The Railways Read online

  Necessity, mother of invention, had filled a gap by July 1852, when Messrs Walters’ ‘celebrated railway convenience for ladies and gentlemen’ was first advertised in The Times. ‘Travelling conveniences’ for wearing under everyday dress also feature in department-store catalogues. The publisher Philip Unwin (born 1905) recalled that articles of this kind, made of rubber and strapped to the leg, could be had from shops at the approaches to many stations. Other expedients were possible. John Gloag (born 1896) recorded that women travelling together in an otherwise empty compartment might bring into service from their luggage ‘an innocent-looking circular basket, which contained a chamber pot’. Mothers with small children no doubt pressed all sorts of articles into emergency service. The solitary (or companionable) male passenger could improvise at an open carriage window without too much risk of scandal or detection, and doubtless did so often enough, especially at night. Otherwise there was nothing for it but to sit tight and await the next long station stop.

  Daumier’s guard is shown leaning down from a fixed seat or cabin on the carriage roof. This feature was not unique to French railways. Similar seats, not always protected against the weather, feature on many early views from Britain. Their occupants’ duties varied from line to line. A train guard might use the vantage point to keep in visual contact with the locomotive crew on their open footplate, to observe any directions and signals from railwaymen by the lineside and to apply or release the carriage brake accordingly. Another position adopted was on the back of the tender, overlooking the train from against the direction of travel; this was Brunel’s choice for the Great Western. Some trains had more than one guard, at a ratio of up to one man per carriage, so that the brakes could be applied to more of the vehicles – this as long as continuous brakes had yet to be brought into use. If the train was carrying mail, a commodity which usually migrated from road to rail the instant a new line opened, there would also be Post Office guards to watch over the mail boxes; and because the habit of carrying the boxes on the carriage roofs was also taken over from the roads, these guards were at first also seated outside and on top. Better arrangements soon suggested themselves, and the guards and their mail moved inside: either to the special vans known as Travelling Post Offices, which were equipped to drop off and pick up mailbags from lineside apparatus while the train was in motion, or to ordinary compartments. In 1848 the Post Office finally accepted that ordinary guards in the employment of the railway could be trusted with the mail. That did not mean the end of roof seats; they were still current as late as 1858, when the Inverness & Aberdeen Junction Railway specified them for its new stock – quite a cruelty, considering the region’s climate. But by that time it was more common for the guard to travel in a compartment or dedicated van equipped with a windowed projection on each side, or with a roof rising higher than the ordinary level by means of a vertical glazed section, through which the guard could look out by climbing steps provided within the carriage.

  A seat on top had an additional advantage: it allowed the guard to watch for slippages of the luggage riding on the carriage roofs, or for sheetings that were working loose, or for occasions when the lumpy assembly of trunks, packages and coverings trapped a hot cinder from the locomotive and caught fire. In such cases it seems to have been common practice to clamber across the roofs to put things right. The dangers are not hard to see, and they took their toll. One early fatality was a servant of the London & Birmingham Railway, a guard called David Dent (all railway employees were officially ‘servants’ until 1948, nationalisation year), on 7 July 1838. While Dent was fixing a flapping tarpaulin, his head struck a bridge, knocking him off. The train was moving at thirty miles an hour. Another train then ran him over on the track. The line having opened fully just one month before, Dent may have had only a few weeks in which to master his perilous duties. A railwayman’s accidental death was still newsworthy in the 1830s; the Annual Register devoted a paragraph to the event, dwelling on the ‘frightfully mangled state’ of the body, for there was little squeamishness in discussing injuries in early-Victorian Britain. Reports in the daily papers described the state of Dent’s skull, arms and viscera in still more horrible detail.

  Making safe the luggage was not the only dangerous duty that might be required of the first railway guards. Exactly one month later, on the same line, Thomas Port fell to his death from a northbound train at Harrow. His duties as guard included checking the tickets of passengers after departure, working along the outside of the moving train from compartment to compartment. Gaps between the carriages were negotiated by stepping across the interval between the footboards. But Port lost his footing and fell beneath the wheels; his legs were crushed; amputation failed to save him. A servant of the new technology, Port died in time to find a place within an older and declining tradition, that of the verse epitaph. The lines carved on his gravestone at Harrow-on-the-Hill may be quoted in all their artless pathos:

  Bright rose the morn and vig’rous rose poor Port:

  Gay on the train, he used his wonted sport:

  Ere noon arrived his mangled form they bore,

  With pain distorted and o’erwhelm’d with gore:

  When evening came, to close the fatal day,

  A mutilated corpse the sufferer lay.

  The manifestly dangerous practice of checking tickets through the windows of moving trains did not last long. Instead, the job was often done by means of a special ticket stop, by which long-distance trains were detained shortly before their termination point so that the tickets could be systematically examined and collected. Sometimes this was done from narrow platforms built specially for the purpose, as at Euston and York in their early years; one of these has survived, against the odds, in the cutting just outside Liverpool Street station in London. Stops were also made at ordinary suburban stations such as Finsbury Park (for King’s Cross), Preston Park (for Brighton) and Dudley Port (for Birmingham New Street), places all too familiar to the long-distance passenger into the early twentieth century. The idea of being held for five minutes a mile or two short of the terminus on every single journey will doubtless set the contemporary traveller’s mind twitching with impatience. So it should be remembered that despite all the time lost, the train remained the swiftest human conveyance yet known. Perhaps the practice can be thought of as equivalent to the boring but expected modern experience of sitting meekly still after landing at the airport, waiting for the docking bays to engage and the seat-belt lights to switch off at last.

  Placing the train crew outside the carriages did not seem startling in the 1830s. The crews of road coaches travelled in the open, as did many of the passengers, coaches commonly having more outside seats than inside ones. This in turn made it perfectly acceptable that the first railways should require passengers travelling at the cheaper rates to journey in the open air. So now we must move out of the compartment for a time, stepping down the social scale from Aristocrat to Democrat, and also back in time from 1862, to the earliest passenger railways.

  Footnotes

  * On these anomalous ‘posting carriages’ see Chapter 3.

  ** Strictly, the last section of Arnold’s journey was by the Metropolitan District Railway, forerunner of the present District Line.

  – 3 –

  THE CLASSES IN MOTION

  The compartmented coaches of the Liverpool & Manchester were the first of their kind, and influential on the design of thousands more. In the earliest years the company positively encouraged visits to its carriage workshops, ‘whether for the purposes of scientific research, or for practical information’ – for there was no reason to be nervous of competition, as long as the new lines up and down the country remained isolated from one another. The Liverpool & Manchester’s public, timetabled, steam-hauled service is the chief reason it qualifies as the first true railway in the modern sense, despite the prior claims of its famous predecessor the Stockton & Darlington Railway, opened in 1825. The two lines shared the magic name of George Ste
phenson as engineer and as supplier of locomotives (via Robert Stephenson & Co. of Newcastle, the engine works George set up with his no less gifted son). The different ways in which they chose to convey their human cargoes are worth dwelling on.

  The Stockton & Darlington at first owned just one carriage, named Experiment – a hint of ambivalence in the title, perhaps. The naming of carriages echoed road practice, and the carriage was indeed fashioned like a single-compartment road coach, for the good reason that the Stockton & Darlington’s passengers did not yet travel behind locomotives at all. The chief difference was that Experiment had identical ends, so that a horse could pull it either way. After the junketings were done, the core business of the railway as a mineral and goods carrier asserted itself. Access was allowed to anyone who wished to operate trains, effectively on a toll system. These privately run trains took their turn in the intervals between those the company ran using its own locomotives, horses and rolling stock. The young company actually gave up operating passenger trains on its own account for a while, in favour of provision by the horse-drawn carriages of licensed private operators. Only after 1833 did all Stockton & Darlington trains become subject to steam-hauled company operation.

  The use of horses to pull passengers along a railway was nothing new for Britain. Mineral and goods lines – railways, tramways (or tramroads), plateways or waggonways, named according to their deployment of various types of iron or timber rails – already had a history more than two centuries long. Informal use by passengers taking rides on their vehicles, perhaps in return for a small fee or tip, was widespread. The next chapter in the story was the operation of an advertised public service, running at fixed times. First in the field was the Swansea & Mumbles Railway, a five-mile mineral line opened in 1806. In the following year the company contracted out the right to run a passenger service by means of road-type coaches, which had wheels with flanged iron tyres. This service lasted only until the late 1820s, when a turnpike road opened alongside: the first instance of a passenger railway killed off by road competition. The sequence of events would not have seemed so strange at the time; as on other horse-drawn railways, passenger traffic represented a useful additional revenue source, but was not intrinsic to the concept. Even the prospectus issued for the Liverpool & Manchester in October 1824 was still cagey about the potential of passenger traffic. Once the Stockton & Darlington had demonstrated the latent demand, the Liverpool & Manchester was emboldened to embrace the concept too, as yet without the additional leap of faith represented by steam haulage. This shyness in teaming locomotives with passenger trains might be compared with the early development of aircraft, which found specialist and military uses in plenty well before anyone had worked out how to make them pay as a means of regular passenger transport.

  These early horse-drawn passenger railways should not be dismissed as backward. The principle was sound: iron tyres and iron rails, like canals, allowed a single horse to manage a much greater load than was possible on the roads. The durability of the concept was proved by its revival some decades later in the form of the horse tram, a familiar sight on many British streets in later Victorian times – although it took an American financier, the poignantly named George Francis Train (1829–1904), to re-establish the method. Train’s tramcars began running in Birkenhead in 1860, after the failure in the previous year of an attempt (by a Briton) to make a go of a horse-tram service in Liverpool, across the Mersey. In the following year Train demonstrated his trams in London, bringing the capital into line with Paris and with many American cities. So the horse found its place within the new systems of public rail-borne travel, even as it was displaced by the iron horse from heavy and long-distance haulage.

  To use horses for railway haulage imposed a limitation on weight, which tended to favour the use of single carriages modelled on those of the roads. The open-topped horse tram demonstrated the principle for later generations; as on the roads, enclosed and exposed passengers all travelled on the same set of wheels. The adoption of steam haulage changed the rules of the game, for a steam locomotive could manage a string of separate carriages – ‘a length infinitely extendible’, as The Times’s man Henry Crabb Robinson put it, with pardonable exaggeration, on his visit to the Liverpool & Manchester in 1833. Now there was an opportunity to build entire vehicles to different standards, of which the second-class carriages were effectively the successors of the outside seats on the roads. Those provided in the company’s first years took the form of open wagons fitted with four-a-side benches. For further protection, some carriages sported a lightweight canopy. That much was all that was needed as long as the railways sought only to take over existing traffic from the roads. While the competition lasted – which was rarely long, for coach services usually folded pretty smartly after a railway opened along its route – the passenger could weigh in the balance questions of comfort, economy and speed.

  Comfort first. In truth, travelling by train in an open-sided carriage was not always more pleasant, minute for minute, than a coach journey. It entailed exposure to much stronger winds and the risk of stinging rain; effectively, the train created its own wind-chill. ‘The cold is great, and [passengers] must have some defence against the wind, through which they pass so rapidly’: thus the Duke of Wellington’s reported experience of the Liverpool & Manchester. This effect was usually tempered by sitting within an enclosed pen, rather than perching up high, stagecoach fashion. Even then, unwelcome currents of air might whip around the ankles from the holes that were sometimes bored in the floors to allow the escape of rainwater, and for slopping out when cleaning. Open-sided carriages without holes might take on water during heavy rain; a depth of two inches was recorded on the Great Western in 1844.

  For extreme exposure, there was little to beat those early railways, which took over the stagecoach habit of placing passengers on the outside of otherwise enclosed coaches. The first steam railway to run out of the capital, the London & Greenwich (opened from 1836 onwards), chose to fix benches across the end walls of its second-class stock, on which passengers could sit with their legs dangling over the track. In its early years the Newcastle & Carlisle offered third-class travel in the form of passenger seats on top of its luggage vans, from which uniformed bands had performed on the railway’s opening day in 1835. Anyone who braved an open carriage or outside seat was also exposed to the locomotive exhaust. ‘Dust from engine annoying to the eyes & filthy in the carriage: I had dreaded the motion backward.’ Thus the young Gladstone in his diary for 13 July 1839, after a journey to Crewe. And not only dust: lighted cinders pattering down from the locomotive exhaust, which might ruin hats and other clothes, or burn the skin directly. One passenger in the early days of the Great Western sent a note of protest to the management, enclosing a cinder ‘which fell within my shirt collar in a burning state and caused a large blister to rise’.

  As for economy and speed, the train was almost always the winner. The average expense saved was appreciable, though not necessarily enormous; in the 1830s some coaches charged 5d per mile for an inside seat, whereas first-class trains might cost 3½d. But the railways were free of the customary tips or ‘vails’ payable on the roads at regular stages and at the end of the journey; as recalled in 1858 by R. S. Surtees – famously, an aficionado of fox hunting, but also an enthusiast for railways – ‘a man used never to have his hand out of his pocket’. Then there was the time won by travelling faster, which in turn saved on meals, and which on longer journeys might avert the heavy expense of an overnight stay – not to mention the release of valuable extra hours for those who worked for a living.

  It was also clear from early on that the railways could unlock a great deal of extra demand by conveying passengers more quickly and cheaply than the roads. The Liverpool & Manchester began by running five daily trains each way; within five years that figure had risen to nine. But even this level of service excluded the poorer classes: those for whom the price of a coach journey remained out of reach, but whose bu
dgets might stretch to a ticket if only the trains could be made to run as cheaply as possible. As a rule, early lines were not built with such people in mind. A few companies actually found it more profitable to raise prices so much that demand began to fall. Even so, the prospect of extra human payloads that could be carried as cheaply and easily as livestock – sometimes, indeed, sharing the same train with livestock – was difficult to resist.

  First-, second- and third-class travel, from the Illustrated London News, 1846. The first-class carriage has an end compartment of the single-sided coupé type.

  So third-class travel was born. By definition, it offered an inferior service to what was often still an austere second class. Some lines simply provided low-sided open wagons, in which passengers had to stand, lean or balance on their luggage as best they could. The Stockton & Darlington carried passengers on this basis on its Middlesbrough extension in 1835. On the Manchester & Leeds Railway a bar and crossbar were fitted within, making four standing enclosures or pens (the parallel with handling livestock is exact here). Occupants of these vehicles were not even granted the honorific of third class by the company, which used the term ‘wagon passengers’. The London & Birmingham was using wagon-type carriages by Christmas Eve, 1838, when the teenaged Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) took one from Berkhamsted to London. His autobiography recalls ‘open trucks identical with modern goods trucks, except that they had hinged doors, but with no seats whatever, so that any one tired of standing must sit upon the floor’. Despite mild weather for the season and a speed not over 20 mph, ‘the wind was very disagreeable’.