In his capacity as a railway enthusiast, Casson proceeded to move to the next phase, which was to construct his own railway system, something beyond even the most elaborate train set: an entire counterfactual network as he believes it could and should have developed after 1830. By Casson’s reckoning – and it involved far more complex study than ever went into building the real thing – a 12,000-mile network, properly thought out, would have had the same social benefit as the 20,000 route-miles that Britain did have at the peak just before the First World War.
Some of the follies of the British system that developed are obvious. It is not a mark of the city’s grandeur that London has a dozen different main railway entrances instead of a single Hauptbahnhof, Termini or Union Station, which even the Americans usually managed; it’s a mark of national stupidity that has cost trillions of pounds in wasted time for travellers over the generations.3 Because the rival companies were fighting for dominance and each had its own station, the major provincial cities also failed to become major hubs. To this day changing trains to go north or south remains an infernal nuisance in Manchester and Glasgow. Swansea, for many years, had six different stations, enabling it – in this respect, if no other – to rival Paris. Even in a town as small as Dunstable, Casson points out, changing trains was difficult because the lines never linked up.
For Casson, the mania (‘a redistribution of income from naive investors to street-wise lawyers’) and its collapse meant that the eventual British railway network was a salvage job. ‘The failure of Parliament to establish an integrated national system was the permanent and most serious aspect of the legacy,’ he says. The early railway engineers were primarily concerned with getting from one end of the route to the other, rather than maximizing revenue by stopping at the major centres in between. That is another reason why Robert Ste-phenson was unperturbed about missing Northampton, and why the Great Western avoided historically important Trow-bridge, and opted for the tiddly village of Swindon instead. In the 1840s the pressures on the entrepreneurs changed: landowners desperately wanted a railway instead of trying to keep it away. The result was a shambles, based on local politics, engineers’ whims, the state of the capital market and pure blind chance.
To put it right, Casson retreated into his dream world. This is a very academic dream world in that it is founded on eight main heuristics (‘the Steiner principle, the triangle principle, the cut-off principle . . .’) which are hard to criticize if you cannot quite understand what a heuristic is. The result was a very carefully ordered dream too, with just one trunk line to the north out of London, heading through Northampton to Rugby, where it branches off in different directions. This is, of course, the basis of Britain’s motorway system. And his hubs and junctions are not necessarily the existing hubs and junctions: Wetherby, Melrose, Kirkby Lonsdale, Trowbridge and indeed Northampton become vital railway centres; Crewe is left alone as an obscure and peaceful Cheshire hamlet.
Casson’s analysis puts into perspective what was the first major catastrophe that shaped Britain’s failing twenty-first century transportation system. His system is an awesome piece of work and far better than the real thing. In heaven, perhaps, I will be able to take a ride on such Cassonian confections as the Trowbridge cut-off and the Axminster loop. But though Casson appears to have taken everything into account, it is, I think, possible to identify some weaknesses, even without a clear understanding of heuristics.
Starting with the most trivial point: if Robert Stephenson did not have the technology in the 1830s to get trains by a direct route into Northampton, then no one else would have done, including Casson.
Secondly, I believe that Casson – as economists sometimes do – has underestimated the inevitability of politics. In 2008 Gordon Brown’s government announced plans to distance consideration of major infrastructure projects from the democratic process, imagining that this way it would thus be possible to dump a nuclear power plant on some unsuspecting village without objectors being able to stop it. I suspect the British people will prove more resilient and resourceful than the would-be dictators expect. And even in the first half of the nineteenth century, when power was more concentrated, it was not possible to ignore local feelings – whether people were fighting to get a railway, or keep it out. Britain is not Belgium. Casson also ignores what was sensed instinctively then and we know for certain now: that British government involvement with the railways will always tend towards the calamitous. In an alternative universe, Britain would probably have matched France in the 1840s and talked about railways rather than building them.
Also, his single trunk line does sound awfully vulnerable. Even if it were designed as a ten- or twelve-lane highway, which is what would now be needed, it would be at the mercy – as the M1 is – of all manner of problems: crashes, weather, sabotage, incompetence. Cars can find an alternative route when the motorway is closed and trains need one too: a network has to be robust as well as intricate.
The final point is that all these supposedly wasteful alternative routes turned out, during the most crucial years of the twentieth century to have their uses, as we shall see. The construction of Britain’s railways was a traditional British cock-up, but it was not an unmitigated cock-up.
Fear and Loving
From the day the Liverpool & Manchester opened, the overblown, generalized fears about what the railways might do to passengers, livestock and the countryside all rapidly disappeared. But the Huskisson business created a very specific fear, of the trains themselves.
There was a certain adventurousness in the early days. People accustomed to riding on top of stagecoaches happily rode on train roofs for a while, as they still do in parts of Africa and Asia. (What is really terrifying is when they ride on top of trains with electric overhead cables.) But they soon got the message not to wander off.
Small boys had raced the horse-drawn Stockton & Darlington, jumping on and off the wagons. Meanwhile, adults walked the line, which seemed natural at a time when the distinction between railways and highways was still fuzzy. This did not become a national habit. After Huskisson’s death British railways were almost invariably fenced in. This was partly because landowners did not want passengers contaminating their estates with their mucky presence. But the idea rapidly took hold that trains were dangerous unless you were on one.
P. G. Wodehouse has a wonderful line about Aunt Agatha ‘whose demeanour was now rather like one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back’. But Wodehouse wrote that in 1923, by which time he was largely based in America where, if anyone did pick daisies, they would be quite likely to do so on the railway, or at any rate the railroad. In the US, trains marched through city streets (most famously in Syracuse, New York), and hobos leapt in and out of boxcars that often had more passengers than a subway in rush hour. In the cinema the oncoming train has been a constant motif from The Perils of Pauline to a modern rite-of-passage movie like Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me: the casual walk across the trestle bridge in the sunshine, the distant toot of the freight train, the Huskissonian look of horror at the realization that there is nowhere to run or hide, the terrifying approach . . . and the deus ex machina that enables the hero to escape.
In the Third World, the shantytowns of Nairobi and Dhaka nuzzle against the tracks, and the street vendors of Bangkok lay out their wares so close to the rails that their limes, mangoes and fingers all look certain to be crushed by the wheels. Unthinkable in Britain.
In the 1950s the British chanteuse Alma Cogan sang The Railroad Runs through the Middle of the House; it was one of the songs of my childhood, but the very word ‘railroad’ gives it away as American, as does the concept. The middle of the house? Totally against British planning regulations! Trains are segregated as if they are carriers of disease. The arrangement applies even in stations. From Euston to the remotest country halt, the platform, as the name implies, has always had to be raised high above the tracks.4 The expense has been massive.
The French have much faster trains than we do yet, even at major stations, passengers potter quite happily along on platforms barely raised above ground level. American conductors just keep a set of portable steps.
Not merely did British railways require fences, but the company was responsible for maintaining them. This became more urgent after the Southern Railway introduced third-rail electrification in 1925. And the law was reinforced in 1972 (Herrington’s case) when the House of Lords ruled that the British Railways Board owed a duty of care to trespassers. Get run over by a train and you can claim. The widow Huskisson should have sued too.
In Arnside, Cumbria, there is traditionally an annual mass trespass on the Kent Viaduct across Morecambe Bay. This is said to be the exercise of the parishioners’ ancient right of way. However, it takes place on Christmas Day, when there are no trains.5 And its very rarity makes it worthy of note. Fear, I am convinced, is part of the British fascination with trains. But the conscious fear of actually travelling on trains faded very rapidly. Though the early financial support for railways came almost wholly from the northern bourgeoisie, the Lancashire capitalists and the north-eastern Quakers, it rapidly spread across the classes. The Liverpool & Manchester’s initial assumption, remember, was that the main potential revenue would come from goods, particularly from raw cotton, whose volume had outgrown the canals’ capacity to carry it.
Then the company discovered that the manufacturers themselves would also be travelling: the story of the Manchester gentleman who went to Liverpool twice in one day to buy cotton tickled the press’s fancy. Then, slowly, the railway latched onto the potential of the workers as passengers. The weavers started to use the line to carry their finished work to their customers, with one weaver carrying the produce of two others. The managers responded by imposing a one-person, one-pack rule. So the weavers staged a boycott and got the rule rescinded: the first recorded instance, according to Nicholas Faith, of a popular revolt against ‘the almighty, monopolistic railway’.
But it took a while for the working-classes to get much benefit. Third-class did not exist in the early days (although the Liverpool & Manchester experimented with a ‘superior description of carriage’ above first-class). This was partly because the companies were at first taxed per passenger mile, so there was a disincentive to selling cheap tickets. The Stockton & Darlington introduced a third-class in 1835, partly to draw in the walkers, who up there had not yet succumbed to the trespass taboo.
The notion of carrying the working-class developed from there, but even third-class fares were high, and third-class passengers were confined to the slowest and most inconvenient trains. Some thought they were actually worse off than before because the old wagons and carts that used to carry them were being driven out of business along with the stagecoaches. So there was no alternative to the new railways, where conditions for the poor might range from the bad to the unspeakable. We might talk these days about cattle-class on Ryanair or First Great Western; this was the real thing.
Third-class generally comprised open trucks and while, on the face of it, they were similar to a carter’s wagon, even a slow steam locomotive travelled about two or three times the speed of a horse, and so its passengers got a great deal colder. And if there was any danger going, they got the brunt of it. The Great Western, which opened its first stretch in 1838, did not bother with such riff-raff at all until it reached Reading in 1840, when it was announced – and you can imagine the official hand holding the official nose – that ‘goods train passengers would be conveyed in uncovered trucks by the goods train only’. Since the Great Western’s second-class was uncovered, the next rung down had to be disgusting. According to Charles E. Lee’s splendid monograph on Passenger Class Distinctions: ‘The seats for the goods train passengers were eighteen inches high, and were fitted in trucks with sides and ends only two feet above the floor; standing was thus very dangerous, especially as there were no spring buffers. The London-Bristol journey involved ten to twelve hours of exposure and discomfort.’ And worse.
On Christmas Eve 1841 two of these trucks were put on a goods train to Bristol to carry home workers who were building the new Houses of Parliament. They were placed behind the locomotive and tender but in front of the freight wagons. The weather was bitter. The sides were so low that passengers might have been thrown out in the event of a sudden jolt. It was more than a jolt. Near Sonning the train ploughed into a landslide: eight dead, seventeen injured.
Remarkably, considering the hair-raising safety methods of the 1830s – no telegraph, no signals – this was the first high-profile accident since Day One. And it did lead to stricter regulations in the 1844 Act. But a Commons enquiry soon revealed that none of the companies had fully complied with the Act and, though third-class was normally now covered, that in many ways made things worse. The closed wagons had appalling ventilation, making them a haven for germs; and they had little light by day and, normally, none at night which converted the carriage, as one press report put it, into ‘a den of infamy’. The Lee monograph is one of those splen – did works that, by its concentration on the arcane, illuminates far greater historical truths. It includes a drawing of a post-1841 Great Western third-class wagon. It is hard to decide what it most resembles: a Black Maria or a poultry lorry.
Even in 1850, alfresco travel had evidently not disappeared entirely. In his short story The Fiddler’s Reel, Thomas Hardy describes the arrival of an excursion train from Wessex at Waterloo for the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace:
The unfortunate occupants of these vehicles were . . . in a pitiable condition from their long journey; blue-faced, stiff-necked, sneezing, rain-beaten, chilled to the marrow, many of the men being hatless; in fact, they resembled people who had been out all night in an open boat on a rough sea, rather than inland excursionists for pleasure. The women had in some degree protected themselves by turning up the skirts of their gowns over their heads, but as by this arrangement they were additionally exposed about the hips, they were all more or less in a sorry plight.
The stoicism of our ancestors beggars belief, and they embraced the excursion train from the first opportunity. The precise first instance is unknown, but we know that in the 1830s the horse-drawn Whitby-Pickering line in Yorkshire issued cheap tickets to a church bazaar. Thomas Cook’s first enterprise was undertaken in his capacity as secretary of his local branch of the South Midland Temperance Association. In 1841 he took 570 people from Leicester to Loughborough for an anti-alcohol rally. We assume the company did not have to worry about passengers overdosing on cheap lager and wrecking the carriages.
When the Great Exhibition opened ten years later, Cook was hired by the Midland Railway to use his skills in drumming up business for their trips from Yorkshire to London. A fares war broke out between the Midland and its rival, the Great Northern, and the cost was slashed from fifteen shillings (75p) to five; one estimate is that Cook alone organized travel for 165,000 passengers.
By then the masses were accustomed to using their rare days off to get on a cheap train, however congested and uncomfortable it might be, and wherever it might be going. There were even trips to factories as well as to zoos and seaside resorts. Indeed, there were treats available that are denied to modern day-trippers. In 1849 John Gleeson Wilson murdered all the other occupants of the house where he lodged in Liverpool: a pregnant woman, her two children and her maid. A crowd estimated at 100,000 turned up to watch him hang: ‘The railway turned the occasion to a business purpose,’ said The Times, ‘by running cheap trains, all of which were densely packed.’ Later in the century public executions were abolished, and professional football became popular instead.
In those first few extraordinary years, every kind of business was affected by the railways. The London ‘magsman’ – or street trickster – experienced a splendid boom when the provincial innocents made their first visit to the big city. However, according to the historian of the underworld Kellow Chesney, this was a temporary phenomenon: �
��The magsmen reaped the harvest, but in the long run the transport revolution worked against them by helping to form a more sophisticated town-centred society . . . On the whole the social and technological changes of the nineteenth century tended to favour the higher grades of fraud.’
Quite so. Crooked railway entrepreneurs often did extremely well.
So Excessively Improper
From the reign of Elizabeth I until 1844 Eton College held a ceremony on Salt Hill in the middle of what is now Slough. It was known as ‘Montem’, and was replete with traditions of an obscure and complicated nature, even by Etonian standards. It had started as an initiation rite for new boys but, by the end, had become a major public occasion: in May 1844 Her Majesty graciously lent the college the immense tent of Tippoo Sahib, captured at the storming of Seringapatam, for the Eton boys to dine in.
Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, attended that year, travelling by rail from Paddington to Slough in the Great Western’s state carriage. The whole day, reported The Times, ‘came off with all those accompaniments, of crowds, equipages, processions, gay dresses, juvenile joy, beauty, drums and dust, which usually attend this triennial Saturnalia’. However, Etonians, their relatives and Royalty were not the only ones present. As the late Victorian historian of Eton, H. C. Maxwell Lyte, put it: ‘The opening of the Great Western railway had the effect of bringing down a promiscuous horde of sightseers.’ And the headmaster, Edward Craven Hawtrey, returned to his quarters with a steely resolve.
He bided his time. But in November 1846, six months before the next Montem was scheduled, the news seeped out. The whole business was being abolished forthwith. ‘One could hardly help regretting the abolition of so very picturesque a ceremony,’ The Times said now, in a much lower key, ‘but still the alteration of circumstances may render such a step expedient. The great facilities afforded by railways for conveying vast multitudes of people to Eton and Salt Hill render it hazardous to encourage the assemblage of such a mixed crowd as is now certain to be collected at the Montem.’
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