23 Quoted in Frank Ferneyhough, The History of Railways in Britain, Osprey Publishing, 1975, p. 62.
24 18 November 1824.
25 1 October 1825.
26 Adrian Vaughan, Railwaymen, Politics and Money, John Murray, 1997, p. 24.
27 Ibid., p. 26.
28 There is some discussion about whether these were loops, that allowed trains to continue forward once they had passed each other, or, as some accounts suggest, sidings which required shunting in and out to allow the train on the main line to progress.
29 Ferneyhough, The History of Railways in Britain, p. 61.
30 Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle (eds), The Oxford Companion to British Railway History, Oxford, 1997, p. 478.
ONE: The First Railway
1 Harold Perkin, The Age of the Railway, David & Charles, 1970, p. 180.
2 Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, Pelican Books, 1968, p. 96.
3 Simon Garfield, The Last Journey of William Huskisson, Faber & Faber, 2004, p. 16.
4 Frank Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 1830–1980, Robert Hale, 1980, p. 13.
5 Garfield, The Last Journey of William Huskisson, p. 16.
6 Ibid.
7 Remarkably cheap, given that a new railway would cost anything between £30m and £350m per mile in the UK today.
8 Marjorie Whitelaw in Bryan Morgan (ed.), The Railway-Lover’s Companion, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963, p. 66.
9 F. D. Klingender, Art and the Industrial Revolution, Paladin, 1972, p. 123.
10 Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 1830–1980, p. 22.
11 Ibid.
12 Quoted in Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, p. 24.
13 The Times, 2 May 1825.
14 Adrian Vaughan, Railwaymen, Politics and Money, John Murray, 1997, p.
15 Terry Coleman, The Railway Navvies, Pimlico, 2000, p. 25.
16 Ibid., p. 28.
17 As opposed to the ‘four foot’, which is the distance between the two rails on the same track, an inaccurate shorthand since it is 4ft 8½ins. The space between the tracks nowadays is normally 6ft 6ins.
18 In fact, the railway was still forced to open itself up to other carriers in 1831 but there were few takers given the complexity of trying to operate on a line largely used by the owners’ trains. A similar difficulty still pertains today for freight operators seeking to use state-controlled railways in Europe.
19 Some references suggest this was a tramway with iron plates on which any road wagon could be pulled, rather than a proper railway that could be used only by specially designed vehicles.
20 Fortunately, the company was in financial difficulties which delayed construction and by the time the first section opened in 1835, locomotives were seen as the only viable option.
21 Apart from a brief three-year period in the 1870s, with just one train per day in each direction.
22 One of the inclines, the 1 in 14 Hopton, was operated after 1887 by steam locomotives, the steepest gradient on which conventional steam engines ever ran in the UK.
22 Nevertheless, Sans Pareil was fixed and proved to be a workable freight locomotive that spent many productive years on the Leigh & Bolton Railway.
24 The key feature was that the hot gases from the fire were passed through a large number of small tubes which vastly increased the evaporative surface.
25 There is no record of why Stephenson chose that name. It was then merely a description of a firework, occasionally used as a weapon of war, rather than a vehicle used for space travel.
26 There are also many replicas dotted around the world, including one at the National Rail Museum in York.
27 6 October 1829.
28 Quoted in Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, p. 59.
29 Quoted in ibid., p. 64.
30 The Times, 17 September 1830.
31 Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 31.
32 The Corn Laws, first introduced in 1815 and finally abolished in 1846, kept wheat prices artificially high, protecting landowners from foreign competition and making food more expensive.
33 Indeed, Britain is one of the few countries with a fenced railway, in contrast to, say, the United States where huge freight trains often rumble along main streets or even people’s backyards.
34 In the introduction to Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, p. xii.
TWO: Getting the Railway Habit
1 Frank Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 1830–1980, Robert Hale, 1980, p. 105. Much of this information was still required for train journeys in India until relatively recently.
2 Ibid., p. 102.
3 It was not so much those opening the doors who were killed but people already on the platform, standing too near the trains.
4 Many passengers perished in this way at an accident in Versailles in France in May 1842 (see p. 147).
5 Quoted in many places. See, for example, Simon Garfield, The Last Journey of William Huskisson, Faber, 2002, p. 20.
6 Nicholas Faith, The World the Railways Made, Bodley Head, 1990, p. 15.
7 The three mainland Japanese railways are profitable, though they had huge debt write-offs at privatization in the 1980s, and US freight companies do very well thanks to the sheer distance involved in crossing the country. Freight in India and Russia is profitable too, but otherwise, while individual services may make a profit, the need for cross-subsidy means that throughout the world the vast majority of railway networks are loss-making.
8 Quoted in Ferneyhough, Liverpool & Manchester Railway, p. 93.
9 As the Bodmin & Wadebridge had been built to standard gauge, it was not directly connected to the rest of the network until 1892 when the Great Western’s broad gauge was finally abandoned (as explained in Chapter 9).
10 The Quarterly Review, 1833, quoted in Frank Ferneyhough, The History of Railways in Britain, Osprey Publishing, 1975, p. 73.
11 Many of the arches are now being converted into upmarket restaurants and fashionable nightclubs.
THREE: Joining Up Britain
1 There were specific reasons for this: Belgium was a new country, having just broken away from Holland, and the government was keen to establish its national identity through the creation of a railway network.
2 It claims to be the oldest surviving railway station, though sections of the Manchester terminus of the Liverpool & Manchester remain, incorporated as part of the Manchester Industrial Museum.
3 Quoted in Frank Ferneyhough, History of the Railways, Osprey Publishing, 1975, p. 71.
4 Overall, there were one hundred underbridges, fifty overbridges, five viaducts, two tunnels and two aqueducts.
5 Only for a few years, as in 1844 the improvement in locomotive technology allowed engines to climb the incline to Camden Town.
6 In A Practical Treatise on Railways, A & C Black, 1839.
7 Francis Coghlan, The Iron Road Book, 1838, reprinted by E. & W. Books, 1970, p. 32.
8 Both were tragically demolished, despite a huge protest, by British Railways in 1962 in the modernist mood of the times, and replaced by the current banal glass and concrete block which, hopefully, is soon to be redeveloped in turn.
9 Adrian Vaughan, Railwaymen, Politics and Money, John Murray, 1997, p. 180.
10 Michael Robbins, The Railway Age, Penguin, 1965, p. 67.
11 Quoted in Chris de Winter Hebron, 50 famous railwaymen, Silver Link Publishing, 2005, p. 23.
12 The actual gauge was a quarter of an inch greater than 7ft, to allow the flanges to run unimpeded on the rails.
13 Rodney Weaver in The Oxford Companion to British Railway History, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 25.
14 Early railways were limited to just 1 in 200, a very gentle slope.
FOUR: Changing Britain
1 Known in the industry as ‘recovery time’, and which explains why trains often arrive at the terminus early. There is also a ‘working timetable’ that contains
the real expected timings and includes all freight and other movements, and is quite different from the published timetable.
2 As we see in Chapters 11 and 13, the government took over the railways in both world wars, but under subsequent legislation.
3 Jack Simmons, The Railways of Britain, Macmillan, 1968, p. 11.
4 The Oxford Companion to British Railway History is slightly sceptical about this tale, suggesting that it was probably ‘not a single train, but in a series run in succession’.
5 F. S. Williams, Our Iron Roads: their history, construction and social influences, Bemrose, 1852, p. 285.
6 Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle (eds), The Oxford Companion to Railway History, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 427.
7 Ibid.
8 Interestingly, the line was a long branch but in British Rail timetable maps it was always depicted as a main line, presumably out of deference.
9 Fears had been raised by the terrible accident and fire near Versailles in May 1842.
10 Reported in the Morning Post, quoted in W. M. Acworth, ‘The railways in 1843’, in Bryan Morgan (ed.), Railway-Lover’s Companion, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963, p. 86.
11 Quoted in Acworth, ‘The railways in 1843’, in Morgan (ed.), Railway-Lover’s Companion, p. 93.
12 The Times, 12 January 1850.
13 Quoted in Acworth, ‘The railways in 1843’, in Morgan (ed.), Railway-Lover’s Companion, p. 91.
14 Quoted in Geoffrey Body, The Railway Age: life and lines in the great age of railways, Silver Link Publishing, 1982, p. 21.
15 Quoted in Acworth, ‘The railways in 1843’, in Morgan (ed.), Railway-Lover’s Companion, p. 90.
16 Quoted in ibid.
17 David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience, Basil Blackwell, 1985, p. 28.
FIVE: Railways Everywhere
1 Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, Yale University Press, 1999, p. 98.
2 Figures for authorized mileage vary somewhat between sources because sometimes previously approved schemes were incorporated into new ones and the precise relationship between the two is not always clear.
3 Henry Grote Lewin, The Railway Mania and its Aftermath, 1936, reprinted by David & Charles, 1968, p. 18.
4 Ibid.
5 Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway: how the London Underground was built and how it changed the city forever, Atlantic Books, 2004, p. 20.
6 Berlin and Paris ended up with similar arrangements of separate radial lines ending just outside the city centre, although Berlin opened its Hauptbahnhof, a genuine central railway station, in 2006.
7 The invisible line around central London was to be breached only by the London, Chatham and Dover railway, which broke into the City of London boundary to build stations at Ludgate Hill, Holborn Viaduct and Blackfriars.
8 Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, p. 98.
9 Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway, Thames and Hudson, 1991, p. 254.
10 Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination, p. 100.
11 Cited from a House of Commons report in John Francis, ‘The mania and the crash’, 1851, in Bryan Morgan (ed.) The Railway-Lover’s Companion, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1963, pp. 96–7.
12 Ibid., p. 96.
13 Ibid., pp. 95–6.
14 Although part of this mileage consists of the English portion of through routes from England.
15 Interestingly, the Trent Valley remains such an important line that work to expand it from two tracks to four began in 2004.
16 Terry Gourvish, Mark Huish and the London & North Western Railway, Leicester University Press, 1972, p. 23.
17 Details are contained in Lewin, The Railway Mania and its Aftermath, p. 86.
18 The tunnel which had been hewn through the chalk for the canal in 1824 caused trouble to the railway until 2004 when it was closed for a year to be relined at a cost of £35m.
19 Adrian Vaughan, Railwaymen, Politics and Money, John Murray, 1997, p. 116
20 There is confusion in British railway terminology in that the West Coast route goes nowhere near the sea until one gets a view of Morecambe Bay near Carnforth, over 230 miles from London, and on the East Coast, from the Great Northern railway, the coast is first visible well north of Newcastle. However, we are stuck with this nomenclature and therefore it is used throughout this book.
21 Oddly enough, track record is not a railway expression but probably originated with horse racing.
22 Vaughan, Railwaymen, Politics and Money, p. 106.
23 Ibid.
24 O. S. Nock, 150 Years of mainline Railways, David & Charles, 1980, p. 39.
25 This, rather confusingly, was a separate railway to the North Midland, one of the three railways which merged to create the Midland.
26 Lewin, The Railway Mania and its Aftermath, p. 357.
27 Quoted in Frank Ferneyhough, The History of Railways in Britain, Osprey Publishing, 1975, p. 88.
28 Jack Simmons, The Railways of Britain, Macmillan, 3rd edn, 1986.
29 Vaughan, Railwaymen, Politics and Money, p. 107.
30 They only began to be phased out once new ticket machines like the Omniprinter started to be used in 1959 and National Cash Register systems became commonplace in the 1960s.
31 Francis, ‘The mania and the crash’, in Morgan (ed.) The Railway-Lover’s Companion, p. 99.
SIX: The Big Companies: Great But Not Necessarily Good
1 The more direct route, used by the East Coast Line trains today, was fully opened in 1852.
2 Nicholas Faith, The World the Railways Made, Bodley Head, 1990, p. 22.
3 Household Words, Vol. 8, 1853/4, p. 412.
4 Terry Gourvish, Mark Huish and the London & North Western Railway, Leicester University Press, 1972.
5 E. T. McDermott, History of the Great Western Railway, Vol. 1, Ian Allen (reprint), 1982, p. 183.
6 See www.victorianstation.com/palace.html
7 The structure was later moved to Crystal Palace, which gave the park, the surrounding area and the football club their name, but burnt down in 1936.
8 About the same number who visited the far less successful Millennium Dome in 2000.
9 There is a list of the railways he built (which stretches to six densely typeset pages) in his biography, The Life and Labours of Mr. Brassey, 1805–1870, by Sir Arthur Helps (Bell and Daldy, 1872, reprinted by Tempus Books in 2006).
10 Introduction by Jack Simmons in Arthur Helps, The Life and Labours of Mr. Brassey, p. viii.
11 Gourvish in Mark Huish and the London & North Western Railway (p. 23), says that the cost per mile for railways across Britain averaged £31,000 in 1846, double the cost in Belgium, where the state planned and specified the railway system. This was a period of very low or even at times negative inflation.
12 One estimate suggests that by 1900 Manchester’s railways had displaced between 41,000 and 55,000 residents.
13 Steven Marchs in J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (eds), The Victorian City: Images and Realities, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973, p. 269.
14 Jack Simmons, The Railway in Town & Country, 1830–1914, David & Charles, 1986, p. 34.
15 Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway, Thames and Hudson, 1991, p. 40.
16 Jack Simmons, The Railway in England & Wales, 1830–1914, Leicester University Press, 1978.
SEVEN: The Agatha Christie Railway
1 Locomotive and coach wheels are usually fitted with tyres which rather like those on cars are replaced when worn out.
2 In Small Talk at Wreyland, Cambridge University Press, 1918.
3 David St John Thomas, The Country Railway, David & Charles, 1976, p. 26.
4 Detailed in Brian Hardy, Tube trains on the Isle of Wight, Capital, 2003. Remarkably a very heavily loss-making section of 8.5 miles between Shanklin and Ryde survives today, operated by six two-car former London Underground Tube trains (dating back to 1938).
5 St John Thomas, The Country Railway, p. 85.
6 Michael Robbins, The Railway Age, Penguin Books, 1965, p. 63.
7 St John Thomas, The Country Railway, p. 28.
8 Ibid., p. 9.
9 See J. Horsley Denton, ‘Private Stations’, in H. A. Vallance (ed.), The Railway Enthusiast’s Bedside Book, B. T. Batsford, 1966.
10 Another more recent example is in the 1996 cult film Trainspotting, where the group of misfits are bemused to find themselves in a totally remote station in the Scottish countryside.
11 The other four were the Caledonian, the Glasgow & South Western, the Highland and the Great North of Scotland.
12 In fact, many canals were bought up by the railways to kill any chance of competition.
13 St John Thomas, The Country Railway, p. 121.
14 Ibid., p. 125.
15 C. Hamilton Ellis, The Midland Railway, Ian Allan, 1953, p. 72.
16 Ibid., p. 74.
17 Later reduced to 2d: see Christian Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway, Atlantic Books, 2004, pp. 54–6, for a detailed account.
18 Sir William Acworth, The Railways of England, London, 1889, p. 412.
19 R. M. Robbins, quoted in H. P. White, A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain, Vol. 13, Greater London, David & Charles, 1963.
20 See Wolmar, The Subterranean Railway, for this story.
21 F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Suburbia, Leicester University Press, 1982, p. 69.
22 C. Hamilton Ellis, British Railway History 1877–1947, George Allen & Unwin, 1959, p. 61.
23 As opposed to grade-separated junctions which use under- or over-passes to reduce conflicting movements.
24 Adrian Vaughan, Railwaymen, Politics and Money, John Murray, 1997, p.
25 C. Hamilton Ellis, British Railway History, Vol. 1, 1830–1876, George Allen & Unwin, 1954, p. 241.
26 Services to and from Kent will, of course, be greatly speeded up when domestic services on the high-speed line start operating in 2009.
27 They could not quite bring themselves to agree a full merger and still retained their individual identity as subsidiaries of a large grouping until the creation of the Big Four in 1923.
28 Their rivalry was fiercest on the Circle Line, which was operated jointly by the two companies: one company provided the clockwise trains and the other the anti-clockwise ones. They both insisted on having their own booking offices, whose clerks would try to maximize their own company’s business, irrespective of whether that was the best option for the passenger, and might send them the long way around.
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