The Railways Read online

  Until the railway companies established their own workshops, most carriages were built by the same businesses that manufactured private road conveyances for the rich, as well as the public stages and mail coaches by which the less-than-poor might aspire to travel. English coaches were already the world’s epitome of comfort, elegance and finish, so it is not surprising that railway vehicles should have taken over many existing techniques and motifs wholesale, or that images of these early carriages betray their roadway origins immediately. Particularly long lived was the gracefully swept or bellied outline at the bottom of each individual compartment. This refinement of later Hanoverian design appeared on road coaches as the defining edge of the volume enclosed, but on the railway carriage was usually translated into an applied moulding, structurally meaningless but culturally highly charged. Its persistence suggests both a desire to reassure the passengers and a combination of conservatism and proper pride on the part of the builders. The value of reassurance was certainly in the mind of George Stephenson, father of Robert, when he specified black-and-yellow livery for some of the first enclosed carriages built for the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830. These colours, in this arrangement – yellow below, black above – were familiar on the roads and provided a sort of aesthetic shorthand for smart and fast travel.

  A similar visual conservatism appeared in the treatment of the carriage windows. The road-coach model required windows in threes, the central one placed in the compartment door, the side windows corresponding to the seating spaces. Road coaches commonly gave these windows a swept or radiused lower corner, echoing the lower curve of the enclosure itself. Railway coach builders followed suit, even though the shape was harder to make than a plain oblong and allowed less light inside. The fall from favour of these half-lunette windows for new-built carriages was placed around 1858 by the railway author C. Hamilton Ellis, who in 1965 wrote the first full history of the nineteenth-century railway carriage. In 1862 most first-class rolling stock (to use the industry’s own term for non-locomotive vehicles) would certainly still have been day-lit in the older fashion, and John Tenniel drew Alice’s carriage in Through the Looking-Glass with windows of this type as late as 1872.

  One other feature of the carriage windows deserves mention. The central opening usually had a separate frame for the window pane or drop-light, so that it could be lowered into a void made within the thickness of the door. This was managed by manipulating a leather strap attached to the lower edge of the window frame. To allow the window to be held in place partly open, the strap was pierced at intervals with holes, which engaged belt-fashion with a stubby peg affixed to the door-frame. (Mishandling of the marriage of strap-hole and peg would cause a loud thump as the droplight fell all the way into the door cavity.) Carriages with windows of this type were common up to the middle of the last century, and many will remember them. The design was superseded by a concealed apparatus on the ‘lazytongs’ principle, allowing windows to stick at any position to which they were pushed or pulled.

  Inside Alice’s carriage, from Through the Looking-Glass, 1872

  The glass in these early windows was not very like the coated, toughened and tinted safety glass of today’s carriages. It had the same ripples and watery imperfections that were found in the window glass used in ordinary houses of the time. Flatter plate glass was available, but this was both heavy and expensive to replace (breakages of carriage windows could be expected fairly frequently). So it was through slightly distorting apertures that the first railway travellers viewed the world as it accelerated and decelerated strangely past them.

  These carriage interiors were not at all large. Road coaches were likewise far from spacious inside, and while railway compartments were generally somewhat bigger, the difference was not spectacular. A few railways, it is true, built their carriages very small indeed. First-class travellers on the Bodmin & Wadebridge Railway (1834), an isolated Cornish line concerned at least as much with transporting sand for fertiliser as with human traffic, had to put up with compartments that measured just 4ft 6in between the partitions and 5ft 9in to the ceiling. On other lines, a length of at least 5ft 6in could be expected, and a height of around 6ft – which was somewhat more than the height of the door opening. Imagining ourselves making an entry into these carriages, all but the least tall should stoop somewhat, mind any headgear, and draw in the limbs, as when passing through a cottage doorway.

  One first-class comfort that could be expected was a good deal of upholstery. Seats and seat-backs were well cushioned, held in place with buttons or quilting. The former colonial administrator Sir Francis Head (1793–1875), whose Stokers and Pokers (1849) is one of the first investigative descriptions of a mature railway company, described a carriage receiving attention in the London & North Western Railway’s works at Crewe, where the men were ‘padding it, and petting it, and stuffing it, as if its object were to fit every bend and hollow in the human frame’. In most cases, sturdy armrests and padded uprights marked the divisions between each place. ‘The carriages are very comfortable, like armchairs, for six persons in each’; thus Rachel Whinyates in her diary, 1840, when the Bristol & Gloucester Railway reached her home town of Cheltenham. The carriage sides below the windows were often upholstered too, and sometimes also the insides of the doors. In some cases even the ceiling was quilted, as in the Liverpool & Manchester’s second generation of carriages, or the surviving saloon built by the London & Birmingham Railway in 1842 for Queen Adelaide and now on display at the National Railway Museum at York. The saloon’s interior is rather a disturbing sight to modern eyes, with its suggestions of a padded cell deluxe, however useful as a means of absorbing the noises of movement. All this padding did no more than keep up with development of the private coach, and also with the increasingly well-stuffed domestic surroundings and social spaces of the upper classes. Sprung seats and seat-backs were later refinements. (The Bodmin & Wadebridge’s first class made do with hay stuffing, but it will be clear by now that this was something of a yokel line.)

  The apogee of all this quilting and stuffing was reached in early royal saloons. Contemporary descriptions of these often take on something of the gushy fabric-fetishism of the fashion magazine. Here is Richard Mansell, Carriage Superintendent of the South Eastern Railway, on the saloon he designed for Victoria and Albert in the Great Exhibition year:

  The sides and ends are stuffed and covered with damask in shades of Amber, White and Drab, decorated ornamental silk tufts, handsome Gimp of Silk and Stout Silk cord. Draperies of Amber and White Satin are suspended round this Compartment trimmed with cord, gimp and fringe of silk, these are supported by cornices of carved wood richly gilt.

  And so on, across the watered lutestring ceiling and over the velvet-pile-carpeted floor. Mansell’s interior even featured a painting on the panelling of a door depicting three guardian angels simpering over a sleeping child, as if to guarantee the royal pair the safety of the railway.

  Even the most luxurious ordinary first-class carriages fell some way short of all this. However, the first-class passenger of 1862 could expect one further refinement in common with royal saloons and traceable in origin to the road carriage. This was the broad sling-like loop of upholstered leather or cloth, sometimes called a cromet, which was fixed to the inside wall of the compartment, often in pairs one above the other. Images of travellers making use of one of these things are rare indeed, and as the years passed there was even some confusion as to their chief purpose: the support of tired arms and wrists has been suggested (although armrests were provided too); or ‘to assist passengers in arising from their seats’ (a reference in the Railway Magazine for 1897); or to grasp tightly when the train was going fast. John Betjeman in 1940 suggested the latter, but admitted never to have seen anyone actually doing so. Yet the Caledonian Railway had thought well enough of the device to extend provision to its better third-class carriages in Edwardian times. In the event of an accident, the carriage strap might be a mixe
d blessing; a passenger caught in a derailment on the Great Western in 1845 had his arm ‘nearly torn from the shoulder socket’ by one of them as his carriage toppled over.

  If compartments were generally small, where did all the luggage go? Some of it was stowed in luggage vans, an innovation of the 1840s, which usually doubled as accommodation for the guard. But until at least the late 1860s much more was simply manhandled on to the carriage roof, where it was kept from tumbling off by strapping it down within a low railing around the central section. The common practice was to protect these rooftop mounds of luggage by means of a tarpaulin, which between uses was often secured in a roll on the roof. That did not make the task of loading and unloading much less cumbersome, even with the help of movable wooden slides that were sometimes kept on hand at the platform, nor did it simplify the challenge of uncovering and unloading the correct luggage for each stop. The process of loading up and sheeting over is represented in William Powell Frith’s famous painting The Railway Station. It is a vignette of anonymous everyday labour, placed by the artist just off-centre above and behind the platform of the Great Western terminus at Paddington, on which passengers of every age, class and position are depicted to make a sort of theatrum mundi of mid-Victorian England. As it happens, this painting is another product of 1862, our representative year; it proved to be a popular sensation, carried (by train, we may be sure) to paying exhibitions round the country and abroad, and reproduced even more lucratively in print form.

  In one key respect, not easily detected in the picture, the carriages depicted by Frith were quite unlike those of other lines. For Brunel had chosen to set the rails of his new main line at a markedly greater width than that used elsewhere: 7ft 0¼in, almost one and a half times as wide as the 4ft 8½in Stephenson had derived from the colliery waggonways of his native North East. There were several reasons behind Brunel’s adoption of the broad gauge, as it came to be known, only one of which need concern us for now. Carriages that ran on standard-gauge lines were necessarily wider than the tracks, so that their bodies had to be lifted up above the wheels. Brunel’s intention was to make the tracks so wide that his carriages would be able to sit within the wheels, lowering the centre of gravity of each vehicle and thus increasing its stability. Without the need to keep clear of the carriage floor, the wheels could also be made to a much larger diameter, like those of road carriages. Since large wheels rotate less rapidly than small ones at any given speed, fast trains could be run without excessive wear on the bearing surfaces of the axles.

  So Brunel had reasoned on 15 September 1835, in a letter to the directors of the fledgling company. But when the time came to build all but a handful of the Great Western’s carriages,* he ignored his own arguments almost completely, placing the wheels below the floor like everybody else. (He did not forsake the idea of large-diameter wheels, the housings for which rose up inconveniently from the carriage floors.) What the more generous clearances associated with the broad gauge undoubtedly did deliver was an ampler width to the carriage bodies – so much so that many compartments in first class were subdivided midway, by means of a longitudinal partition and doorway. The set-up was nicely captured by John Henry Newman in Loss and Gain (1848), in a passage that must have flummoxed later generations of readers: the novel’s Oxonian hero steps into the emptier sub-compartment of a London-bound train, noting that the ‘farther compartment’ is filled by a party of travellers ‘talking together with great volubility and glee’.

  Despite these generous dimensions, Brunel did not think it worth allotting much internal space to the passengers’ luggage. Newman’s fictional travellers would have watched their trunks hoisted on to the broad, flat carriage roof, just as on other lines, or indeed on the road vehicles that would deliver and collect them at each end. It was possible to do this on the railways because the upper profile of the carriages did not yet reach to the maximum height of the loading gauge. Not to be confused with the distance between the rails, this is the term used to describe the standard dimensions beyond which anything moving on the rails would no longer safely clear the edges of tunnels, buildings and other trains, moving or stationary. The concept becomes apparent when one looks at almost any early picture of a train in motion: the locomotive with its chimney towering up as tall as the loading gauge permitted, and the string of little low carriages trundling behind.

  One common personal object that could not be carried securely on the roof was the gentleman’s hat. These reached their greatest height in the 1840s–60s, as if in sympathy with the soaring chimneys of the locomotives. Too tall to keep on when entering the carriage or standing within, too bulky to be kept easily on the lap, too fragile and valuable – at least without some sort of protective box – to risk kicks, treading and dirt by placing on the floor or in the space beneath the seats: the non-collapsible ‘stove-pipe’ presented the traveller with quite a challenge. The solution adopted in many carriages was to stretch taut cords across the ceiling, in parallel or criss-crossing at right angles, from which hats could be suspended upside-down by the brim. So in each first-class compartment of 1862 we may imagine up to six inverted black hats, juddering and quivering overhead with the motion of the train.

  No special arrangements were needed for the hats of female passengers, for whom any bare-headed public appearance risked an erosion of respectability. A much greater challenge in negotiating a railway journey was how to manage the crinoline, which in the same decades expanded to its most preposterous extent. For all the imagery from Victorian art high and low, for all the writings by historians of dress, for all the analyses of feminist critics, it still seems almost beyond belief that these vast encumbrances were once daily wear for half the adult population of the middling and upper classes. That so many women should as a matter of habit and routine have approached and entered the little railway carriages of the day, remained seated for long hours within them, and finally extracted themselves without absolute loss of dignity, composure or sanity, is harder to credit still. As R. S. Surtees put it in 1860, ‘to see them attempt the entry of a moderate sized carriage; the utter disproportion of the door to the “object”, as it may well be called, that seeks admission!’ But this is just one aspect of the trials which the Victorian railway presented to bodies less well-nourished, comfortably dressed and generally healthy than our own, as will become clear when we look at the lower classes of carriage and at the working lives of the railwaymen themselves.

  Facilities for even the most expensive travel in the earliest railway years went little further than padded seats and handy hat hangers. Illumination was provided by God’s own daylight and the internal climate was governed by the external one. Artificial lighting and heating were the next creature comforts the railways attempted to offer, and by 1862 the privileged traveller would have expected to find both, after a fashion.

  Lighting came first. Before the widespread use of electricity, this required the ignition, steady supply and secure confinement of as many small individual flames as were necessary for the task. On the railways this was first achieved by the use of pot-lamps burning rape oil or paraffin, fed by gravity from an upper reservoir, sitting within circular apertures in the carriage roof. In technical terms, the method was neither difficult nor inventive. To protect the lamps from the weather, each was surrounded by an iron cylinder pierced with holes and equipped with a flip-top lid. Refuelling, wick-trimming and cleaning were carried out by removing the entire lamp for attention elsewhere. In early times the lesser classes of carriage were not always provided with covers for the vacated lamp-holes, so that passengers were grateful for their umbrellas in rainy weather.

  The Liverpool & Manchester began to lighten the darkness of its first-class passengers in 1834, with one such lamp for each compartment. The Great Western followed in 1842. As the facility spread to other lines, and to second class and levels downward, many railways economised by placing lamps in a space within or above the partitions, so that a single apparatus could throw light
into two compartments. Sometimes lamps appear to have been left burning during the day, presumably on longer-distance runs that began or ended outside the hours of daylight. Sir Francis Head recorded the passengers’ experience of entering the London & North Western’s tunnel at Primrose Hill, a few miles out of Euston: ‘sudden darkness, visible only by a feeble and hitherto unappreciated lamp, which, like the pale moon after a fiery sunset, modestly shines over their head’.

  Oil lamps had the advantage of using an easily transported fuel, but in other respects were high maintenance. The radical journalist J. W. Robertson Scott, born in 1866, recalled the once-routine sight at stations of a railwayman making his way along the roofs of the carriages, catching and inserting replenished lamps as they were thrown up from a barrow below. Another man walked along after him to light the fresh lamps and to send the iron lids crashing down shut afterwards. Dickens, writing in the year of Scott’s birth, describes a still greater feat: the lamp-man ‘skipping along the top of a train, from carriage to carriage, and catching lighted namesakes thrown up to him by a coadjutor’ – like a shipyard riveter catching hot rivets (Mugby Junction, part 1).

  Often these lamp housings had to be located within the railed-off luggage compound on the roof. It was not unknown for a light to fail when shifting loads or flapping tarpaulins restricted the air supply below, or for a tarpaulin to catch alight. This was not the only fire risk: pity the passenger who was once confined in a nocturnal express on the North British Railway, watching the oil dripping steadily past the lamp-flame from a defective reservoir to form a pool in the bottom of the lamp glass, in powerless dread that the whole thing might suddenly explode. Nor was ordinary combustion – the ‘roof-lamp’s oily flame’ of Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, published in 1917 – particularly clean. Too long a wick and the lamp would burn sootily, blackening the glass. Sometimes the wick was jolted out altogether. The penurious North Sunderland Railway in Northumberland delayed the installation of oil lamps in its carriages until the 1940s, only to remove them again because the vibrations of travel on its ramshackle tracks so often shook out the flames.