The Railways Read online

  Trollope modelled his fictional Barchester on Salisbury. A real Mr Harding in London and a real Archdeacon Grantly in Salisbury in the 1850s would have heard the public clocks striking at the same time. Any time-conscious traveller who got out of the train at Basingstoke, roughly halfway between those cities, would (up to 1852 at least) have encountered a puzzling anomaly: the railway kept to standard time, but the town clocks were on the local version, about five minutes faster. This brings up the matter of how the railways transformed the keeping of time itself.

  Before Victoria’s reign, time was a local matter. East Anglian clocks were several minutes ahead of London’s, those of the West Country and Wales quite a few minutes behind, all measured in accordance with the twenty-four-hour rotation of the earth. The exactitude of these calculations was a sign of sophistication rather than backwardness, the culmination of centuries of scientific clock-making and astronomical observation. The differences could be substantial – Plymouth time was twenty minutes behind that of London – but the practical difficulties that resulted were few. Those most conscious of the disparities included the guards of mail coaches, who carried watches that could be adjusted to gain or lose the correct number of minutes every twenty-four hours. The time observed on the coach could thus be kept in step with that of the towns it passed through.

  In their earliest years the railways also deferred to local time. The first editions of Bradshaw thus seem to show that trains were taking significantly longer to go from west to east than to make the return journey, though in reality the duration was often the same. It was a confusing basis on which to plan and operate a railway timetable, doubly so once lines began to join up. The first companies to adopt London time throughout were those building long lines that ran more east–west than north–south: the Great Western and the London & Southampton. The Great Western main line to Bristol indeed runs almost due west. It opened in full in 1840. Major lines in the north of England, or running towards the north, followed in 1847–8. The change was urged on them by the Railway Clearing House, founded in 1842 chiefly to regularise traffic between subscribing railway companies; in the absence of coherent direction from the State, it often fell to the RCH to bring its members into productive harmony.

  Strange anomalies were thrown up as the London standard invaded the realms of local time. At Andover in Hampshire, a sundial set up on the new building of the bankers Messrs Heath in 1846 still reminds the viewer ‘6 Min Faster for London Time’. In that year the London & Southampton’s nearest station to the town was nine miles off, so any miscalculation in meeting the trains risked a serious waste of effort on road travel. The Chester & Holyhead Railway persisted into 1848 in taking its time from the signal gun of Craig-y-Don in Llandudno, sixteen and a half minutes later than the London time observed by the main lines with which it connected. In the same year the Irish Mail began running along this route. Every day, this train took delivery at Euston of a freshly set watch supplied by a messenger from the Admiralty. The watch was carried over to Dublin for checking against the time kept there and brought back by the return ferry and return train, uncontaminated by the lingering North Welsh time zone through which it passed. In Oxford, where the great bell of Tom Tower at Christ Church rang a curfew for undergraduates at 9 p.m., a compromise was reached. The college and cathedral of Christ Church became a sort of rock-pool of local time, so that the curfew sounded as before (as it does still), but the public hours rung out by the clock were adjusted to the London version brought by the Great Western. When the council at Exeter voted to abandon local time the Dean and Chapter refused to make the change, even though their cathedral’s clock set the standard for the city.

  Elsewhere, the conversion was more straightforward. The two greatest Scottish cities went over to standard time on 29 January 1848, shortly after a request from a railway company. It may have helped assuage national feeling that the line in question was an entirely Scottish outfit, the Edinburgh & Glasgow. The clocks of Greenock, Perth and Stirling converted on the same day. Thus did London time become Scottish national time.

  The London version was derived from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. In the infancy of the railways its transmission was still managed by visual signals, or by means of a chronometer that was checked daily against the master clock and then carried around from place to place. The process was transformed by the electric telegraph, by which information could be sent almost instantly. Railways, being at once enclosed, secure and wholly owned by the companies themselves, were the perfect conduit for the new technology. The mature apparatus allowed messages to be sent by ringing bells, or by the deflection of an upright needle to left or right on a display dial, in each case mostly in variants of Morse code. It was an easy matter to despatch a regular time signal among the other telegraph messages. All that was missing were direct links between the Royal Observatory and the railways’ own network. The first of these was supplied in 1852, by means of a telegraph wire from Greenwich to the South Eastern Railway’s station at Lewisham. Thereafter, a single twitch of the telegraph needle at noon and 4 p.m. each day at stations all the way to Dover kept the railway in time with Greenwich to the very second. Time signals to other railways were passed on by wire via the City of London headquarters of the Central Telegraph Company, one of several telegraph firms that grew up symbiotically with the network.

  It was one thing to get the railways onto a single time standard, quite another to enforce it universally. In the absence of direction from the government, it fell to the law to decide what the right time was; nor did the law speak until prompted by the case of Curtis vs March, heard at Dorchester in 1858, when judgment was given in favour of local mean time rather than the Greenwich version. So the standard national time stood exposed as a sort of pragmatic fiction, even as more and more places and persons adhered to it. There matters stood until the Time Act of 1880, which at last made Greenwich time legally binding.

  So in the end it was Parliament and not the railways that imposed a standard time on Great Britain. But that is to speak de jure and not de facto. For those who lived through the 1840s and 1850s, it was effectively the railways that brought the change. ‘Railway time’ entered the Victorian lexicon, at least until all the different local times were in practice quite dead and time came everywhere in just the one version once more. Many companies underscored the point by an extravagant display of giant clocks, presiding from the centre of station façades as at Shrewsbury and Norwich, or raised up high in a clock tower at one end, as at St Pancras in London, at Darlington, and at the lost Scottish stations of Dundee West and Oban. To show the time in this way implied a claim to the kind of authority that had traditionally resided in municipal and communal buildings, guildhall and town hall and church steeple; it was a significant embodiment of the power of capital, and a reminder of the extent to which conditions and standards were to be imposed forthwith from outside the community.

  Deeper than any visual display, the railways with their strict timetables also sharpened the sense of how time could be subdivided and refined, so that a minute or less could make a world of difference one way or the other: the ‘lost’ or missed train that could not be expected to wait, the catastrophic collision when times were muddled by guards or signalmen. Times were increasingly spoken in pure and curt numbers, as written in railway timetables. Dickens described the habit in his account of a railway district in 1854, where ‘The smallest child in the neighbourhood who can tell the clock, is now convinced that it hasn’t time to say twenty minutes to twelve, but comes back and jerks out, like a little Bradshaw, “Eleven-Forty”.’ Even where older mentalities persisted, at the northern fringes of the kingdom, the habit of timing to the minute took a firm hold. When the Highland Railway attempted to run Sunday fish trains from Strome Ferry in 1883, there was robust resistance from the Sabbatarian population, who fought their way on to the station, the pier and two steam trawlers full of fish. The rebels held their ground for the whole of Sunday 3 June swelli
ng in number to more than 150 men: more than enough to beat off charges by a detachment of police who had joined a special train sent from Inverness to sort things out. But on the minute of midnight the demonstrators slipped away and the fish could at last go off to London, though no longer quite so fresh.

  The story of national time is another reminder of how railways achieved a sort of revolution in the head, a sense of the forceful urgency of the present day, before which old customs and attitudes were doomed and impotent. The younger Victorian generations, Dickens’s ‘little Bradshaws’, might be called railway natives; the new era of timetables was the only reality they would ever know. Many of their seniors who had reached adulthood before the railways came were haunted by a sense of loss, of having experienced a world that seemed secure but which had melted away. Here is William Makepeace Thackeray, in a celebrated article for the Cornhill Magazine:

  Stage-coaches, more or less swift, riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions, Druids, Ancient Britons painted blue, and so forth – all these belong to the old period … We elderly people have lived in that praerailroad world, which has passed into limbo and vanished from under us. I tell you it was firm under our feet once, and not long ago. They have raised those railroad embankments, and shut off the old world that was behind them. Climb up that bank on which the irons are laid, and try to look to the other side – it is gone.

  Thackeray poses as a fogey, but he was not quite so ancient as he pretended: born in 1811, the novelist was one year older than Dickens, which made him fifty-one in the year the article was published – which in turn takes us back once again to 1862, and the imaginary journey with which this chapter began.

  Let us now assume that our traveller has perused his Bradshaw and has managed to decode it. Before train-time, he will then have ‘taken’ or ‘booked’ a ticket for the journey (to ‘buy’ a ticket seems to be a post-Victorian usage). In the first decade of the railway these documents were handwritten on booklets of printed forms and counterfoils, the inscribed pages being torn out and handed to the purchaser as required. Such tickets often served as reservations for specific seats, and might have to be booked a day in advance. These practices were taken over from the road coaches that the railways supplanted, on which places usually had to be reserved at the coaching inn well in advance – a process quite separate from that of payment, which was made to the guard of the coach at the journey’s end. The same early custom explains the not quite obsolete term ‘booking office’ for ticket office. The arrangements were slow, unsuitable for the much larger numbers that could be conveyed by train and open to abuse by dishonest staff. Other methods were tried: the Leicester & Swannington Railway favoured stamped octagonal tokens or tallies of brass for its third-class passengers, to be returned at the end of each journey, but these had the disadvantage (among others) of having to be ferried back to the point of issue after use. Season tickets were another early innovation, but applied to a minority of passengers only.*

  All these shortcomings occupied the mind of another northern Quaker, Thomas Edmondson. After failing to prosper as a cabinet-maker, in 1836 Edmondson began a new life as stationmaster at what is now Brampton station, on the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway. In quieter hours he used his woodworker’s tools to contrive a small printing press, capable of producing a strip of card tickets by means of a smart blow with a mallet. The tickets were then individually numbered and the strip cut up and put in a box ready for use. The next refinement was to make a tube in which tickets of the same class and destination could be stacked in numerical order, with a movable plate at the bottom that shifted upwards by means of weighted strings and pulleys every time a ticket was extracted from the top. With the assistance of a Carlisle clock-maker, Edmondson also developed a stout mahogany-framed contraption housing iron jaws that were set with movable type and an inked ribbon, which printed the day of issue on each ticket as it was inserted. Together, these machines comprised a complete system for printing, storing and issuing tickets. By numbering each ticket consecutively by type, Edmondson also guarded against any skimming of the takings, for the total value of tickets issued could be calculated and cross-checked against what was in the cash box. From the passenger’s point of view, each ticket doubled as a receipt for the fare paid. Only the more unusual or far-flung journeys required tickets to be made out by hand, using blanks supplied for the purpose.

  His employers were slow to appreciate the merits of the completed system, but Edmondson was not deterred. In 1840 he entered into partnership with the Manchester & Leeds Railway, and the following year set up on his own, licensing the system to other companies at the same annual rate of ten shillings per route-mile. That made matters easier for the many new lines then being established, such as the fledgling Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne & Manchester, which promptly decided to invest £250 in Edmondson equipment (plus licence fee) and to appoint its own ticket printer on a £50 annual wage.

  So we should imagine our traveller of 1862 with one of Edmondson’s patent tickets, safely stowed and ready to be brushed reassuringly with the fingertips in wallet, pocket, purse or glove in the course of the journey. The size was a standard two and a quarter by one and three-sixteenths inches, proportions just short of a double square. At once instantly recognisable and universally familiar, the railway ticket thus created its own mental niche, something which could be used down the generations as a rule-of-thumb unit of measurement, like the modern credit card, the old penny, or the postage stamps that first appeared as Penny Black and Tuppenny Blue in 1840. The mathematically minded railway author F. S. Williams had some fun estimating the area that could be covered by the tickets issued annually on the late-Victorian network: 100 acres, he reckoned, allowing for 500 million journeys a year. The stock of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway alone was calculated in 1933 at 300 million, of which 2 million were held at Euston, comprising 90,000 types. This company was the largest of the four giants into which most of the network was amalgamated by statute in 1923, an event known in railway parlance as the Grouping (the others were the London & North Eastern Railway, the Southern Railway, and the venerable Great Western Railway, which was plumped up with a miscellany of regional and local lines). Even the Southern – smallest of the ‘Big Four’, with hordes of season-ticket holders on its London trains – still required its printing works to turn out some 450,000 tickets every day during the 1940s.

  Taking a return ticket – a ‘double ticket’, as they were sometimes known at first – brought with it an additional challenge for the traveller of forgetful or careless habits. The usual custom was to print tickets with the same information twice over, as it were side by side, so that they could be torn in half at the end of the outward journey. That left the passenger holding a bit of pasteboard not much more than an inch square, its elusiveness greatly enhanced (the loss of a return half was a stock subject for humour). An alternative method, more merciful to the absent-minded or butter-fingered, was to clip or punch a small piece from the ticket to show that it was half-used.

  Edmondson tickets also illustrate the conservatism of Britain’s railways in the twentieth century, even into the decade of their privatisation. For it was not until February 1990 that the last Edmondson tickets were issued on the national network, as early-Victorian ingenuity finally succumbed to computerised print-on-demand systems. As for the tearing of return tickets in half, the Southern Region of British Rail finally gave this up in favour of clipping as late as 1969; a conservative-minded contributor to Railway World magazine wondered whether the queues at the barriers at Waterloo would lengthen as station staff fumbled with the new-fangled technology.

  Nor was the electric commuter railway of the 1960s, of John Schlesinger’s famous documentary film Terminus (1961) or the Kinks’ hit Waterloo Sunset (1966), quite so far in all other respects from the railway of Thackeray’s time. Beyond the ticket barriers could still be found carriages by the dozen that were wholly divided
into individual compartments – not the side-corridor type with sliding internal doors that lingered until recently in first class, but self-contained spaces separated by wooden partitions of full height, accessible only by a single door on each side. The last of these carriages disappeared from service in the early 1980s, bringing to an end a tradition that began with the Liverpool & Manchester Railway’s best carriages a century and a half before.

  From this point in the story, matters of class become altogether unavoidable. How the less well-off travelled will be explained later. For the moment, we should imagine a long-distance journey with a first-class ticket, made on a winter’s day in 1862.

  Footnote

  * The later term ‘commuter’ derives from the practice of commuting the payments for individual daily journeys into a lump sum in exchange for a season ticket or pass.

  – 2 –

  SEATING, LIGHTING, HEATING, EATING

  Trains in 1862 were hauled by steam locomotives. These were received from the first as a prodigious innovation. The first-class railway carriage, in its earliest maturity as achieved around 1830, was not nearly so startling, for it was nothing more or less than a composite of three wooden road-coach-type bodies, mounted on a separately assembled underframe also made of wood and running on four wheels. Access to the compartments was by a single door on each side, just as on a road coach. Passengers sat facing one another, customarily three persons per side in first class. The model underwent detailed refinements and enlargements, but did not change in essence until the 1870s. The compartment rather than the carriage was thus the primary space experienced by the traveller, and lay usage often did not distinguish between them. Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder still muddles the two c-words when narrating a journey by troop train in the opening pages of Brideshead Revisited (1945): ‘My three platoon commanders and myself had a carriage to ourselves.’