The Railways Page 8
The industry had not finished with Wallace: he went on to work as a railway surveyor, all the while developing his self-education as an entomologist; finally he flourished as an explorer and naturalist, developing independently of Darwin a theory of natural selection. An elder brother, William, preceded Alfred into the business of surveying for railway lines, but with less happy results. In 1846 William was required to travel up to London to appear before a parliamentary committee concerning Brunel’s South Wales Railway. Shortly after his return to Glamorganshire he died from congestion of the lungs, an illness which, his brother recorded, had begun with a cold brought on ‘by being chilled in a wretched third-class carriage’. At least William died in his bed; in the previous year a wire worker named Jonathan John had fallen down dead just outside Bath station, after enduring a third-class journey in one of Brunel’s open-sided carriages. His travelling outfit of two pairs of trousers, two waistcoats, two overcoats and a woollen neckerchief had not been enough to protect him. The coroners’ jury found the design of the vehicle partly responsible for his demise.
Even if they might still be lethal in cold weather, the design of third-class carriages was already improving by the mid 1840s. The change was brought about by the Railway Regulation Act of 1844, the credit for which is due to William Gladstone as President of the Board of Trade. The context was growing public concern that the railways were unsafe; the trigger was another journey made on the Great Western on a Christmas Eve, to fatal effect, in the year 1841.
The train in question was the 4.30 a.m. from London to Bristol, which passed through Sonning in Berkshire by means of a cutting. At nearly two miles long, this was the largest earthwork on the line, taking the railway through high ground before the approach to Reading. The cutting was then barely two years old. Heavy rains had made its sides unstable, and the landslip that followed blocked the rails to a depth of nearly four feet. The fall went undetected until the train ran into it. Although the service was officially described as a goods train, the practice had been followed of including a pair of third-class carriages – ‘trucks’, in the official stock lists – coupled ahead of the wagons. There was no time for either of the train’s guards to apply the brake, and on impact the wagons by their own momentum rode up over the derailed passenger trucks and against the engine and tender. The trucks were fitted with planks for seats, protected by sides a mere 2ft high. Some of the occupants were crushed, others thrown out by the impact. Eight were killed outright (of whom six were buried by the company in a communal grave); a ninth later died in hospital. Many more were gravely injured. Building workers made up most of the casualties, returning home for Christmas from employment on the foundations of the new Palace of Westminster; their masters there were the same contractors, Messrs Grissell & Peto, who had built a substantial share of the Great Western’s line.
Sonning represented the first major loss of life to passengers on a British railway – an ugly bruise on the public face of the industry. There was no gainsaying that the open carriage was a dismal way to travel (nine and half hours to Bristol in this case, half of that time in winter darkness). Now it was shown to be highly dangerous too. Nor did the working practices of the Great Western emerge with credit. It was not hard to foresee that carriages coupled between the locomotive and heavy wagons would be vulnerable in case of accident. A contributor to the Mechanics’ Magazine, a journal aimed at skilled artisans, denounced the ‘modern mechanical Moloch’ for having failed to act on warnings to this effect.
By 1841 these matters were no longer merely a subject for public denunciation. In the 1830s the railways had been left to manage their own safety, but the first Railway Regulation Act (1840) had set up a Railway Department at the Board of Trade with powers to inspect and approve new lines, and to investigate accidents that resulted in serious injury or worse to members of the public. Such accidents were now to be followed by the publication of an official report, with the power to recommend improved practice.
In the case of the Sonning disaster, the Great Western was exonerated from responsibility for the smash itself, on the grounds that the cutting was not so steep-sided that a landslip could reasonably have been predicted. But the inspector’s report did question the safety of several features and practices, and directed that the carriage sides on this and every other line be raised to a minimum of 4ft 6in, both as a safeguard against being jolted out and to protect against ‘the cutting winds of the winter’.
This was better than nothing; but there was more going on behind the scenes at the Board of Trade. As Vice-President of the Board in 1841–3, then as President in 1843–5, Gladstone showed a particular interest in taking the railways in hand. He proposed a select parliamentary committee on the subject, steered its deliberations, compiled its reports and masterminded their culmination in the shape of the Railway Regulation Act of 1844. Economic and political historians remember this ‘Gladstone Act’ especially for its clauses allowing railways to be nationalised after a fixed period, a pet project that came to nothing, but which seemed prophetic in hindsight. Social and railway historians best know the Act for other provisions, especially for that which gave the nation a new coinage: the ‘Parliamentary’ train.
The Parliamentary got its name because the Act required all future railways with a substantial passenger service to include at least one train in each day’s timetable, Sundays not excepted, to be charged at no more than a penny a mile. These cheap trains were to call at every station while maintaining a minimum overall speed of 12 mph. Their carriages were to have seats, and passengers should also be ‘protected from the weather’, in a manner subject to the Board’s approval. That made certain sorts of carriage obsolete immediately; for instance, the Great Western was still running open second-class carriages as well as its horrible thirds. There was also an allowance under the Act of 56lb of luggage per passenger before surcharges were incurred (half a hundredweight, or just over 25kg metrically) – less than the higher classes were routinely allowed, but sufficient for itinerant workers and tradesmen to take their tools or samples with them.
Gladstone sweetened the pill for the companies by exempting these cheap trains from the 5 per cent duty then normally levied on ticket receipts. This exemption also gave existing lines an incentive to run their own Parliamentary-type trains. Such was the take-up that any differences in passenger services between companies founded before and after 1844 soon ceased to be significant.
The experience of second-class travel over 100 miles, from Angus B. Reach, The Comic Bradshaw, 1848
It is hard to think of any greater single improvement in travelling conditions imposed on unenthusiastic private enterprise by the government of the United Kingdom. In narrow terms, the new rules were a major restraint on free trade, imposing rules and conditions on companies that would rather have done things their own way. On the other hand, the Act also gave a calculated stimulus to capitalism by promoting the free circulation of labour. In addition, the Parliamentary train represented an effective subsidy for the travel of the poorer classes, by the surrender of revenue that would otherwise have come to the Treasury. Only in the daily timetabling of their cheap trains did the companies remain free. The London & Brighton, for instance, initially concentrated them between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. – deliberately useless to those wanting a cheap day trip to the seaside.
What could not be foreseen in 1844 was the way in which the Board would use the regulation of Parliamentary trains as a hand-hold on the companies, steering them away from dependence on the cheapest and most basic type of covered carriage. These interventions were backed by the power to withhold the remission of duty should any carriage designs be found wanting (timetabled speeds and station stops likewise). The under-sung hero of this story is Major-General Sir Charles Pasley, FRS (1780–1861), the second Inspector-General of Railways. Such military titles would become familiar handles for senior members of the inspectorate even into the 1980s, a tradition that began because the 1840 Act barred from a
ppointment anyone with an existing connection to a railway company. That was enough to rule out practically every civil engineer of note, but not the Corps of Royal Engineers, among whom Pasley cut an outstanding figure: a former child prodigy from a gentry family who could read New Testament Greek by the age of eight; a veteran of Napoleonic battles who survived being bayoneted and then shot through at the Battle of Flushing in 1809; the first head of the School of Military Engineering at Woolwich, and later in charge of instruction at the Engineers’ establishment at Chatham, where he added Irish and Welsh to his stock of languages by conversing with rankers under his command; an internationally recognised authority on siege warfare, on the demolition of naval wrecks and on the properties of cement and concrete; an early advocate of decimal weights and measures – the register is so full that Pasley’s pages in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography hurry over his railway years in just two sentences.
That Pasley knew little about the new industry when he was appointed proved no handicap. He was able to mug up from the technical literature that was then just beginning to appear, and his diaries record an avid assimilation of knowledge on his journeys over the expanding network. On 28 February 1842, for example, he was in Manchester, watching tickets being printed and numbered by Edmondson’s still novel method (‘The quickest mode of entering’).
The bulk of Pasley’s responsibilities concerned the inspection of new lines and the investigation of accidents. His diaries have much less to say about carriage design. Yet it is clear that the 1844 Act opened the way for a culture of arm-twisting, and that this endured well beyond the end of the Inspector-General’s term of office in 1846, each intervention offering an opportunity for further improvement. The policy was never officially formulated, and it is difficult to detect any ulterior motives behind it. The bureaucratic instinct to put things in order doubtless contributed, backed by a broader public feeling that the railways deserved more direction and control than they had so far received; but there seems to have been a genuine humanitarian impulse there too.
So the Grand Junction Railway was told brusquely in October 1844 that the open-sided carriages proposed for its Parliamentary trains ‘would never do’. The following month, Pasley decreed that the adequate protection for passengers stipulated under the Act meant that carriages should be ‘capable of being entirely closed when necessity may require, with provisions for the admission of light and air’ (this in response to a submission from the Manchester & Birmingham). In this case the company’s proposal had gone to the opposite extreme: a fully enclosed vehicle with unglazed openings that could be made weathertight by means of shutters or blinds, so that passengers could exclude rain and wind only at the cost of sitting in the dark. It was a not uncommon response to the Act, partly suggested by the ease with which existing open-sided carriages could simply be boarded up below the roofline. Tarpaulin hangings, as on the London & South Western, were another way of filling the gap.
The requirement to admit light and air was then circulated to several other companies, as Minute 410. This action took the Department into uncertain territory, for the 1844 Act did not empower it to make legally enforceable regulations. Care was therefore taken not to expose Minute 410 to the glare of the courtroom by taking legal action against companies failing to provide coaches to the standard preferred. Nor was there any need; the Inspectorate’s power to refuse the remittance of passenger duty proved enough to secure compliance.
In 1846 it was declared by the Board that lamps were ‘absolutely necessary for the safety and comfort of passengers’ – though as we have seen, the level of future provision varied a good deal according to class. Glazed windows were an obvious next step. Minute 410 stopped short of insisting on these, as the Lancaster & Carlisle Railway well knew. Its managers hoped to get away with using carriages equipped with slatted or shuttered openings only. The official response gave this short shrift, pointing out that the new route passed through the bleak eastern fells of the Lake Counties, in consideration of which the passengers certainly deserved protection behind glass. A compromise was reached, by which four glass panels would be let into the roof. It is a strange picture: the Parliamentary passengers shuttered within as their train climbed the punishing incline at Shap, deprived of the sight of the Westmorland skyline, or any external view but the clouds visible through the film of rainwater streaming over the skylights above their heads.
This exchange dates from 1846–7. By 1860, the Board of Trade was confident enough to determine the amount of windowing too. Each Parliamentary passenger was now to have a minimum of sixty square inches of window glass, as well as minimum standards of space, at twenty cubic feet per person and sixteen inches’ width of seat on which to sit.
None of this meant that open carriages were prohibited as such. Some lines simply redesignated them ‘fourth class’, others kept them in reserve for cheap excursion traffic. But the passenger-duty rule left little inducement to build new open carriages, and to the ordinary traveller of 1862 the type would already have seemed archaic. Probably the worst excursion stock in regular use by that date was on the ever-thrifty Lancashire & Yorkshire, which carried on using mere open wagons for this traffic as late as 1859. Criticism from the Board in that year spurred the company into fitting temporary roofs to some 200 of these vehicles, which had been built for the conveyance of cattle.
Those who could countenance an occasional trip in an open carriage might yet be daunted by the boxed-in Parliamentary type. One such was Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–66), wife of the philosopher and critic Thomas Carlyle. In 1835 she had braved a journey on the Liverpool & Manchester, the only rail-borne instalment of a complicated Anglo-Scottish journey. Judging the experience no worse than going by road, she became a confirmed user of second class; but in 1855 she found herself weighing up the attractions of an overnight journey to Scotland under a starry sky. Checking at Euston to see if open-topped thirds could still be had, Jane encountered instead ‘a black hole of Calcutta on wheels! Closely roofed in, windows like pigeon holes, and no partitions to separate the twelve breaths of one compartment from all the breaths of all the third-class carriage!’
Jane’s ‘twelve breaths’ – presumably a reference to the risk of contagion while travelling – must refer to individual places within each division of the carriage. Her calculation that passengers should sit in facing rows of six may have been a misunderstanding or exaggeration, five a side being usual. The intended capacity was anyway not easy to tell, for lower classes of carriage came without armrests or headrests to apportion the sitting space. Even five a side was tight, given the overall dimensions. The Midland Railway’s earliest Parliamentary coaches can stand as an example from the more generous end of the spectrum: compartments 6ft 5in wide, which gave just over 15½in for each seat, and 5ft long. The last measurement was reduced in some Great Western stock to a barely endurable 4ft – especially so, given that the railway’s broad-gauge carriages were unusually wide. The experience must have been like sitting sideways in a mobile wooden tunnel.
Sitting on mere benches, too, for these third-class seats were not upholstered. That would have seemed less startling in an age when padded furniture was still a status symbol. Church, chapel, school, alehouse, lecture theatre and music hall all made do with timber benches or chairs. Simple wooden seating with removable cushions, rather than upholstered furniture as such, remained the norm in the ordinary home. To guard against jolting and vibration during travel, the traveller was advised to take a supply of padding, whether in the form of thick clothing or cushions of one sort or another. (The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book recommended the inflatable sort made of caoutchouc or India rubber.)
Less comfort, less personal space, visibly cheaper and plainer materials – all these distinctions between first class and the rest remain familiar. The railways also took care to make their first-class carriages look superior externally. Often they were adorned with the company’s own heraldry, almost always concocted without
the endorsement of the College of Arms, but painted nonetheless with all the care usually lavished on the displays on aristocratic road-coaches – at least until 1870, after which crests and complex lettering could be applied in the form of printed transfers invented by Messrs Tearnes of Birmingham. In his tour of the Crewe workshops in 1849, Sir Francis Head observed one first-class carriage being painted in ‘beautiful colours’, while another was being stripped out for demotion to second class, with men ‘converting large, fashionable, oval windows [another echo of the smart private coach] into vulgar little square ones’. Likewise, older second-class carriages might be stripped down for further use as thirds. The commitment to cleanliness varied too; Head observed that the ‘large gang of strong he-housemaids’ employed at Euston was divided into dedicated first-class moppers and other men to whose care was allotted everything from second class to horseboxes and luggage trains.
Another difference was the presence of posters and notices pasted within the upper parts of the carriage, an intrusion that first-class was spared. The area available for advertising varied, according to how high the partitions reached. Jane Carlyle remarked on the lack of partitions between compartments in the Euston carriages, and in such cases passengers might sit literally back-to-back on seats of the lowest bench type. The distinction is important, for it made the second- or third-class carriage into a different kind of social space. By means of a bit of head-twisting, every other passenger could be seen (there were normally no more than four or five compartments, even in the longer, six-wheeled type of carriage that prevailed from the 1860s onwards). Above a certain level of background noise, the other passengers could therefore be heard, too.