The Railways Page 5
Even when a compartment was favoured with two lamps all to itself, artificial light was not provided in excess. In dimly lit carriages it might do little more than allow passengers to find their way in and out of the compartment and to gather an imprecise sense of who it was they might be travelling with. To read, and to do so without eye-strain, represented a greater challenge. Some help could be obtained in the form of the pocket reading lamp, usually candle-powered and equipped with a reflector. By 1857 the Morning Post could refer to the ‘railway reading lamp’ as a familiar article. These were lamps specifically adapted for travel by means of hooks for fixing into the upholstery, or rubber suction pads that were supposed to stick securely to the window pane. The Army & Navy Stores Catalogue was still offering different types in Edwardian times, together with the special candles that went with them (8½d per box).
A better fuel for carriage lighting was gas. It burnt cleanly, required less maintenance and could be supplied from large reservoirs shared by multiple lamps. The first railways to make standard use of gas carriage lighting were in London, for long the world centre of the technology. One crucial breakthrough was William Sugg’s non-corroding steatite burner, invented in 1858, which was at once more durable than older gas fixtures and better at generating light rather than heat. By 1862, London alone used twice as much gas as the whole of Germany.
Early experiments aside, the honour of operating the first gaslit services belongs to the North London Railway, also in 1862. The gas was stored in a large container in the guard’s van of each train, from which pipes ran to the individual carriages. It was an enterprising venture for a busy urban and suburban railway that ran for much of its length high up on a viaduct. For the Metropolitan Railway, operating almost entirely in tunnels, adequate lighting was a pressing need from the outset. The opening services in 1863 used gaslit carriages supplied from a sort of giant squeeze-box all along the roofs: an iron-topped wooden housing, within which was a squashy rubber reservoir kept firmly under pressure beneath the weight of a giant trellis made of wood and iron. The passengers’ experience was of a clear and welcome increase in light: the Daily Telegraph observed the double burners in each first-class compartment, flaming so brightly ‘that newspapers might be read with ease’ – the point being that Victorian newspapers favoured much smaller and less distinct print than that used in books. Such was Matthew Arnold’s ‘wonderful Metropolitan Railway which takes you in at Finsbury Circus and puts you out, after you have read for half an hour in an arm chair by the brightest of gas-light, at Victoria’.**
The Metropolitan’s coal-gas method did not become generally popular and the company itself gave it up in 1876 in favour of the oil-gas lighting developed by Julius Pintsch in Prussia (one instance among many of technical initiative passing to Germany). This became the standard system used across Britain’s railways. Compressed gas was carried in steel cylinders beneath the floor of each carriage, which thus became self-sufficient in supply. The gas could be distilled from oil shale, available in the central belt of Scotland, or increasingly from imported crude oil; the Great Western set up a refinery for the purpose within its mighty works at Swindon in 1893, and the Great Eastern built one at its only slightly smaller works at Stratford, now vanished into the 2012 Olympics site. Within the carriage, each lamp glowed from within a big inverted glass dome, somewhat like those used to show off artificial flowers or taxidermy. The better sort of long-distance carriage sometimes came with a hinged cover of dark-tinted glass fixed alongside for swinging across, to kill the glare in the compartment when trying to sleep at night.
For all that her carriages were the most luxurious on British rails, Queen Victoria had little use or liking for this brightness. When the royal saloon that took her annually to Balmoral was upgraded for gas without consultation, she demanded that the oil lamps be put back. Later, when the same carriage body was refurbished, spliced to another and given a more modern underframe, she shunned the newly provided electric reading lamps in favour of candle-holders. The story is a snapshot of what might be called the mixed economy of Victorian illumination, in which candles, oil and gas all played an everyday part, with electricity an exotic latecomer. Artificial light was a necessity for all, whether in the form of rudimentary street lighting or the candle that lighted both duke and farmhand to bed; in large amounts it was a luxury, laid on extravagantly at gatherings in grand households, or for specially contrived ‘illuminations’ of public spaces at times of celebration. (The almost complete disappearance during the last century of oil and gas, the broad middle ground of public lighting, would doubtless be almost as surprising from the Victorian point of view as our continuing penchant for candles in electrically lit homes.)
Edwardian trains, and Edwardian lives in general, were more brightly lit than those of the Victorians. That owed less to the advance of electricity than to Carl Auer von Welsbach’s development of the improved fluorescent gas mantle in the mid 1890s. Railway carriages adopted this type from circa 1905–6. The curious may still notice these mantles in places where public gas lamps remain in use; strange, pallid, frail-looking little objects, like dwarfish hosiery, made by drying out an open weave of cotton steeped in saturated nitrite salts. The cotton burnt away on first use, leaving a tight, non-flammable mesh which converted a much greater share of the combustion to light rather than heat, and burnt considerably less gas than the old fishtail or flat-flame burners in the process. It is a pardonable mistake to assume that the steady, brilliant, yellowish-white illumination emitted by lamps of this type puts us in touch with the flaringly lit nocturnal world of the mid Victorians.
The mature method of carriage gas lighting allowed forty hours’ reserve, with a central control in each vehicle for turning the gas on and off and a bypass system linked to a pilot light that ensured instant ignition of all the lamps. It sounds both splendid and ingenious, and such refinements certainly gave gas lighting a longer run against the electric competition. So they hissed their way well into the mid twentieth century: over a third of carriages in 1935 were still gaslit and one in ten of those taken over when the railways were nationalised in 1948.
Gas had its drawbacks. For all that the experienced traveller might take care to select a well-lit compartment, a steady and continuing supply could not be guaranteed. The infuriatingly erratic gas pressure on the suburban Cheshire Lines trains from Manchester just after the First World War was recalled half a century later by a contributor to Railway World magazine. Settled in his compartment with the evening paper, he found that after half a mile the lights often sank to ‘a blue glimmer, which would last until the train reached its first stop, when as if by magic the light would flare up again for the duration of the stop and then repeat the process’. Arnold Bennett used this familiar annoyance of travel in his story ‘Beginning the New Year’ (1907). A man returns after long absence to the novelist’s version of his home territory of Stoke-on-Trent – not a seductive place even in its age of prosperity – via the distinctly unbucolic local line, the North Staffordshire Railway. ‘The compartment was illuminated by one lamp, and in Bleakridge Tunnel this lamp expired. Everything reminded him of his youth.’ (Bennett’s own last journey, in the form of ashes from Golders Green crematorium, was made over these same rails in 1931.) In addition, the cleanliness of gas lighting by comparison with oil was often relative: in both cases, condensation and leaked rainwater tended to build up in the bottom of the glass, to be joined there by the disintegrating corpses of moths and other flying insects that had been fatally attracted by the light. The railway author H. C. Casserley remembered from childhood the fascination of this revolting mixture, and its rhythmic slopping action when the train was in motion. Acetylene gas, adopted by some smaller railways in the twentieth century, had a way of freezing in its tanks in hard winters, just when most needed.
More serious was the danger that cylinders of compressed gas presented in case of accident. Oil- or gas-lit, a Victorian railway carriage was effectively a mobi
le bonfire awaiting ignition. The various materials that provided this potential fuel were noted in their raw state, ‘stacked in vast piles’ at the Midland Railway’s Derby carriage works, in F. S. Williams’s Our Iron Roads (1883): ‘logs of ash, elm, East Indian teak, Honduras mahogany – worth from £15 to £20 a log – red, white and yellow deals from Quebec and Stettin … and satinwood from Kauri, in New Zealand’.
Sawn, planed, mitred, moulded, nailed and glued together, these timbers became the carriage bodies. The process was essentially one of craft manufacture. Oak or teak were the usual materials for the framing, deal (softwood) for the floors, deal or ash for the long, close-fitting planks that made up the roof. The Midland then required twenty-five separate stages of undercoating, painting, rubbing down and varnishing the body, to say nothing of lining-out and lettering. Further painting and varnishing was done within, as well as trimming, lining and upholstery in horsehair, woollen cloth, waxed cloth and linoleum. Taut, waterproofed canvas covered the roof; thick felt layers were used for insulation below the floorboards. When smashed apart and suffused with escaping hydrocarbons, it did not take much input from an unextinguished lamp flame or the coals of a derailed steam locomotive to set these ingredients in a blaze. Especially shocking was the nocturnal collision on the Midland Railway at Hawes Junction in the Pennines in 1910, when wrecked wooden carriages were torched by an entire cylinder of blazing gas, and nine passengers died. Fourteen more were incinerated ‘almost without trace’ one night three years later, in another collision a few miles north on the same line. Worst of all, in 1915 a triple collision and gas-fuelled fire at Quintinshill in Dumfriesshire killed at least 227, mostly soldiers on their way to Gallipoli.
Electric lighting was much safer, but despite occasional use from 1881 it took over a quarter-century to become firmly established. That was partly because light bulbs that worked reliably on the move were slow to appear. Railway engineers also struggled to find the right balance between dynamo power deriving from the movement of the train and battery power that could keep the lights shining when at rest. Each carriage effectively became a small mobile power station, with its own back-up supply – a roundabout way of generating electricity by burning coal to make steam, as a by-product of dragging a train from A to B. Unlike railway gas lamps, these early electric lights were often elaborately designed, with two or more glass-shaded bulbs branching off each ornate iron stem. Although cheaper to operate, the new technology was more expensive to install, sometimes prohibitively so: it was estimated at £130 per coach versus £34 for gas on the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway. Also on the financial side, the railways had to consider the capital already sunk into gasworks and plant, for in most cases they made their own gas. The Highland Railway is a case in point: having experimented with both methods to replace its old oil lighting, come down on the side of gas and built a substantial gasworks at Inverness in 1901, the company did not wish to overturn its decision with any undue haste. On top of which were the improvements in gas brilliance already described, which stole a march over the new technology. These were enough for the North British Railway to order in 1908 that its existing electrically lit carriages be returned to gas, but only once all the costly spares had been used up. Shortly after which came the Midland Railway’s two fatal Pennine conflagrations, and only then did company after company across the railway network decide to go electric at last.
Electricity had a further advantage: the guard could turn it on when the train passed through tunnels during the day. This was a problem to which gas lighting had no satisfactory solution, short of leaving the lights burning all the time. Other experiments were attempted. In 1880 the London & North Western tried out glow-in-the-dark paint on compartment ceilings, with not much effect beyond some reported alarm among uninformed passengers. One of the steam-hauled Glasgow suburban lines was equipped a few years later with an electric conductor rail, solely to light the carriages as they passed through its underground section; at night, when the carriage gas lamps were lit, the electricity could be turned off. Fully electrified lines were another matter, but there were none of these in Britain before 1890, and very few for decades after that.
A preoccupation with artificial lighting risks overlooking the continued importance of daylight. Rather than enlarging the windows, visibility was improved by raising the central strip of the roof to form a clerestory, with little windows along the sides. Sometimes the lamps were placed in the curved sections of roof on either side, sometimes they were set into the roof of the clerestory itself. The clerestory was the usual form of roof on many lines from the 1870s until the 1900s. It also helped to see off the risky practice of putting luggage on the roof, although this was already in retreat following the substitution of coal for cleaner but costlier coke as locomotive fuel after 1860, with a corresponding increase in fallout from hot cinders. Clerestory openings were nowhere near as large as the side windows, but by allowing light to enter obliquely overhead they could make quite a difference to the middle seats of the compartment, which could be surprisingly dark on a dull day. Rather missing the point, the Great Eastern Railway favoured some of its clerestory windows with ‘coloured photochrome transparencies’ on the stained-glass principle. A more useful (but never common) refinement was to double-glaze the windows as a precaution against condensation. To sit beneath a single-glazed clerestory in a crowded compartment on a cold day was to risk a steady delivery of drips of less than pure water – another reason to prefer the window seat.
Heating took longer to arrive. To the earliest passengers, not excluding those well-off enough to travel habitually in the inside seats of road coaches, it would not have seemed at all strange that the new trains were unheated. For the whole span of previous human existence, to be transported across Northern Europe during more than half the year was to endure exposure to cold. The only protection against chills, wind or rain was to wrap up well. One extreme case of the technique was the young Brunel on his way across the frozen Pas de Calais in 1829, calling for bundles of hay at each stop to fill the void spaces in his coupé up to neck height, until its human cargo sat ‘like three stone Schiedam bottles packed … for safe carriage’. But that was no way to run a railway.
The first British example of a train that could generate its own heating belonged, like other luxuries, to royalty. The diminutive saloon provided for Queen Victoria by the London & Birmingham Railway in 1843 had a small underfloor boiler fired by oil burners, the heat from which circulated by means of a pipe within the floor cavity. A brass grating allowed the heat to enter the compartment. But the system was ahead of time, and was not repeated even in subsequent royal carriages.
Instead, the solution adopted for royalty downwards was simply to put something hot inside the carriage. Horse-drawn transport provided a precedent: private coaches would sometimes have the chill taken off them by means of a house-brick hot from the hearth, placed in a sand-tray or fireproof box. The railway equivalent was a flat tin or iron box about 2ft long with handles at both ends, filled with hot water and known with disarming candour as a footwarmer. The device made its British début on the long-distance trains of the Great Northern Railway in 1852. It is said to have been a French idea, encountered by the company’s chief engineer on a winter holiday. Other British lines followed suit. On some lines the footwarmers were rented for a modest charge from porters or hawkers on the platform, on others they were provided as part of the service, although the recipient might be expected to reward the porter with a tip. The foot-warmers spent the journey on the floor of the carriage, sometimes stowed into recesses made for the purpose. Thermal performance improved due to a modification in 1881 by Francis William Webb, the autocratic chief engineer of the London & North Western Railway, again borrowed from France. His containers were sealed permanently and filled with a strong solution of sodium acetate, which released extra heat as it cooled and recrystallised. A brisk shake of the cooling acetate tin would bring a welcome extra pulse of heat. The chemical vers
ion was estimated to stay warm three times longer than mere water.
The heat source for both sealed and refillable types was provided at the station. The acetate variety had to be immersed in large wheeled vats of water, the contents kept at a permanent simmer by a small stove. On longer journeys passengers might be issued with a fresh footwarmer, or have the old one recharged. Regular travellers learned to look forward to these stops, the more so when the journey was long and likely to be cold. On the Highland Railway’s main line between Perth and Inverness, the magic station names were Blair Atholl and Aviemore. The North British Railway built a boiler house for the purpose at its station at Riccarton Junction in the Southern Uplands, a remote railway hamlet without road access that stood midway on the now defunct Waverley Route from Carlisle to Edinburgh. In such cases, smart work was needed by the porters on the icy platforms to re-equip an entire train within the allowed timetable. Cannier travellers made a point of sitting in the part of the train that would draw up closest to the footwarmer cart on the platform when the train stopped en route.