The Railways Read online

  A poster of 1841, suggestive of the constant flux in travel arrangements caused by the opening of new railway routes

  In the early 1860s there was therefore no sense that the railway adventure had come to an end. The speculative turbulence of the early years left a residue of mistrust, but it was not intrinsic to railways as a method of transport. To the contemporary mind, they still represented the essence of modernity. In certain towns bypassed by early main lines, the blame was laid on municipal reactionaries for failing to grasp the chance of a connection when it came. The MP for Abingdon in Berkshire actually managed to kill off the first proposal for a branch line to the town. A similar story is repeated, less fairly, of Northampton. Here the company in question was the London & Birmingham, the world’s first long-distance railway, opened in 1837–8; the populace was eager for the line to come that way, and it was the county landowners who led the party of opposition. (Yet the legend of blockheads at the town hall endures: on a train to Northampton an inhabitant was recently overheard repeating it to a visitor, as if to say, What else can you expect from the folk round here?) Railway builders around 1860 thus had many goals still to aim at: connecting to bypassed towns, pushing fresh lines into more remote areas, making short cuts for cross-country traffic. Because Britain was served by many independent lines, their companies also increasingly competed for traffic by means of rival or alternative routes.

  The last English county to be joined to the national network was Cornwall, into which Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Cornwall Railway began running trains in 1859. Three years later, the Isle of Wight received its first railway, the Cowes & Newport. On 1 July 1862 the inaugural train ran along its four miles of route in less than ten minutes. That was faster than anyone had ever travelled on the Isle of Wight before – simply because the steam railway could routinely go faster than a galloping horse, on which the existing limit on human swiftness depended. Having subjugated the surface of Britain, railways began to probe below it. The Metropolitan Railway’s inaugural route was to have opened that same year, had the noxious waters of the Fleet Ditch not burst into its cavernous brick-lined tunnel as the line was under construction through London from Paddington to Farringdon Street. That put back the opening day of the world’s pioneer underground railway until the second week of 1863. One year later, the first train steamed into the new station at Aberystwyth, completing the railway route westward through the heart of Welsh-speaking Wales.

  In Scotland, where railways spread outwards from the Central Belt anchored by Edinburgh and Glasgow, two great natural barriers had yet to be bridged in 1862, the firths of the Forth and the Tay. The bridges that eventually did the job have both become famous, for rather different reasons; less well-known is that trains had begun crossing these waters by means of special ferries and floating jetties as early as the 1850s. That these gaps would one day be filled by something more solid would not have been doubted by any progressive-minded person in 1862.

  Railways penetrate beneath the streets of London: King’s Cross station on the Metropolitan Railway, from the Illustrated London News, 1868

  The modern-minded traveller in mid-Victorian decades thus kept an eye on the railway map for new routes and opportunities. The poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88), who was also a government inspector of schools, was of this class. His tours of inspection entailed a punishing amount of long- and medium-distance travel, largely by rail. January 1852 – a representative itinerary – began with a train connection from Windermere to the London & North Western Railway’s great junction at Crewe and continued with appointments at schools in at least fifteen towns, dotted across eight counties. Windermere was the nearest station to the inspector-poet’s Lake District retreat, Fox Howe at Rydal. Before setting off for the Monday morning train, Arnold found the time to finish his latest poem, ‘The Youth of Nature’. It was an elegy to his recently deceased neighbour William Wordsworth, a confirmed hater of railways, who back in 1844–5 had done all he could to prevent the branch line to Windermere happening at all. To this end, Wordsworth composed a celebrated anti-railway sonnet, which he posted to Mr Gladstone, then President of the Board of Trade, and also published as a pamphlet. The railway company then modified its plans a little, so that the line stopped a mile short of the Windermere shore. Perhaps the episode came into Arnold’s mind that morning as he wrote of the late poet laureate, ‘He grew old in an age that he condemn’d … And, like the Theban seer / Died in his enemies’ day’.

  Which was true enough: Wordsworth was already sixty years old when the first modern railway opened between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Arnold understood all too well that his venerable subject’s views on Church, State and Nature were formed in an England that no longer existed. His own father, the headmaster and reformer Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby (1795–1842), had also realised as much, but had embraced the coming age of change. The railways got to him unusually early: in 1835, to be precise. In that year Dr Arnold received a visit from the engineer Robert Stephenson, who was surveying the London & Birmingham line through Kilsby in Northamptonshire, where the headmaster held some property – this as a consequence of having been turned away from the route through Northampton. Five miles north-west of Kilsby the route passed through Rugby, and before long that town was noted as much for its timetabled stops for visiting the station refreshment rooms as for Dr Arnold’s school. Looking down from a bridge at a train running on the completed line, the headmaster made a remark that has become celebrated: ‘I rejoice to see it … and think that feudality is gone forever.’ Perhaps Dr Arnold also had in mind some easing of the journey to his country retreat at Rydal, which he had built in 1832 with advice from Wordsworth, his friend. When Matthew Arnold left this house twenty years later, he had an easier journey still.

  Arnold’s leisure hours, too, were transformed by the growing railway network. From Folkestone on 15 August 1861, Arnold wrote to his mother that he had begged his wife Florence (‘Flu’) to join him from their home in Belgravia: ‘come down today by the new line – London Chatham & Dover – which goes to Victoria’. For Flu it would have been a walk or cab ride of about 500 yards from the Arnolds’ residence in Chester Square to the new Victoria terminus, opened only the year before but already familiar enough to be identifiable by the unqualified use of the monarch’s name. In 1863 another letter from Arnold to his mother described a pleasant evening party spent with family and friends on Clapham Common: ‘by the new rail from Victoria we are only seven minutes from it’. This was the West London Extension Railway, from West Brompton to Clapham Junction, opened three months previously. Its route included a new bridge across the Thames, one of five iron bridges built by railway companies to reach Kensington, Westminster or the City of London in the years 1859–69. Most of the earlier lines into London had been stopped short of the innermost districts north of the river, so these new bridges made the capital’s railways spectacularly visible above ground at the same time that they were beginning to push their way beneath it.

  Arnold calls his line to Clapham ‘the new rail’. ‘I see they have begun our rail,’ says Mr Vincent of St Saviour’s College in Loss and Gain, John Henry Newman’s Oxford novel of 1848. Both expressions would have baffled anyone in the 1820s, before the language flexed and compressed itself in the cause of new technology. First, the companies’ own terminology became brisker and more businesslike. The ponderous but technically correct ‘locomotive engine’ was swiftly abbreviated to ‘engine’ alone, or else, as in writings by Robert Stephenson as early as 1828, to ‘locomotive’ – a term that was general currency by about 1850. ‘Train’ is an early contraction of ‘train of wagons’ or ‘train of carriages’. The Annual Register for 1830 used both long and short versions, that for 1831 already the short version only. Travellers and customers were quick to catch up, like the frequent flyers who slip into today’s airline jargon. Lay British usage gradually gave up the well-established term ‘railroad’, which now sounds thoroughly North American,
but which for several decades was used interchangeably with ‘railway’, the industry’s preferred term.

  It is striking also how some usefully terse Victorian railway expressions have lapsed into disuse. To travel by railway was to ‘take train for’ a destination, or non-specifically, just to ‘take train’. In John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906), George Forsyte ‘took train at South Kensington station (for everyone today went Underground)’. The time of departure was ‘train-time’; to ‘lose the train’ was to fail to observe it. ‘As lang as ah live, ah winnet forget th’ day we lost the train’ is the refrain of Wor Nanny’s a Mazer, by the Tyneside pitman and balladeer Tommy Armstrong, born in 1848 (Nanny and the singer resort to the pub for a quick drink before the next train comes, then another drink, and then one more …) When Daniel Povey says ‘I came by mail from Crewe’, in Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908, but set some forty years earlier), he means not some strange self-posting arrangement but an overnight journey on the mail trains, many of which included carriages for fare-paying passengers. Another widely understood convention was the use of ‘up’ and ‘down’ to designate trains to and from London, and by extension to other cities and major destinations. The murderous mysteries of timetabling which Miss Marple sets out to unravel in Agatha Christie’s 4.50 from Paddington (1957) are still phrased in these terms. They must be quite opaque to most present-day readers of the Queen of Crime.

  Still with us are the railway expressions that have spread into common use: running out of steam, letting off steam, on the right lines, going off the rails, hitting the buffers. Stock phrases now, but smart and vivid in their day, signalling modern-mindedness in speech and in writing. To an author with a genius for extended metaphor, the railways were a golden gift. Here is Dickens, in Little Dorrit (1857): ‘Mrs General had no opinions. […] She had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails on which she started little trains of other people’s opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere.’

  Metaphors, and vocabulary too: as Dickens’s weekly All The Year Round asserted in 1863, ‘“Stoke”, “shunt”, “siding”, &c., are all perfectly legitimate words’. And so we have Mrs Veneering, ‘waking Lady Tippins from a snore, by dexterously shunting a train of plates and dishes at her knuckles across the table’, in Our Mutual Friend (1865).

  Dickens had even more fun with one of the early institutions of railway travel, Bradshaw. George Bradshaw (1801–53) was a Manchester Quaker and engraver who had published several well-received maps of canals and early railways. Fame and wealth followed when he spotted a related gap in the market. The railway companies were already advertising the times of trains at stations and by placing notices in the newspapers, and some local railway guides had been published, but there was nothing by way of a compact and portable summary of services across the whole country. Bradshaw therefore set out to provide the first printed Time Tables – the term is another railway coinage – beginning in 1839. They were an instant success. This first booklet was tiny, a mere four and a half by three inches and regional in scope. Bradshaw’s original intention was that updated sheets could be bought every month, Filofax-fashion, for pasting over those pages that were no longer current. But the network was growing too fast; the following year witnessed the opening of thirteen new lines. Wholly new editions at monthly intervals were the answer. In 1841 came Bradshaw’s Railway Guide, a somewhat larger object. The September 1845 edition already amounted to eighty-nine pages. Growth continued – 1847 alone added twenty-seven new railway lines – and gradually the essential Guide became as thick as a brick. When a time capsule was walled into the foundations of Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment in 1878, a copy of the latest Bradshaw was included. New editions continued to appear until issue no. 1521 in June 1961, by which time the challenge was to keep up with line closures rather than openings. Passengers and railway staff alike were then left to fumble with the separate volumes produced by British Railways’ six separate regions, before an official single-volume compendium at last appeared in 1974.

  Many found Bradshaw’s ever-expanding book no easier to understand than the network itself. Even now it is difficult to look at its pages without a sense of quiet panic. The timetable columns are confusingly interspersed with bands that indicate arrival times for connections, before the same train resumes (with a later time, referring to departure) at the head of the next band, from the same station. Mysterious little pointing hands appear: in superimposed boxes for cross-references, but also within the columns and indicating up or down. An exhausting variety of exceptions is shown, many according to the day of the week (Mondays and Saturdays especially, but also a marked bias to Wednesdays), others to indicate set-down-only stops. Now and again a threatening black bar intrudes, with the word Stop below. Some of the font sizes recall those used for novelty miniature bibles. The paper is bad, the print surprisingly faint. Even the index is harassing: large towns may have references to over a hundred different pages, depending on the line and the direction of travel.

  It was easy to get a laugh at Bradshaw’s expense. Punch put the book in his Tourist’s Alphabet: ‘B is the Bradshaw which leads you to swear’. ‘Do not buy a Bradshaw unless you want a headache’, the sporting novelist R. S. Surtees advised in 1851 (he recommended the companies’ timetables instead). The young Charles Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, even wrote a comic opera Guida di Bragia – a burlesque of Bradshaw – to entertain his sisters.

  Dickens conflated the challenges of travel with those of trying to read Bradshaw’s guide in the ‘Narrative of Extraordinary Suffering’, in his magazine Household Words for 12 July 1851. As with much of Dickens’s best writing on railways – and no literary author wrote better about them in nineteenth-century Britain – the piece straddles the line between journalism and fiction. It was topical, too: July 1851 was the third month of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, in a year when railways with a London connection reported rises in passenger traffic of up to 38 per cent.

  Dickens imagines among these visiting hordes a Mr Lost, ‘of the Maze, Ware’. Quite unable to master Bradshaw, he gives up on the trains and goes down to London in his own horse-chaise. From there he tries to reach Worcester by rail, but is halted at Tring and again at Leighton. The tone becomes delirious, as Mr Lost’s progress is blocked again and again by the ‘dreaded black barrier’ – the black bar in Bradshaw’s columns that indicates when a train goes no further. He finds himself ‘listlessly travelling anywhere’ on the London & North Western Railway, after which ‘He repeatedly found himself in the Isle of Man’. Then Mr Lost goes surreally astray in Bradshaw’s back pages, first in the hotel notices, then among the general advertisements. These evoke the same cornucopia of industrial commodities that were displayed in the Crystal Palace, articles that increasingly owed their distribution to the railways themselves: ‘the Extract of Sarsaparilla, the Registered Paletot, Rowlands’ Kalydor, the Cycloidal Parasol, the Cough Lozenges, the universal night-light, the poncho, Allsopp’s pale ale, and the patent knife cleaner’. At last we see Mr Lost, ‘a ruin’, stranded at the Euston station hotel, ‘continually turning over the leaves of a small, dog’s-eared quarto volume with a yellow cover, and babbling in a plaintive voice, BRADSHAW, BRADSHAW’.

  No matter; railways in the mid-Victorian years were part of normal life for more and more people all the time. As The Times put it in 1850, ‘Thirty years ago not one countryman in a hundred had seen the metropolis. There is now scarcely one in the same number who has not spent his day there’. An exaggeration, certainly; but even stay-at-homes could see the trains, the stations, the new embankments and viaducts, and realise that here was something momentous. As a gauge of this growing familiarity, jokes were told at the expense of those who failed to grasp the new technology. In Essex it was said of the villagers of Coggeshall, by local tradition a slow-witted lot, that they believed the fences along the railway to be there to stop the trains getting out and attacking people. A
story from Devon tells of a farmer and his wife who believed London to be a very fine place all spread out under glass, having failed to explore beyond the confines of Paddington station.

  In fiction, too, railways changed the conventions. The critic Richard Altick has observed how the mere mention of train or railway in a Victorian novel serves immediately to locate the action in the present, just as a reference to stagecoaches pushed the story back into the past. Novels of the time also remind us that there was then truly no alternative to the train except walking or riding – no cars or taxis, no motorway dashes or helicopters – and that for long and speedy journeys the railway timetable was lord and master. The crucial reading of a will in Anthony Trollope’s The Bertrams (1859) is arranged for 2 p.m., not to allow for the lunch hour, but to follow the arrival of a particular train precisely fifteen minutes earlier. In The Warden (1855), Trollope’s gentle Mr Harding knows very well that fierce Archdeacon Grantly cannot be in London until the next train from Barchester arrives at 2 p.m. – though his irrational dread of being tracked down by Grantly at his hotel is so great that he wanders the streets of the capital instead. Like Matthew Arnold, Trollope too was a writer in government employment, a senior Post Office official whose work involved immense amounts of railway travel; we shall be meeting him again.