(The Duke had to be protected from the mobs which swarmed all over the tracks. Uncharacteristically this war hero was so scared that it took considerable persuasion to get him to complete the journey to Manchester. The whole episode, including Huskisson’s death, was so traumatic that he could not be tempted onto another train for thirteen years.)
Less publicly, Rainhill had also introduced the idea of technological obsolescence. The railways replaced canals built in the previous half-century, and the post-coaches running over macadamised road surfaces introduced in the previous two decades. Yet these had represented the biggest advance in road transport since the Romans left Britain fourteen centuries earlier. Travelling time between major British cities had halved between 1770 and 1830.
But the locomotives themselves became obsolescent in a matter of months, not decades. By the end of 1830 Rocket had been replaced by Northumbrian, another of Robert Stephenson’s designs. ‘In all essential particulars,’ in L. T. C. Rolt’s words, ‘the boiler of the Northumbrian was the same as that fitted to every orthodox locomotive from that day to this.’ Within a few years the immortal Rocket had been relegated to the sidings. But it had served its purpose. It had seen off the opposition and proved that a mobile steam locomotive could replace horses, fixed engines and steam-powered road carriages.
Side and end views of a locomotive engine similar to the Planet, one of the Stephensons’ triumphant designs.
The immediate success of the Liverpool & Manchester sent shock waves, first throughout Britain, and then, with some delay, round the world. By 1833 a Railway Companion describing an excursion along the line could claim that ‘already locomotive power is rapidly superseding every other species of conveyance throughout the civilised world.’
Within fifteen years lines had been built between London and most of Britain’s major cities, although London’s first line (and the first urban railway in the world) from London Bridge to Greenwich, was completed only in 1838, its arches soaring high over the slums and market gardens along the way. Robert Stephenson’s line between London and Birmingham was even more significant, and its parliamentary passage a crucial battle between the railway and the canal interests. It was not only the first link between the capital and a major provincial city (and thus, albeit indirectly, between the capital, Liverpool and Manchester), but it also ran parallel – and often very close to – the country’s foremost man-made waterway, the Grand Junction Canal, with its twenty-six speedy daily flyboats for urgent goods, and Watling Street, with its sixteen coaches daily between the two towns. With the London & Birmingham the newly almighty – private – railway interest had dealt a deadly blow to the public, communal thoroughfares, canal and road, where the small man could compete on equal terms with major carriers.
However, no-one yet believed that canals had had their day; indeed more miles of canals than railways were built between 1830 and 1840. John Francis5 quoted one wiseacre that, ‘long before the London & Birmingham is ready, such are the improvements now making in canals, that not only may the charge be expected to be many times less than the railway, but the time will be considerably saved.’
By contrast post-coaches, and turnpike traffic in general, were seen as obviously doomed. The Greenwich line, a mere four miles long, saved fifty minutes over the turnpike and showed how even a short line could prosper. The London to Brighton line, opened in 1841, proved that the railway could supersede even the most efficient stage coach service. The coaches to Brighton ran every hour, covering the 90 km to London in under five hours, yet within a couple of years they were mere relics of a bygone age.
With the post-coaches went the coaching inns, the ostlers, and the carters, some of them substantial businesses. Only a few coaching entrepreneurs managed to switch businesses, most famously William James Chaplin, who sold his firm, and invested the proceeds in the London & Southampton railway, of which he became chairman.
By the time the London & Birmingham opened in 1839 the public was so used to railways that there were great complaints when passengers were ferried by coach at the previously respectable speed of eleven miles an hour over a stretch of line which could not be completed for several months because of the difficulty in building the Kilsby tunnel. The public’s astonishingly speedy acceptance of this fearsome new form of transport was largely due to its excellent safety record. Only two of the five million or so passengers carried by the Liverpool & Manchester in its first decade of operation lost their lives. ‘During the same period,’ noted Samuel Smiles, ‘the loss of life by the upsetting of stage-coaches had been immensely greater in proportion.’
Many less exalted passengers obviously shared the feelings of Charles Greville, the Clerk to the Privy Council. In 1837 he decided, on an impulse, to ‘run down’ to see the Earl of Derby by train. He was delighted. ‘The first sensation,’ he wrote, ‘is a slight degree of nervousness and a feeling of being run away with, but a sense of security soon supervenes … it entirely renders all other travelling irksome and tedious by comparison.’ The next year he records how, as a matter of course, he took the train to Slough and then walked to Windsor Castle when he was summoned there by Queen Victoria.
The Liverpool & Manchester immediately bred a new world of hustling at a previously unimaginable pace. According to Francis, ‘Men talk of “getting up the steam”, of “railway speed” and reckon distances by hours and minutes. The press never got tired of one particular story, of a gentleman who left Manchester in the morning, went thence to Liverpool, purchased and took back with him one hundred and fifty tons of cotton, and having sold it, returned to Liverpool on a similar errand with similar success.’
At a more humble level Manchester weavers found they could use the railway to reduce the time they spent carrying their loads to their customers. Three of them would give their packages to one of their number. But, in Francis’s words, ‘railway managers are political economists’, and for a time they allowed each passenger to carry only a single pack. The weavers retorted by boycotting the line, and won their point – the first recorded instance of a populist revolt against excessive charges or unreasonable regulations imposed by the almighty, monopolistic, railway.
Traditional railway histories have made much of the opposition to railways mounted by the landowning aristocracy. Its members undeniably made life a misery for the promoters, especially when House of Lords committees’ examined railway bills. A few objected on principle, but most were practical men. They did not want their hunting and shooting interfered with or their views spoiled; they were appalled at the behaviour of the promoters and their surveyors. (The most often-quoted, the Lincolnshire MP Colonel Sibthorp, was clearly regarded as something of an eccentric even at the time.)
The need to avoid the coverts where foxes lurked and game bred led to a number of diversions. However, the railway people added to their own problems by trampling over territory sacred to squire and parson since time immemorial. In an anonymous volume of ‘Railroad Eclogues’ published in 1846 the Squire moans about:
These railway bores, who, papers in each hand,
Request permission to cut up our land –
Request permission! I should rather say
Who, leave unasked, invade our lands, survey
temples and trespass …
… No dies non, no Sabbath to projectors.
‘Sir we’re the crooked-railroad deputation,
And merely want your greenhouse for a station.’
At which point the parson chimes in with his complaint:
A grand connecting line will tunnel under
My rectory, and cut my glebe asunder.
The church they don’t intend to touch at present.
But the landowners were greedy, and soon found that opposition could be astonishingly profitable. Cash, and lots of it, soon placated them. ‘By paying out £750,000 for land originally valued at £250,000’, wrote L. T. C. Rolt, ‘the most strenuous objectors were silenced.’
In his splendid n
ovel Mr Facey Romford’s Hounds, R. S. Surtees recounts how a certain Mr Mellowfield ‘who had retired from the troubles of fish-curing to enjoy his filberts and his madeira in the evening of life was so shocked at the invasion of his privacy by the arrival of a railway that “nothing but a strong application of golden ointment could have got over the difficulty. Ten thousand pounds for two thousand pounds” of property mollified him.’
The landowners’ profits continued after they had held the promoters up to ransom. Francis noted that ‘Some agriculturalists, who had vehemently declared it would ruin their property, discovered that property was increased in value and withdrew from the contest; and some landowners, who had combatted it because it was to ruin the country, found that houses grew in the place of corn, and that ground rents more than compensated for grain.’
At first, the upper classes kept their distance by travelling in their own carriages. ‘To enable private carriages to travel along the railway,’ wrote A Tourist,* flat forms are provided, upon which the carriage is raised and its wheels firmly secured upon the platforms by moveable grooves.’ But these were uncomfortable and inconvenient and by the end of the decade most of their owners travelled like everyone else. By 1840 the first special royal coach had been built for the Dowager Queen Adelaide. Prince Albert, apostle of modernity, was naturally an early enthusiast, and soon converted his wife. By 1842 Queen Victoria noted how she had come to London ‘by the railroad from Windsor, in half an hour, free from the dust and crowd and heat, and I am quite charmed with it’.
In the 1830s two great engineers improved on the Stephensons’ ideas. George’s former pupil, Joseph Locke, refused to accept that lines had to be relatively level because of the low power of existing engines, arguing that locomotive power would increase sufficiently for gradients to be relatively steep. As a result Locke surveyed and built a much shorter though steeper alternative to the lengthy coastal route proposed by the Stephensons for the West Coast route to Scotland.
The second challenge was mounted by the greatest of all Victorian engineers, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, with his 7-foot gauge line* to Bristol and the west. Thanks to the superb, level track he laid down, his broad-gauge system set incredible standards of speed. By the mid-1840s his trains were averaging over forty miles an hour to Bristol (a speed which only doubled in the subsequent century), averaging over fifty mph from Bristol to Taunton on their way to Exeter. By the mid-1840s Brunel’s trains were reaching this town, over two hundred miles from London, in a mere five hours. Almost incidentally, Brunel established the first town specifically developed to cater for railways at Swindon, then merely a little village at the pointwhere engines were changed.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel: greatest genius of rail’s early years
Brunel’s swaggering success put the proponents of the normal ‘narrow-gauge’ on their mettle. The competition between the two gauges ensured that by the end of the 1840s most of the major towns in the country were linked by trains averaging over thirty miles an hour, for the potential of the steam locomotive was exploited more quickly and more effectively than that of the internal combustion engine was to be seventy-five years later.
The pressures of the 1830s dealt a final blow to the idea of the ‘Renaissance engineer’, able to design an engine or a railway line at will. Although Robert Stephenson’s original contribution had been as a mechanical engineer, in the 1830s and 1840s he was forced to concentrate on his work as a civil engineer, while Brunel’s interference in the design of the locomotives he required was often rather unhappy. Their successors rarely combined civil and mechanical engineering work.
Brunel was also the first of the many visionaries who perceived a railway line as merely one link in an intercontinental transport chain (see Chapter VI). To him the railway to Bristol was merely one step on the route across the Atlantic, and his magnificent steamship, the Great Western, forced Edward Cunard and the ‘Liverpool Interest’ to develop steamships which revolutionised travel on the North Atlantic within a few years.
The level track demanded by Robert Stephenson for the London to Birmingham line, and the broad swathe cut through the countryside by the Great Western, involved earthworks of a size not required even by the most ambitious canals. Stephenson demanded cuttings of previously unimaginable length and depth, and both he and Brunel required longer tunnels than had ever been dug before, ideas which naturally produced the usual buzz of scepticism. They were more expensive and more difficult to dig than anticipated, but proved practicable and profitable. The engineers, however, soon found that it was useless to rely on a horde of small sub-contractors for such vast projects. They gave contracts to single men, like Thomas Brassey and Samuel Morton Peto, the models for the contractors who erupted over the face of the globe in the succeeding decades.
The spread of the railways forced towns to take attitudes towards the intruder. Liverpool was positive, and Liverpool Council was prepared to invest in the tunnel costing well over £100,000 from Edgehill to Lime Street in the centre of the city. As a result Liverpool became by far the biggest English city with a single central station. By contrast Manchester had three disconnected termini. So, originally, did Birmingham, where the first terminus of the first major line linking a capital with a major provincial city was on the edge of the urban area. The burghers of another historic city, York, were so keen that, in Gordon Biddle’s words, they ‘positively welcomed one inside the medieval walls that required an arch cutting through the fabric … the station covered the known sites of three Roman baths’.6
The stations themselves quickly assumed their permanent character, as can be seen from Crown Street, Liverpool, the first purpose-built passenger station in the world. Its architect remains unknown, though he was certainly greatly influenced by George Stephenson. It was astonishingly modern. In Carroll Meeks’ words7 it:
embodied the basic features of the modern station in embryo. The passenger preparing to depart from Liverpool arrived by carriage or omnibus at a vehicle court – foreshadowing the covered driveways of later stations – which was separated from the street traffic by a wall. On entering the building he found himself in a room which combined the function of ticket selling and waiting, as in the great concourse of today’s terminals. From the waiting-room he passed onto the platform and into his carriage under the cover of a train-shed, the degree of protection was greater than it is in many recent stations.
During the 1830s architects used a variety of styles to glorify the new form of transport. The most astonishing was at Euston, where in the mid-1840s Philip Hardwicke built a magnificent, classical Great Hall. A grand staircase led to the equally grand offices for the Directors of the London & North Western Railway, the largest railway company – and thus the biggest enterprise – in the land, and the prototype of the arrogant, self-sufficient, lordly railway company.
The magnificence of Euston was echoed at the other end of the line, where Birmingham’s first station boasted an Ionic portico, the Midlands’ equivalent of the triumphal arch at Euston. And both Euston and Birmingham boasted another convenience, a station hotel. On the 18th September 1838 The Times reported that ‘part of the magnificent Station house in Birmingham has recently been licensed as an hotel … so that passengers, if they think proper, may be accommodated with every good thing without leaving the company’s premises’.
These schemes required more capital more quickly than any previous form of capital investment. Fortunately for the promoters, no-one really believed that a railway could be unprofitable. In the dry words of a modern economic historian,8 ‘Private capital was forthcoming for railway investment in the later 1830s and early 1840s only because the eventual lowness of the private rate of return on some projects was not anticipated.’
Francis, looking back fifteen years later, saw the 1830s as a period of relative innocence. ‘The established lines were conducted by men who could not have done a mean action had they tried, and would not have done if they could. The monied public felt this, a
nd purchased freely where they trusted fully.’ Nevertheless even this Golden Age of Innocence was full of dubious schemes, each promoted in a separate Parliamentary Bill which provided opportunities for much debate and more bribery.
The sums involved were gigantic: Thomas Brassey built sixty miles of difficult line in Northern Italy for the same sum – £430,000 – as it cost to put through the Bill for a single English railway, the Lancs & Yorks. Even worse, in John Francis’s words, ‘scarcely was it recognised as an object of legitimate investment than it became a subject of illegitimate speculation.’
The success of the ‘railway interest’ provoked the complaint that ‘in our country, alone, has the right of possession in perpetuity been granted by the government’.9 From the beginning their profits attracted envy, naturally expressed in demands for government control. This was somewhat unfair. As John Francis put it, ‘It was said, and with much justice, that railways were as beneficial as canals, but that, though the latter averaged 33 per cent, there had been no restriction on their dividends, no claim on their profits.’
By the early 1840s politicians were already heavily involved. Lord Dalhousie, who carried his enthusiasm for railways – and for government control over them – to India when he became Governor-General, went so far as to suggest that the government should be given the power to nationalise the railways if their profits had been found excessive over a ten-year period. Before a railway could be built a board should examine the promoters’ capacities and their forecasts of costs, revenue and profits. In the event these ideas were swept away. A York-born promoter, George Hudson, did a private deal with William Gladstone to water down the original, more restrictive, proposals for controlling the railways.
Francis recognised that ‘The spirit of unreasoning optimism was in the air; the possibilities and advantages which the country was to attain with liberal railway communication were deemed to be boundless.’ The railway spirit was epitomised by Hudson, the very archetype of the vulgar, swaggering adventurer bred world-wide by the railways. In the words of his biographer10 ‘his energies flowed into four distinct channels: first, railway, dock and other industrial enterprises; secondly, banking and finance; thirdly, the acquisition and management of landed property; lastly, politics local and national’ – he naturally represented his native York in Parliament. But, inevitably in a railway-mad age, railways came first.
The World the Railways Made Page 3
