from Euston. The move was designed to allow extra time for the wealthy passengers with their mounds of luggage to change to the local Deeside train that served their hunting lodges. However, it meant the Euston train reached Aberdeen by 7.40 a.m., just five minutes behind the East Coast service, which then responded by cutting a quarter an hour off its train’s scheduled time. A tit-for-tat battle ensued, with the West Coast cutting more than an hour off its timing, aiming to reach Aberdeen by 6.35 a.m. For seventeen days each group of companies sought to better their rivals’ time. The effort which went into the contest was considerable, requiring fresh engines to be prepared far earlier than normal and signalmen to be alerted. The companies were ruthless in their pressure to save time. The West Coast companies effectively abandoned their timetables, rushing passengers on at inte
rmediate stops and departing straightaway, irrespective of the scheduled time – a breach of standard railway practice, which is never to leave early so that punctual passengers are not inconvenienced. At Crewe one evening, in the rush to get the train away, a hapless porter who had made the mistake of helping an old lady on to the train found himself taking an unexpected trip to Glasgow. On the East Coast, the North Eastern and the North British insisted at first on adhering to their timetables but later discarded them in the rush to beat off their rivals.

  The race caught the public imagination and every evening at both Euston and King’s Cross, as well as at intermediate stops on the route, crowds gathered to cheer the racers on their journey and the newspapers provided information on the previous day’s runs in great detail, as if reporting the Derby or the Grand National. Indeed, the press even complained that the races had encouraged gambling on the outcome. The finishing post was not really Aberdeen but Kinnaber Junction, thirty-eight miles south, where the two routes met. Amazingly, the signalman there, who was a Caledonian man and therefore part of the West Coast partnership, allowed through the East Coast train just a minute ahead of its rival, a decision very much in keeping with the spirit of the railway which, despite the intense rivalry between companies, was felt by the workforce to be one family. By the end the timings were incredible. On 20 August, the East Coast train burst through to Aberdeen in just eight hours forty minutes, arriving in the granite city at the unearthly time of 4.40 a.m.

  In response, the West Coast cheated. It stripped a train down for racing and did the journey – which had until recently been timetabled at nearly twelve hours – in just eight hours thirty-two minutes, at an average speed of 63 mph. That marked the end of the race as the companies became aware that the massive resources being ploughed into the contest were not only being wasted but were actually becoming counter-productive: fewer people were travelling on these trains, perhaps out of fear of an accident, but also because the ride at such speed was at times very uncomfortable. Moreover, what was the point of arriving at Aberdeen in the small hours to be thrown out of one’s sleeper car only to have to wait two hours for breakfast and three hours for the connection? It would take eighty years and the introduction of high-speed trains for the timings achieved in that infamous fortnight to be beaten regularly. Even today, over a century later and with state-of-the-art trains, the fastest day services take just over seven hours, a mere hour and a half less than in those heady days of August 1895.

  Superficially, these races appear to have been mere braggadocio on the part of the railway companies, but in the long term they helped to transform Britain’s railways. They jolted the companies out of a torpor and helped them to concentrate on improving the service they were providing. It was ‘a fine and spectacular advertisement for British railways’14 which gave Britain the world record for speed.

  But there was a negative legacy, too. The races had led to renewed concerns about safety: speed was still a relatively new concept as, for the first half-century of their history, the railways had concentrated more on expansion. There was no doubt that during such races, drivers, excited by being allowed to open up their regulators, adopted a gungho spirit that may well have resulted in unnecessary risks being taken, particularly given that they were at the controls of massive machines which did not have speedometers. Certainly, the drivers were taking curves at a far greater speed than that recommended by the permanent way (track) engineers. Although no accidents occurred during the races, a crash a year later in Preston on 15 August at the height of the holiday season revived the concerns of the doomsayers. In fact this derailment of the night train heading for Scotland was caused by the inexperience of the drivers on the London & North Western train. Travelling northbound through Preston involved negotiating a curve with a nominal restriction of 10 mph, but most trains regularly went round it at double that speed. Neither of the enginemen had driven a train that was scheduled to go through the station without stopping, and must have been conscious that keeping good time in the holiday season was important. However, that should not have excused their attempt to speed through the town at 45 mph, which inevitably led to disaster when the leading engine jumped the rails. Although the accident claimed the life of only one of the sixteen passengers on board, according to O. S. Nock ‘this was the case of an accident where the outcome was out of all proportion to the casualty list. Few accidents in British railway history have had a more profound effect on both public and railway opinion. [It] resulted in express running times between London and Scotland being slowed down and remaining stagnant for more than 35 years’.15

  Not all companies were so timid. The Great Western, for example, retained a focus on reducing journey times and races broke out on other lines such as those between London and Manchester. There were even a couple of sections of four-track railway where different companies raced directly against each other, notably from York south to Church Fenton where the tracks of the North Eastern and the Lancashire & Yorkshire ran side by side for eleven miles. Southbound trains belonging to both railways left York at 2.35 p.m. every day and normally the North Eastern, which ran lighter trains, beat off its rival.

  While on the Scottish routes a tacit agreement between the companies spelt the end of the races, a decade later further competitiveness arose between two rival railways for passengers arriving at Plymouth from the United States. Plymouth was the best disembarkation point for passengers coming across the Atlantic as they could save a day, by not remaining on the boat all the way to Southampton. The rail companies were eager to serve this market, which included plenty of affluent first-class passengers, and competition to be the fastest service to London arose in the early 1900s between the Great Western and the London & South Western.

  Focusing on speed was a relatively new development for the Great Western, which, since a series of amalgamations in the 1860s, had become the railway with the greatest route mileage. Until Daniel Gooch, the great locomotive engineer and latterly chairman of the Great Western, died, still in post, in 1889, the railway had long been a ‘majestically slow, stately, superbly well-engineered railway’.16 Its biggest challenge had been converting its broad gauge lines to the standard ones, a process that had started as far back as 1868. The task was finally completed in a spectacular weekend in May 1892 when all the 213 miles west of Exeter were converted, an almost unimaginable achievement of project management and coordination. To undertake this enormous task, 3,400 men were drafted in from around the country, divided up into gangs of twenty, each of which was allocated about a mile of track to convert. While straight sections of track were relatively easy, on curved sections the rails had to be shortened and every set of points presented particular difficulties.17 In 1886, the Great Western had also completed one of the great engineering feats of railway history by building the 4.4-mile Severn tunnel, the longest on the British railway network and wettest.18 It took thirteen years to finish as the site was dogged by flooding which required constant pumping operations (and still does today).

  After the death of Gooch, the Great Western began to take an interest in modernizing and speeding up its services. In March 1892 the railway launched what Adrian Vaughan has called the first ‘modern express train in Britain’19 on its Paddington–Birkenhead route, offering the kind of comforts that were soon to be taken for granted. The train accommodated first-, second- and third-class passengers in carriages that were heated by steam through radiators under the seats and had corridors with connecting gangways that would enable restaurant cars (which Great Western introduced four years later) to be added. The clerestory roofs allowed for extra height and light and the coaches were panelled with walnut and satinwood that would not have been out of place in a gentleman’s club. There was an electrical bell-push to ‘summon’ the guard and a novel form of emergency cord. Although emergency cords for passengers’ use had been fitted on some services as early as the 1850s, the Great Western’s new trains adopted a much more sophisticated system that
allowed passengers to alert the driver who would stop the train as soon as practicable.

  Even after the Preston accident, the caution being exercised by the West and East Coast railways found no echo at the Great Western. Quite the contrary. With the broad gauge gone, the Great Western managers seemed eager to show that they could live up to the railway’s nickname – ‘God’s Wonderful Railway’ – rather than the name that was being used in the popular press, ‘Great Way Round’. Locomotive design was improving rapidly, and trains became heavier. The City of Truro, one of the Great Western’s new types of locomotive designed by the greatest traction engineer of his time, George Churchward, became the first to achieve the magical three figures when it was allegedly timed at just over 102 mph on a mail train down to Plymouth one evening in May 1904.20

  The railways serving the country south of London were very different. Here there was, as The Times called it, a ‘crawl to the south’21 rather than a race to the north. The slowness of travel to the Kent Channel ports has already been mentioned in Chapter 7 but the Brighton line was also famous – or rather infamous – for delays and tediously long journeys. The town was served by two railways, the South Eastern and the London, Brighton & South Coast, but a shared section of track between Coulsdon and Redhill gave them the opportunity to blame each other for delays. Delays on the Brighton line had turned into a national joke, becoming the butt of music-hall routines and regular comments in The Times: ‘Very bad they both are, this at least the most severe critic must admit, difficult as he would find it . . . to say with certainty which of the two has the better right to call itself absolutely the worst line in the country.’22 Spurred on by this constant criticism, a new six-mile section of line opened in 1900, bypassing Redhill and leading to much better service patterns. The joke was over, and even the old South Eastern and London & Chatham, which had merged, were now offering a better service, blending their rival lines into a homogenous network that catered for the burgeoning London commuter network. Travel did remain slow, however, on many branch lines, where it seemed in keeping with the cadence of life. David St John Thomas, who wrote much on rural routes, reckoned that the slowest service was from Bournemouth to Bath through the Mendips on the Somerset & Dorset joint main line, which took over four hours to cover just seventy-one miles, gruesomely slow progress.