Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  The London & North Western, for example, which for most of its thirty-year period under the chairmanship of Sir Richard Moon (who had replaced Mark Huish in 1861) had been the biggest joint stock company in the world, was now prepared to spend considerable sums to offer passengers what today would be known as a ‘more pleasant journey experience’. Moon had been a brilliant manager, developing the basic managerial concepts such as ‘executive responsibility’ first set out by Huish, but his very ethos – of providing the best possible service at minimum cost – meant that the company’s facilities were rather parsimonious. As we have seen, he was quite happy for his trains to trundle around the country at 40 mph and, until the Armagh disaster, had not even appreciated the necessity of having proper brakes. The London & North Western was a wonderful railway, efficient and punctual thanks to a great attention to detail – goods and passenger lines were separated wherever possible and there was investment in the basics, such as junction layouts – but it was desperately old-fashioned.

  While Moon’s policies had, for a long time, given the company a solid financial basis and its shareholders healthy dividends, the company realized that in the twentieth century things had to change on its 2,000-mile network. Euston, in particular, required a new layout to cater for an increasing number of trains and this came at the cost of demolishing acres of private housing and offices. The quadrupled track to Bletchley was extended through to Rugby and there was a range of other improvements around the network, including the remodelling of Crewe, where trains branched off for Manchester or Holyhead. All this came with fleets of new locomotives, modern corridor rolling stock and even a couple of new packet steamers for the Holyhead–Dublin service.

  Other companies followed suit. Express trains painted and maintained in elegant liveries hurtled through the countryside, overtaking lengthy coal trains that often ran on entirely separate rails, as lines had been quadrupled to cater for slow and fast services. Carriages on express routes were comfortably upholstered and there was now widespread provision of dining facilities in which passengers sat in splendour to be attended at linen-covered tables by smartly dressed and attentive waiters. For the most part it was understated luxury, but there were occasional flourishes such as the stained glass in the clerestory roof lights on the Great Central’s Marylebone–Sheffield expresses.

  Although there was no attempt to reinstate the rather risky races, there were moves to reduce overall journey times. With corridor trains that had dining and toilet facilities now being widely used, there was a fashion among train companies to run lengthy non-stop services, the longest being the Great Western service between London and Plymouth, a distance of 225 miles. The Great Western, again, was the leading force behind this rush to speed, running several rapid services down to Bristol and beyond. In 1914, the fastest ran the 118 miles from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads in precisely two hours, an average of 59 mph.8 By the outbreak of the Great War, the fastest scheduled service was a late-evening train from Darlington to York, which took just forty-three minutes to travel forty-four miles, and consequently was a tad faster at 61.5 mph.9 There were several others around the network – from Scotland to the south-east – which averaged over 55 mph, a result of the energy which the train companies had devoted to improving their timings.

  As we have seen, most major cities were connected to London by more than one route and competition was undoubtedly a spur to improved service. From December 1908, the London & North Western, in conjunction with the North London with which it had a close relationship, ran a service from Broad Street (the now demolished station next to Liverpool Street) non-stop to Birmingham in just two and a quarter hours. While the Great Western offered a train from Paddington that was fifteen minutes faster, the same time as the normal Euston service run by the London & North Western, the latter had the disincentive of an extra Underground or taxi ride for the busy City businessman who was just a short walk away from Broad Street station. Moreover, the ‘City to City’ trains, as the Broad Street services were called, offered an unprecedented extra facility: a travelling typist, ensuring not a moment of the journey was wasted.

  Luxury and speed were now being sold even on the previously laggardly south coast routes too. The London, Brighton & South Coast Railway advertised its Brighton Southern Belle service with seven smart Pullman cars (four ‘parlour’, one ‘buffet and smoking’, and two ‘smoking’), ‘exquisitely upholstered, lighted by electricity, comfortably warmed and ventilated and fitted with all the latest improvements’. The journey would take an hour (little more than today’s usual timing, including two stops, of fifty-one minutes) and the company also offered ‘Pullman Drawing Room Cars’ for its services between the capital and Eastbourne (including an all-Pullman train on Sundays), as well as a variety of routes to the Continent on its numerous ships. There was even a service operated jointly with the London & North Western on the cheerfully named Sunny South Special between Liverpool and Hastings, leaving both termini at 11 a.m. daily, and several others that connected south coast resorts with their huge potential market in the north.

  Travelling on the railway for the holidays on these trains was still a source of awe and wonder for many people, particularly children. Philip Unwin10 describes starting a journey at Surbiton to board the ‘West of England Express’, which was really nothing more than a semifast corridor train to Exeter and Plymouth that was ‘pick-up only’.11 There was a porter who would ‘transport the mountain of luggage, each with its tie-on label’ to the station. He was a ‘tough individual who led a slightly shadowy existence in a corner of the station yard – half porter and half carter; he had no uniform but wore a brass armlet fixed so tight to his sleeve that it seemed almost to be screwed to his arm . . . [and had] that smell of stale sweat almost inevitable for those who did hard physical work in days before their houses had bathrooms’. There was a fantastic array of baggage – trunks, suitcases, and ‘Gladstone bags full of bathing dresses and beach clothes’ – which was quite normal even though the Unwin family was by no means rich. The ticket collector was in his best uniform ‘of double-breasted frock and braided peaked cap’ and the station-master himself would venture out on the platform to ‘see these important trains away and make sure that a large party like ours found its ENGAGED carriage safely’. The compartment would be ‘ceremoniously unlocked by the stationmaster and the family piled in, each child clutching a small piece of hand luggage while their father took a careful look down the platform to make sure that the pre-tipped porter was stowing all the luggage in the guard’s van’.

  For most rail companies, profit was most likely to be earned through these long-distance services and with the main lines now all built, the emphasis was on speeding up services by cutting out diversions created by the Victorians in their need for economy. Cut-offs, the precursor of bypasses, were being developed on various parts of the network to reduce journey times. On the Great Western, for example, once the Severn tunnel opened in 1886 Bristol became a bottleneck for services to Cardiff and Swansea and the alternative via Gloucester was certainly the ‘Great Way Round’. The Great Western, therefore, built a forty-mile route through what is now called Bristol Parkway, which opened in 1901, shaving half an hour off the journey between the English and Welsh capitals and on a route twenty-five miles shorter than the Gloucester one. The local aristocrat, the Duke of Beaufort, showed that noblesse oblige survived into the twentieth century by extracting his ha’p’orth for allowing the line to cross his estate; he insisted that he had the right to stop any train at Badminton, his own ducal station, a concession that survived until its closure in 1968. Another Great Western shortcut was the continuation of the Berks & Hants line via Castle Cary, providing a much more direct route to the West Country, also avoiding Bristol, this time to the south.

  Cooperation between companies resulted in other new routes and the operation of joint lines to reduce distances on longer journeys. In 1906, the Great Central, which under the management of Sam Fay
quickly established itself as a deal-maker in its desperate attempts to generate traffic on its somewhat superfluous railway, joined with the Great Western to build a nineteen-mile line between Northolt in Middlesex and High Wycombe. This new line reduced the distance for the Great Western’s trains to Birmingham to two miles fewer than the London & North Western’s West Coast route, while providing the Great Central with a new market to tap in outer suburbia.

  In the north, a second bridge was built over the Tyne at Newcastle to relieve congestion on the old Stephenson one which had only three tracks. In nearby Sunderland, another massive new bridge, 330 feet in a single span, a combined railway and road bridge on two decks, opened in 1910, a cooperative effort between the local council and the North Eastern railway. South of London, even the merger of the London, Chatham & Dover and the South Eastern bore fruit with a link between the two through the Bickley loop and, later, a junction from Chislehurst to the Chatham main line that greatly improved services in those areas.

  For the suburbs, though, electrification was the key, but the nascent technology was slow to be adopted. Apart from tramways, the earliest electrified railway in Britain was the world’s first deep tube line, the City and South London Railway, which opened in 1890. Unable to use steam engines, given the depth and small diameter of the tunnels, it had originally been designed to be run with cables but that proved impractical. The Liverpool Overhead railway of 1893 was next and another deep tube line, the Waterloo & City, opened in 1898. However, it was not until the early years of the new century that the growth of electrified lines gathered pace with the conversion of the District and Metropolitan lines on the London Underground and of several heavily used suburban lines on the Lancashire & Yorkshire, and the North Eastern, which used different and incompatible systems.12 The London, Brighton & South Coast realized that electrification for commuter services offered far more flexibility with quicker turn-around times as well as cleaner trains for its affluent travellers, and opened its south London line, a loop between Victoria and London Bridge via Brixton and Peckham, in late 1909. The Brighton Railway chose overhead electrification but its neighbours, the London & South Western and the South Eastern, both plumped for the cheaper third rail, which then was universally used on what became the Southern Railway after the war. Despite the war, the Brighton Railway had converted all its suburban lines by 1925, at which time several other suburban railways, such as the North London Railway’s line between Broad Street and Richmond, and the London & North Western’s London to Watford service, had followed suit.

  While none of this work was on the scale of the great railway construction of the previous century, it demonstrated that the railway in the Edwardian years was still dynamic, expanding and improving all the time. There was a sense of pride among the big companies – and just a hint of smugness which perhaps prevented them doing enough in the face of the competition from motor vehicles. Their profits were being squeezed by the need to make improvements but nevertheless their businesses were steady and mature, mostly able to compensate their shareholders adequately, if not richly. Even real financial basket cases, such as the Hull & Barnsley, were profitable in the early years of the twentieth century.

  Competition was fierce and for the first time companies began to sell themselves through publicity and public relations. Until the last decade of the nineteenth century, the railways had done little to sell their wares, relying instead on their monopoly position. There was, of course, much free advertising space at stations: bills were posted and checked by ‘bill inspectors’, whose job consisted solely of touring around the company’s network to ensure that the bills had been properly fixed. Companies advertised extensively in newspapers, listing timetables and fares for regular services as well as announcing excursions and cheap trips, and in the 1870s the Great Western, something of a pioneer in this respect, issued comprehensive summer timetables for ‘Tourist Arrangements’, catering for those seeking to enjoy ‘picnic or pleasure parties’.13 However, it was only in the 1890s that pictorial posters and illustrated guides for holiday accommodation became more widespread and the Great Western, serving the country’s biggest tourist area, began producing summer timetables listing a few ‘principal places of attraction’.

  By the turn of the century, the companies began more actively to rid themselves of the monopolist image that was still the dominant perception of the public. Sam Fay at the Great Central even set up a publicity department with its own manager in 1902 in recognition of its need to market itself. Trainspotting would have to wait another generation before becoming the number one pastime of schoolboys, but already the rail companies were beginning to exploit the affection of the public for trains and, particularly, for steam engines. The London & North Western produced millions of postcards, sold through vending machines, invariably showing trains passing through picturesque stretches of track.

  The Great Western, which continued to be the most innovative of the companies in respect of publicity, printed over 100,000 copies of Holiday Haunts, a guide to suggested destinations reached easily by rail. More weighty travel books were produced by the company too. The first was a quite lavish 152-page book, The Cornish Riviera, published in 1904, costing just 3d, and it set a standard which the company maintained until nationalization, far outstripping the imitations produced by its rivals. During this period, too, the greatest master of publicity, Frank Pick, was beginning his work at the London Underground, forging an image for that institution which is still evocative today. The famous roundel was a very early example of a logo and the remarkable series of posters advertising the Underground became renowned, transcending the barrier between advertising and art. The Great Eastern produced strange maps which suggested that the straightest way between London and York was via its station at Liverpool Street, rather than the Great Northern’s more direct route from King’s Cross. The London & South Western also pretended its links between London and Paris were the shortest, compared with those of the Chatham & South Eastern Railway that could genuinely boast the lowest mileage for the journey.

  Freight services were also improving and benefited from much-needed modernization. Passenger trains had had priority on the tracks and the increase in their number resulted in freight trains, particularly those loaded with coal, simply getting lost in the system as they waited for the go-ahead to proceed on their journey. The Midland, in particular, carried numerous coal trains that were invariably held up for days in sidings and yards. The fault was the system of regulation – whereby each train was handed on from one signal box to another – and freight trains were often left in sidings, watching passenger services whizz by, for hours on end. The solution to that problem was another recent invention, the telephone. Every morning the local controller would phone all his district managers to find out about any delays and they in turn would contact signalmen up and down the line. Signalmen were then required to phone their controllers, alerting them precisely when each train left their section. This simple communication system ensured that when bottlenecks occurred, they were quickly discovered and extra resources devoted to unblocking them. It might sound basic but the system developed by the Midland in 1907 proved so successful that it was adopted by all railways following the grouping of 1923.

  Some freight, however, did take priority – and with good reason. The Great Central exploited its Lincolnshire lines to create a massive one hundred acres of docks around Grimsby and Immingham, and the railway’s fast fish services were widely acclaimed. Presumably, fear of the smell would have ensured that the cargo reached its destination promptly overnight.

  The concentration on improving existing services meant that, for the most part, the urge to build long parallel lines to pinch traffic off rival railways had died out. The Great Central’s lack of dividends clearly made this an example not to follow but that did not stop the companies running daft loss-making services to annoy their rivals. The Great Western, for example, operated trains down from Paddington to Southampton via
Reading and Newbury, a journey few passengers would have chosen over the London & South Western direct service from Waterloo.

  Despite the fact that the country was overrun with railways, in the early years of the twentieth century there were still dozens of little branch lines being built to connect any town that had been left off the system by reason of geography or topography. In order to overcome the lack of viability of such branch lines, the government, eager to foster the spread of the network into rural areas which had been affected by the depression of the 1880s, encouraged the construction of a simpler type of railway (built to a lower standard than the conventional ones) by passing the Light Railways Act in 1896. This enabled the construction of cheaper railways, able to carry axle-loads of only eight tons, far less than standard lines, at a maximum speed of just 25 mph, as a way of overcoming the high costs of conventional branch lines. The Act was an early attempt at rural regeneration as it allowed government grants to be paid for the construction of these lines, a rare form of subsidy for what the state always considered to be a private industry that should stand on its own feet.

  While such light railways were commonplace in France, and particularly in Belgium, which boasted 2,400 miles of minor lines, a huge number for such a small country, earlier attempts to build them in Britain had foundered for lack of funding and the costs of obtaining parliamentary approval. On the Continent, there was a tradition of more powerful and financially independent local authorities which were willing to finance such important transport links. Before the Act of 1896, a handful of low-cost lines had been built in Britain during the 1870s and 1880s, the most notable being the narrow-gauge Ffestiniog Railway in north Wales (see Chapter 7). It was used for slate-carrying and demonstrated the huge savings that could be made by building lines on a smaller scale and to lower standards. The line still survives as a tourist attraction today but it had few imitators in Britain at the time because building even a modest railway still required jumping the hurdles and costs of the parliamentary procedure and, occasionally, overcoming the resistance of local Luddite landowners.