Fire and Steam

by Christian Wolmar

  Work started in 1869, and it took seven years and the efforts of 6,000 men to complete it. Poor Sharland, whose route was used faithfully, never saw the completion of the scheme. He died soon after his survey at the age of just twenty-six, his health broken by the effort. He was the line’s first victim but by no means its last. The total death toll is unknown but over a hundred navvies and members of their families succumbed to smallpox in the summer of 1871 in the parish of Batty Green, which took its odd name from the nearby pothole called Batty Wife’s Hole. The Ribblehead viaduct alone claimed one death per week during the five years it took to build. Though it is impossible to prove, the line probably took the highest toll on its workforce of any railway built in Britain, as a result of the harsh conditions and difficult terrain; the evidence is in the various cemeteries and memorials along its route.

  The Midland’s route to Scotland, via the Settle & Carlisle, may have been more circuitous than those of its East and West Coast rivals’, but the company, realizing it was at a disadvantage in terms of the length of the journey, offered a far better service to its passengers than its rivals. Pullman and sleeping cars were provided in carriages that incorporated the innovation of sprung wheel bogies (which gave a far smoother ride than simple wheels on axles). According to Jack Simmons, writing in 1978: ‘A Midland Scotch express of 1876 belongs firmly to the modern world; those of its West Coast and East Coast rivals were still, one might say, medieval.’19 The Settle & Carlisle line was the last to be built by traditional methods, using little more than the sheer brute strength of the navvies and lots of dynamite – barely different from those employed by Stephenson on the Liverpool & Manchester over half a century before. Thereafter there would be increased mechanization and less reliance on the navvies.

  There was one other significant line built around that time, the Hull & Barnsley, born of the Corporation of Hull’s dissatisfaction with the monopoly of the North Eastern railway. The name was a misnomer since the railway, which was completed in 1885 after five years of construction, never reached Barnsley. It was to prove an expensive mistake right from the outset as it had to cut through two miles of chalk which, together with other construction difficulties and the fact that its near eighty miles of railway merely duplicated other lines, resulted in the company going bankrupt soon after the railway opened. One more main line remained to be built, the Great Central (see Chapter 10) but most of the energy of the railway companies was now being focused on improvements rather than further expansion and expensive lines that duplicated those of their rivals.

  NINE

  SPEEDING TO DANGER

  There never was truly a golden age of the railways. There was always something that was not quite right in the world of the iron road, whether it was a spate of accidents or the financial difficulties of the railway companies or complaints about poor service. The railway network was always evolving, always needing to be improved as passengers became more demanding and technologies developed. The railways could, as it were, never stand still and their managers were always faced with a complex set of questions for which there was never a perfect answer. There was a continual requirement to upgrade lines, develop faster locomotives, provide more efficient timetables and improve stations. Traffic on some lines would decline due to external circumstances such as rural depopulation, while on others it would start exceeding what could be easily provided.

  However, the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth were probably as close to a golden age as the railways ever achieved. The network was nearly complete and the trains were getting less ‘medieval’. The railway tradition had been to look after the locomotives better than the carriages, with engines being ‘groomed and polished like so many objets d’art while many carriages were little better than so many dog boxes on wheels’.1 Now this was changing. Services were more regular and carriages were more comfortable with facilities such as better lighting, toilets and dining cars beginning to appear in the 1880s. The first all-corridor train ran on the Great Western in 1892 and electric lighting started to be used around then too, but did not become universal on new trains until after the First World War.

  All these developments came quite slowly. For the first half-century of the railways, passengers had no other form of heating than the occasional portable foot-warmer which was nothing more than a flat metal container full of hot water. After a long gap between stations, there would have been a rush to swap the now cold metal boxes for fresh hot ones. It was only towards the end of the century that heating became widely available, mostly using steam piped through the train. Lighting originally consisted of stinking oil pots that gave a feeble light and it was only in the early 1880s that a better system using gas became widespread, although this obviously presented a safety risk. According to Stanley Hall,2 electric lighting became available in the 1890s and by the outbreak of the First World War ‘there were only 12,000 electric lit carriages in service’, fewer than a quarter of the total. Toilets, again, only started appearing in the 1870s, along with the corridors that enabled all passengers to have access and until then train timetables were slowed by the need for convenience stops at those stations where huge facilities had been made available.

  Most crucially, though, the railways now had no significant competition from any other mode of transport until motor buses started appearing in substantial numbers towards the end of the Edwardian period. Instead, the railway companies had the spur of competition between each other and on some routes began races which drove them to reduce journey times. The first series of contests started as a curious side issue of the decision by the three East Coast partners (the Great Northern, North Eastern and North British) which provided the through services between London and Scotland to allow second-class passengers on their fastest trains for the first time in November 1887. The West Coast companies (London & North Western and Caledonian) had long allowed second-class customers but their trains took ten hours, a full sixty minutes longer than their East Coast rivals, and consequently they started to lose customers. The chairman of the London & North Western was an austere fellow, Sir Richard Moon, who deprecated fast running because it was expensive, using more coal and requiring extra track maintenance. Moon was described memorably as having an appearance in keeping with his character with ‘rocky brows above cold, small, fierce eyes, a strong cranium, a strong nose and a mouth like a steel gin’3 and was one of the most able managers of his age, ‘incorruptible and one of the most terrifying personages in Victorian private business’.4 Under his rule the London & North Western had been transformed from a loose amalgam of railways to ‘a totalitarian corporate state in nineteenth-century capitalism’.5 Moon dictated that an average speed of 40 mph was quite good enough for his passengers. However, after eight months of watching them desert his trains, he suddenly announced in June 1888 that the Day Scotch Express, the key 10 a.m. departure from Euston, which rivalled the simultaneous East Coast’s Special Scotch Express, would have its timing to both Glasgow and Edinburgh slashed by an hour, bringing its average speed up to 43.8 mph.

  It took a month for the East Coast to respond but a tit-for-tat battle ensued in August 1888 with each company announcing regular reductions in timings, cutting journey times down to seven and a half hours. In the rush to be the quickest, customers’ needs were not always paramount. The lunch stops – at York on the East Coast, Preston on the West – that were essential requirements given that trains were still carriages separated into compartments without dining cars, let alone toilets, were reduced from half an hour to just twenty minutes, with little thought to the damage that might cause to the passengers’ digestive systems or their bladders. Peace finally broke out at a conference of the railway companies when it was agreed to put a bit of slack back into the timetable so that journeys would take seven and three quarter hours by the East Coast, and eight hours on the West, with an extra half an hour in the winter.

  The race was to resume seven years later with a
vengeance, following the completion of the Forth bridge, but within a year it was safety that exercised the minds of railway directors following the worst disaster in the railways’ short history. The steady death toll on the railways was accepted rather like today’s carnage on the roads. There were perennial protests in the press, accompanied by calls for ‘something to be done’, but demands usually fell short of expecting a much tighter regulatory regime as that would have been considered as excessive state interference. That said, the new regulations of the early 1870s mentioned in the last chapter were never considered to be the last word on safety on the railways and in 1874 a Royal Commission was held on railway accidents. It proved to be a laborious inquiry lasting three years and while the committee collected a mass of evidence, it led to precious little change and the number of accidents kept rising, making the 1870s the worst ever in railway history for passenger deaths.6

  If anything illustrated the reluctance by the railway companies to deal with the issue of safety with sufficient urgency, it was the failure to provide trains with proper braking systems. It took the terrible Armagh disaster of 1889, the result of inadequate brakes and sloppy procedures, to bring about change and then only because the government introduced new legislation forcing the railway companies to act. There had been a series of accidents caused by the inadequacy of the trains’ braking systems. By the 1870s trains were occasionally reaching the unimaginable speed of 80 mph (although not with Queen Victoria aboard). Yet, remarkably, locomotives were still being built without any direct means of stopping. Drivers were forced to rely on tender handbrakes, putting the engine into reverse, and telling the guards in their vans7 to apply their brakes, communicating with them by a whistle code.

  As public pressure to fit continuous brakes to passenger trains intensified, progress was held up by a lengthy ‘battle of the brakes’ over which type should be used. The Board of Trade favoured automatic brakes which failed safe (in other words were applied by default when the system malfunctioned). However, not only were these more expensive than conventional systems, but their unreliability and unpredictable failure, which resulted in delays, meant their installation was resisted by many train companies. Sir Edward Watkin, the chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, was at his megalomaniac worst in refusing to countenance automatic brakes and it was only after two serious accidents within three years on his railway, in which forty-nine people died, that Watkin agreed to a change of policy in 1884.

  In a continuous braking system, the application of brakes is transmitted through the whole of a train either by vacuum or air pressure, and there were strong proponents of both systems.8 Most British railways were trying to develop vacuum brakes until George Westinghouse visited Britain in 1871 to demonstrate his highly effective air brake. The response of British railway management to Westinghouse’s invention was, as O. S. Nock records, ‘extraordinarily parochial. Not only did they resent the intrusion of any device invented or developed outside the country, but many of them were exceedingly reluctant to use good ideas that had been developed on another railway in this country.’9 In fact, it was worse than that. It was precisely because the Midland was interested in the Westinghouse brake that the London & North Western refused even to countenance it.

  The death toll from accidents either caused or exacerbated by inadequate braking kept mounting but it took the sheer horror and inevitability of the Armagh accident on 12 June 1889 to make the public’s demands for change irresistible. The disaster involved a very heavily laden excursion train which was taking 940 people, including 600 children, on a Sunday school excursion from Armagh to Warrenpoint, a journey of just fifteen miles but crucially involving a three-mile climb up a steep gradient of 1 in 75. The train driver, Thomas McGrath, had little experience of the line and he struggled to get the train of fifteen fully loaded carriages, including two brake vans, up the hill. Indeed, he had argued with the station-master at Armagh that the train was overloaded but eventually agreed to accept it and at first his progress up the hill was steady. However, just a couple of hundred yards from the summit, the train stalled and McGrath, together with James Elliot, who was in charge of the excursion, made a fatal mistake. Instead of protecting the back of the train with detonators and waiting for the regular service train to push the stricken excursion carriages up the hill, they decided to lighten the load by splitting off the back ten coaches. As ever with such accidents, other mistakes contributed to the eventual disaster. The guard was asked to chock the train with stones but McGrath started the uncoupling process before this had been done properly because there was a dearth of suitable rocks in the area.

  The train was not fitted with an automatic brake. Instead, once the pressure was released on the vacuum brake, the coaches were left with no brakes except for those in the brake van. And, not surprisingly, they proved inadequate for the task of holding the heavy train. The ten coaches started rolling back and despite efforts by Elliot and the guard, Thomas Henry, to put stones under the wheels, nothing could stop the carriages from gathering speed. Meanwhile, the regular service train was chugging up the hill, oblivious of the runaway carriages. One can imagine the panic of the schoolchildren as the train gathered momentum downhill, since, despite previous disasters (such as the one mentioned on page 147 at Versailles), they had been locked in their carriages to prevent unlawful entry. The loose coaches reached a speed of 40 mph before smashing into the regular train, whose driver, on seeing the escaped carriages, managed to all but stop his locomotive, hence reducing the speed of impact. The front wooden carriages were nevertheless smashed to smithereens by the collision and the toll of eighty dead and 250 injured was by far the highest on any British railway up to that point. It would have been greater had it not been for the heroism of the crew of the second train, who managed, despite being injured, to prevent their coaches from rolling down the slope after they, in turn, had become detached by the collision.

  It was the most significant accident in British railway history as ‘in those shattered coaches of the ill-fated excursion train, the old happy-go-lucky days of railway working came to their ultimate end and the modern phase of railway working as we know it began’.10 The public response to Armagh was remarkably rapid, especially in the light of the failure to act in the aftermath of other, equally preventable, accidents. There was an outcry following the accident, heightened by the death of so many children. As a result the government found the ability to move far more quickly and forcefully than ever before and rushed through – within weeks of the accident – the Regulation Act.

  The Armagh accident had highlighted two fundamental inadequacies of the safety regime on the railway network: the braking system and the continued use of the time-interval method of keeping trains apart rather than any form of signalling. The three pillars of the new safety regime introduced by the Regulation Act of 1889 were, therefore, ‘lock, block and brake’. The first refers to interlocking, a crucial aspect of rail safety which ensures that the indications on the signals correspond to the way that the points on the rails are set. Signals were controlled mechanically by levers in signal boxes connected to cables, pulleys and rods, and it was relatively easy to devise methods of interlocking to prevent trains being sent in directions other than those shown by the signals.

  ‘Block’ refers to the method of dividing up the track into sections – or blocks – which the signalling system ensures can be occupied by only one train at a time. This innovation was made much easier when track circuits, an electrical device that shows when a train is in a particular section, started to be introduced in 1901. Like many developments on the railways, track circuits took a long time to be implemented throughout the network, and even at nationalization in 1948 many sections of track still did not have this form of protection.

  The third element of the legislation required the fitting of continuous automatic brakes, but did not specify what type, and every company seemed to prefer its own version. As mentioned before, there wer
e arguments in favour of both vacuum and air brakes but, as Jack Simmons puts it, ‘what was indefensible was the failure to agree, in a small country where so much through working of vehicles took place between one company’s lines and another’.11 It would not be until nationalization after the Second World War that a standard braking system would be adopted and then, oddly, the vacuum method was preferred over air, which was used in most other railways in the world. Since then, the situation has reversed and all trains in the UK now use air brakes (with the exception of a few heritage railways).