Blood, Iron and Gold E-Book

Christian Wolmar

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 749

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

The birth of the railways and their rapid spread across the world triggered economic growth and social change on an unprecedented scale. From Panama to the Punjab, Tasmania to Turin, Blood, Iron and Gold describes the vision and determination of the pioneers who developed railways that would link cities that had hitherto been isolated, and would one day span continents. Christian Wolmar reveals how the rise of the train stimulated daring feats of engineering, architectural innovation and the rapid movement of people and goods around the world. He shows how cultures were enriched - and destroyed - by the unrelenting construction and how the railways played a vital role in civil conflict, as well as in two world wars. Blood, Iron and Gold tells the dramatic story of how the railways changed the world.

Leseprobe

BLOOD,

IRON &

GOLD

Also by Christian Wolmar

Fire & Steam

The Subterranean Railway

On the Wrong Line

Down the Tube

Broken Rails

Forgotten Children

Stagecoach

The Great Railway Disaster

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Christian Wolmar 2009

The moral right of Christian Wolmar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 84887 170 0ePub ISBN: 978 1 84887 434 3Mobi ISBN 978 1 84887 434 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic BooksAn imprint of Grove Atlantic LtdOrmond House26–27 Boswell StreetLondonWC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Dedicated to my wonderful Deborah who puts upwith my obsessions and foibles, and inspires meto keep going.

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Maps

1    The First Railways

2    Europe Makes a Start

3    The British Influence

4    The American Way

5    Joining Up Europe

6    Crossing America . . .

7    . . . and Other Continents

8    The Invasion of the Railway

9    The Railway Revolution

10    Getting Better All the Time

11    Changing Trains

12    Decline But Not Fall

13    Railway Renaissance

Bibliography

Notes

Index

List of Maps and Illustrations

PREFACE

In my previous book, Fire & Steam, I undertook a task that seemed daunting – to encapsulate the 175-year history of the railways in Britain in one relatively short volume. For this book, the set task has been even harder: to try to draw together the history of the railways across the world and to demonstrate their enormous impact globally. Again, therefore, I have made no attempt to be comprehensive and have found enormous difficulties in selecting which stories to tell.

Certain tales, however, had to be included, such as the genesis of various railways, the development of the major European networks, the influence of British technology in so many countries, the creation of the huge systems in India and, much later, China, as well as the building of the great transcontinental lines in Russia and the USA. It was essential, too, to outline the way that the railways progressed, becoming faster, more comfortable and safer.

Again, I have eschewed nostalgia. While this book inevitably evokes the past, occasionally even wistfully, it is about the way the railways transformed people's lives and were a catalyst for a whole range of other changes. The impact of the railways is almost impossible to exaggerate. To understand the way they changed the world, put yourself in the position of a person who had never seen a large machine, nor travelled in or witnessed anything faster than a galloping horse. Their horizons were necessarily limited and the arrival of the iron road changed that for ever.

There are many books with titles like ‘The World's Railways’ or ‘Tracks Around the World’, but most either celebrate the technology of trains or only give cursory accounts of their social impact. I have attempted to show how the railways helped to create the world we live in and stimulated development and change in virtually every country. It has been a gargantuan task, but hopefully this book will, at least, give a taster of the importance of the iron road and of the very enduring nature of an invention which went completely out of fashion in the second half of the last century but which is enjoying a fantastic renaissance.

It is easier, as I have remarked before, to list what the railways did not change, than to set out their achievements. Quite simply, between the first quarter and last quarter of the nineteenth century, the railways transformed the world from one where most people barely travelled beyond their village or nearest market town, to one where it became possible to cross continents in days rather than months. Their development created a vast manufacturing industry that ensured the Industrial Revolution would affect the lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Everything from holidays to suburban sprawl and fresh milk to mail order was made possible by the coming of the railways.

And this was on a global scale. Between 1830, the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, and the turn of the century, a million kilometres of railway were built,1 and few countries were left without at least a section of track. Indeed, as this book shows, the railway penetrated far beyond the obvious places, reaching heights and remote corners of the world that seemed impossible. And everywhere that a spectacular railway was built, there would be an amazing group of men who battled to overcome the obstacles. Of the major schemes covered in this book, virtually every one, except the Cape to Cairo railway lines, was completed.

I have focused less on the UK than on the world as a whole because I have covered Britain's railways in great detail in Fire & Steam, which can be read in conjunction with this book. Britain was a pioneer in many respects, because it was home to the world's first major railway, and also developed the technology and operational practices which spread around the world. Britain's story cannot be omitted entirely but this book somewhat understates the importance of its railways and its role in the development of the rail network across the world.

I have concentrated particularly on the great railways, those which transformed their nations such as the Indian, American2 and Russian systems, which were built in the most onerous and difficult conditions. Just think of the imagination and breadth of ambition that led to the construction of the Trans-Siberian or, indeed, the network of lines linking India's great cities. The story of these railways deserves to be set out in some detail to celebrate their construction.

There is, for example, far more on the American railroads than on those of many other countries. But there are good reasons for this. At its peak, the US railroad system represented about a third of the world's total mileage and, as explained in Chapter 4, contributed to the very creation of the globe's most powerful nation. Admittedly, too, there is a more comprehensive and accessible literature on US railroad history than on any other country's, and the availability of good studies on various railways has meant that on occasion I have given them disproportionate coverage.

Everyone has their pet railway or their favourite journey and I am bound to have left some out. I have not, for example, mentioned the Indonesian railways which, built by the Dutch, were reportedly among the best narrow-gauge railways in the world before the Second World War. Turkey and the rest of the Middle East barely get a mention, and neither does the Philippines. Nor have I included the story of many strange and wonderful lines such as the overhead railway in Wuppertal near Düsseldorf which has been operating since 1901 and still carries thousands of commuters daily. But most significant railways are given some space whilst others, which may not really be as important, have been accorded lots of space, because there is a good story to tell and the information is accessible. Indeed, if you are a budding railway author, there are lots of social histories of railways around the world remaining to be written to add to the few that I have managed to track down. Much of railway literature is written for what a fellow author termed ‘rivet counters’, and that is a wasted opportunity. The railways deserve better histories than simple accounts of their construction and their technology, and I have listed a few in the bibliography.

In Chapter 1, I have set out the early history of the railways, covering in brief the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, and the start of railways in several other European countries. While many early railways were created with freight in mind, it is remarkable how they quickly attracted passengers and this, in turn, stimulated the spread of the iron road. While the early railways used or copied British technology, several different railway traditions soon established themselves. These are examined in the next three chapters. Chapter 2 covers the establishment of the European tradition. These railways were built to more generous proportions and the state tended to be far more involved in their creation than in Britain. They were used as a deliberate political tool, to unify nations that for the most part still had unstable borders. Chapter 3 looks at the spread of the British style of railway, notably in India where the colonial power designed and built a system that also helped forge a nation. This chapter also covers Ireland and Australia. Chapter 4 is devoted to the United States. It reminds us of the importance of the railways to the development of the country, which is now largely forgotten. It also covers the crucial role played by the railways in the Civil War and their contribution to the ultimate victory by the North. The American tradition was different with heavier locomotives, cheaper track that limited speed and open-plan carriages rather than the compartments favoured in Europe.

In Chapter 5, I focus on the development of the railway network in Europe which gradually crossed borders and allowed rapid travel all over the continent. Routes were established through the barriers of the Alps and other mountain ranges, which in turn stimulated the development of industry and tourism. The debate over whether the railways should be privately or publicly owned spread around Europe and the role of the state is examined. The function of railways in several European wars is also considered.

Chapters 6 and 7 tell the amazing stories of how and why the transcontinental railways were built. Chapter 6 covers the disastrous Panama Railway whose construction cost the lives of thousands of men and took far longer than expected, but provided a vital link between the east and west coasts of America and the creation of the first American transcontinental, probably the most significant of all the early railways. Chapter 7 deals with crossing other continents, notably Russia where the Trans-Siberian was arguably the most ambitious infrastructure project ever built, and the failed, but heroic, Cape to Cairo.

In Chapters 8 and 9, I take a breather to look at what travelling on the railways was like and the social and economic changes that they brought in their wake. Chapter 8 covers a variety of journeys on railways around the world and the technological progress which made train travel gradually more pleasant and, indeed, safer. It also shows the ubiquitous nature of the railways which, by 1900, were established in all significant countries and many others, ranging from small Caribbean islands to obscure African colonies, and were still growing apace. Chapter 9 considers the impact of the railways, the way they affected the lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Their existence had a huge number of unexpected side effects: famines became less serious as it was possible to transport food more quickly, urbanization grew as people were able to commute to work and the scale of wars was unprecedented as railways brought in troops and arms far more efficiently than horse-drawn transport.

In Chapter 10, I describe what is generally considered to be the heyday of the railways, that brief period early in the last century when they ruled unchallenged. Their role in the First World War was crucial and, indeed, possibly decisive, but already the seeds of their decline were being sown with the development of motor transport.

Chapter 11 looks at the interwar years, and the first hints that the railways might not rule for ever. Passenger numbers were still rising but the railway companies were struggling in the face of competition, often hindered by governments unwilling to support organizations that had previously exploited their monopoly position. Despite these difficulties, this too was to some extent a golden age, with steam locomotive technology becoming far more efficient and the emergence of both diesel and electric trains which offered unprecedented levels of comfort. Despite the threat of aerial bombardment, the role of the railways in the Second World War was again vital.

Chapter 12 examines the decline in the post-war period when the rise of the motor car seemed to make the iron road redundant. It was not to be, though, as gradually government and railway companies realized there remained great potential for the railways in the markets where traditionally they dominated: commuting, fast intercity travel and carrying coal and minerals. And Chapter 13 celebrates their renaissance, in particular the high-speed rail revolution that has given the railways in the twenty-first century a new lease of life, and suggests that the future is rail.

I have been deliberately inconsistent in the use of names of towns and cities. Where there is a common English usage, such as Vienna or Turin, I have used it, but elsewhere I have kept the local name. Lyon and Marseille have stayed in the French, without the ‘s’ at the end, because the English spellings seem plain daft! I have used miles almost everywhere for simplicity – one mile is 1.6 kilometres. Forgive me in advance for omissions and errors. Do please email me via my website www.christianwolmar.co.uk with any corrections, errors and comments for future editions. This has proved immensely helpful in the past and I thank you in advance. Above all, enjoy the ride.

London, March 2009

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Writing can be a lonely business, particularly on such a lengthy enterprise as this one. I would therefore like to thank a variety of people who have helped on this project in one way or another, either by offering advice or by helping me source material or simply by being at the other end of the phone or email. Most of all I would like to thank Tony Telford who, as with my previous book, has provided expert and detailed critiques of every chapter and spent far more time on this project than he ought to have done. John Fowler, too, read every chapter and kept up with it, offering countless useful suggestions. I would also like to thank Jim Ballantyne, Rupert Brennan-Brown, Roger Ford, Bernard Gambrill, Nigel Harris, Phil Kelly, Gordon Pettit, Fritz Plous and Jon Shaw who have all helped in various ways. My apologies to any others whom I have inadvertently left out.

I would also like to thank my agent Andrew Lownie, who encouraged me to write this series of railway books, and Toby Mundy, Sarah Norman and Karen Duffy at my esteemed publishers, for their help and support. The errors, of course, are all mine.

ONE

THE FIRST RAILWAYS

It was the world's first global news story. In September 1830, just fifteen years after the Battle of Waterloo, the inaugural train chugged along the tracks at the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. This sumptuous event, attended by the victor at Waterloo, the prime minister the Duke of Wellington, and a host of notables, attracted hundreds of thousands of onlookers. Memorabilia, ranging from penny handkerchiefs and snuffboxes to dinner sets and framed artists’ impressions, were on sale and the whole world seemed to be watching. Newspapers as far afield as America and India covered the occasion with an awareness that this was an epoch-making event that would change the world. However, not even the most far-sighted and imaginative reporter of the day could possibly have predicted just how fast this transformation would take place and how widely the impact of this new invention would be felt.

The event's significance had not been missed. The Liverpool & Manchester was far more advanced than any of its predecessors or any other line being considered elsewhere in the world. It was double tracked, powered entirely by steam and connected two of the world's most important cities of the day. It was not, of course, the world's first railway, but while its predecessors had been created principally for the transport of coal or other minerals from a mine to navigable water, the Liverpool & Manchester carried traffic, including passengers, in both directions. Thanks to Britain's place as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, not only was British technology the most advanced in the world but its application was far more widespread and developed than elsewhere. Consequently, many foreign dignitaries and, more important, engineers eager to reproduce the technology back home, were among the thousands of people who lined the tracks watching the proceedings.

There was, for example, William Archibald Bake,1 a Dutch artillery officer, who would return home to press for a railway to link Amsterdam with a proposed network of Prussian railways in the Rhineland. Rumours spread through the city that several Americans and Russians were at the opening on fact-finding missions, and xenophobia bubbled under the surface with dark talk of spies and agents from potentially hostile countries intent on stealing the technology. Indeed, a pair of Americans, Horatio Allen, chief engineer of the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company, and his companion, E.L. Miller, had already dropped in to the Rainhill Trials the previous year. All these people and many more were ready to become proselytizers for railways, taking the message back home that the iron horse had arrived and was here to stay.

Without the development of the cheap transport enabled by the railways, the economic development stimulated by the Industrial Revolution would have stalled or remained localized for far longer. Instead, the railways were the catalyst for the spread of technology and would initiate the process of globalization that culminated with the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web. From its isolation in small communities, the human race was brought together by the railway, for better or worse. Within a decade of the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, trains pulled by steam locomotives had spread across Europe and started running in North America. Within a quarter of a century, railways had sprung up in the most unlikely places, ranging from Cuba and Peru to Egypt and India. While these new opportunities to travel had huge beneficial effects, they also facilitated the fighting of wars and hastened the decline of many industries.

Britain's role in this process was seminal. While jingoistic writers are apt to exaggerate its importance in world history, with regard to the history of the railways it is almost impossible to do so. British technology formed the basis of so many different railways that the British tradition was dominant for decades, and its capital helped to fund projects not only in the large part of the world that was pink on the map, but also in Europe and Latin America. The locomotives of George Stephenson, who was largely responsible for the engineering of the Liverpool & Manchester, for example, would provide the basic design for many railways. A prominent part of the British legacy is the gauge of 4ft 8½ins – the distance between the rails that Stephenson chose for the Liverpool & Manchester – which would rightly become known as ‘standard’ because it is the most widely used gauge around the world.

Arguments about gauge cannot, unfortunately, be dismissed as a mere technical matter that is outside the scope of this book. Quite the opposite. Gauge plays an all too important role in this story because disputes over that crucial distance between the rails encompass a diverse range of other issues such as cost and speed, and making the wrong choice often resulted not only in massive sums of money being wasted but also in jeopardizing the profitability of whole railway networks. Gauge was a compromise between cost and practicality and Stephenson got it about right, which explains the popularity of his choice. Wider railways obviously cost far more to build and take up much more land, but could offer greater standards of comfort. Narrower railways were cheaper, slower and not able to accommodate as many people. The width between the rails is not, however, the only aspect of gauge. There is the ‘loading gauge’, the size of the ‘envelope’ required to accommodate trains which determines the size of tunnels, and the location of platforms and lineside equipment, and this is normally larger on standard gauge lines in Europe than for those in Britain. Stephenson did not always succeed in persuading the various foreign railways he advised to adopt his gauge and the legacy of that failure still proves costly today. In Spain, for example, which the ageing Stephenson visited in the 1840s, the nascent RENFE (Reo Nacional de los Ferrocariles Españoles2) rejected his pleas to adopt the standard gauge and, instead, chose 5ft 6ins,3 which was later used in several other countries, notably India and parts of Latin America.

Debate over gauge occurred in every country with a railway, even in Britain where the standard gauge was adopted relatively early following a Royal Commission on this vexed issue in 1845. That was already too late for the Great Western Railway which by then had built over 200 miles of line using Isambard Kingdom Brunel's favoured 7ft gauge and would not fully convert until the end of the century, causing great inconvenience, not least to Queen Victoria who was forced to change trains on her journeys from Windsor to Scotland, and enormous expense. This brief reference to gauge, a subject that comes up all too often, demonstrates why it is necessary to start this brief international history with an account of the prehistory and early history of the railways in Britain. While that story has been widely covered elsewhere,4 a short recap is essential for an understanding of the full account of the global spread of the railways.

The railways were made possible by a series of technical inventions over the space of a couple of centuries involving the development of steam engines, locomotives and rails. Railways were the answer to the long-established problem of how to transport heavy loads of coal and other minerals to rivers or the sea, and later to canals, where they could be transported for far greater distances. There is some evidence that putting goods in wagons to be hauled by people or animals along tracks predates Jesus Christ, and the earliest surviving representation of such a scene, dating from 1350, can be found in the minster at Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany. There were enough such lines to be discussed in a book published in 1556, and certainly by the sixteenth century in Britain there were numerous wagonways5 using crude wooden rails to help haul heavy wagons out of mines. Horses had begun to replace manpower to boost efficiency and combining the two ideas, horses and rails, which allowed far greater loads to be pulled, was the obvious next step. By the early eighteenth century in the principal German coal-producing area of the Ruhr, rather more sophisticated wooden wagonways were developed which guided the trucks to prevent them becoming derailed using a type of flange – an extra lip on the wheels to keep them on the track. These precursors of the railway had an important economic impact in the early days of the Industrial Revolution as coal consumption in Britain increased tenfold between 1700 and the early 1800s,6 serving both industrial and domestic needs.

In Britain, the network of wagonways that emerged in the northeast was so extensive that they became known as ‘Newcastle Roads’. By 1660, on Tyneside alone7 there were nine such wagonways, which became increasingly necessary as pits were extended deeper as the more accessible coal near the surface was extracted. In 1726 a group of coal owners, the Grand Allies, developed the idea further by agreeing to use a shared wagonway to link up their collieries which allowed them to rationalize coal movements. They even created a ‘main line’, a joint route, much of it double tracked, from several mines to the water which included the Causey Arch, a bridge with a 100ft span that lays claim to being the world's first railway bridge and survives today. These railways made extensive use of gravity since most of them led down to a waterway and therefore the horses had the relatively easy task of hauling the empty wagons back up the hills. As the putative railways increased in sophistication and length, wagons were coupled together to improve efficiency and by the 1750s, iron rails were introduced which proved far more durable than the wooden ones.

The other major technical development required for the establishment of the railways was, of course, the steam engine and, later, the development of self-propelled locomotives, a far more complex and difficult process. Again, the idea of steam power dated to classical times but the first working steam engines were probably those of John Newcomen, an ironmaster from Devon who built them in the early years of the eighteenth century. Applying principles which had been observed by a French scientist, Denis Papin, who had noticed that a piston contained within a cylinder was a potential way of exploiting the power of steam, Newcomen developed the idea to produce engines to pump water from the mines. He created something of a cottage industry, making sixty engines himself and, after his patents ran out, a further three hundred were built by other engineers over the next half-century, many for export to countries such as the USA, the German states and the Austrian Empire where one was even used to drive the fountains for Prinz von Schwarzenberg's palace in Vienna.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, it was James Watt who made steam power commercially viable by improving the efficiency of steam engines, and adapting them for a wide variety of purposes. The engines manufactured by the company he formed with Matthew Boulton were used to provide power for everything from ships and looms to sugar mills in the West Indies and cotton mills in the USA, but not for developing steam locomotives. Other inventors did try to put steam engines on wheels. The first to do so was the Frenchman Nicholas Cugnot whose fardier was intended to be used as an artillery tractor. On a test run in Paris, it reached a speed of 2.5 mph but hit a wall, overturned and was declared a public danger by the city authorities. It would never have run far anyway, since there was no way of replenishing the steam once it ran out. Various other inventors in England, Scotland and the USA built similar steam road locomotives but a historian of the railways dismissed these early efforts: ‘None of these pioneers made any contribution to the design or development of the steam locomotive.’8 Their problem, which explains why railways were developed more than fifty years before road vehicles, was that the roads, poorly built and little-maintained, were simply too bad to support their weight.

It was when Richard Trevithick, who had a short but crucial role in the history of the railways, hit upon the idea of putting steam engines on rails that a workable form of transport was developed. Trevithick, a Cornishman, has the best claim to the much disputed title of ‘father of the locomotive’. Whereas Watt and Boulton had insisted on only building low-powered engines, Trevithick developed the concept of using high-pressure steam, enabling him to obtain more power for a given weight. In 1801 he produced the world's first successful steam ‘road carriage’, which drove into a ditch because there was no steering mechanism and then exploded because he and his colleagues went off to the pub, forgetting to extinguish the fire under the boiler. When Trevithick developed an improved model the following year at Coalbrookdale, an ironworks in Shropshire, he had the brainwave of putting it on rails9 which not only dispensed with the need for steering but also gave it a firmer base than the muddy lanes which, at the time, passed for roads. In 1803, a Trevithick engine hauled wagons weighing 9 tons at a speed of 5 mph at Pen-y-Darren in Wales, another ironworks, which was certainly a world first. However, the primitive rails were not up to the task as the locomotive was too heavy, and consequently it was soon converted into a stationary engine powering cables to haul the wagons.

While steam engines proliferated, with 30,000 being in use in Manchester alone by 1830, the development of locomotives was slow, not only because of the technical difficulties but also as a result of doubts about whether they would ever justify the large amount of investment required to perfect them. When Trevithick built a locomotive with the playful name Catch Me Who Can and demonstrated it successfully on a circular track near the present site of Euston Station in London, there was no interest in producing it commercially. Poor Trevithick gave up and went to South America to develop stationary steam engines for use in the gold and silver mines of Peru.

Other engineers attempted to build locomotives with little success and it was not until 1814 when George Stephenson, a self-taught engineer from Northumberland, produced his first one that the idea began to be seen as viable. Stephenson is often wrongly referred to as the inventor of the steam locomotive, but he has the best claim to being the ‘father of the railway’, because it was his drive and energy, together with his skill in making use of available technology and, indeed, improving on it, that ensured railways came into being. Born into a poor background in 1781, he received no formal education but learned on the job from the age of twelve when he started working as an assistant to his father, who was a fireman on colliery steam-pumping engines. His talents were soon recognized, and he became an enginewright, in charge of all the stationary engines at Killingworth, a large mine in Northumberland. Stephenson soon realized that engines that could run on rails and haul loads would be far more flexible than the traditional stationary ones. After his first one, Blücher, proved reasonably successful though not very reliable, over the next seven years he built a further sixteen both for Killingworth and for the Kilmarnock & Troon, the first Scottish railway whose tracks, again, were not strong enough to support the weight of the locomotives which were quickly converted into stationary engines. He then formed a locomotive construction company, with his son, Robert, who would also have a career as a great railwayman, notably as the engineer for the London & Birmingham Railway, and who, at the remarkable age of nineteen, became responsible for locomotive development.

In the early 1820s, Stephenson was asked to advise on the construction of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, later becoming both its surveyor and engineer, and was able to ensure that his engines would be used on the railway. Though it has a claim to be the first steam-hauled public railway, the Stockton & Darlington was really only a logical extension of the mining tramways that had been developed over the previous couple of centuries. As mentioned above, the Stockton & Darlington was a single-track local line whose principal purpose was hauling coal, and the railway carried few passengers. Most of the trains on the line, including all the early passenger services, were horse-hauled and the single track meant not only that speeds had to be kept low, but also resulted in fierce arguments about who should give way and reverse to the nearest crossing point when trains met. Moreover, when the line opened in 1825, only one of Stephenson's locomotives was available for use and even when more were delivered, they were notoriously unreliable. Indeed, at one point the directors contemplated turning the railway back to horse-haulage and only relented after desperate pleas from Stephenson.

Stephenson was to play an equally vital role in the construction and development of the Liverpool & Manchester, and his company's locomotives were to become far more reliable thanks to the efforts of his son. Stephenson père was again the surveyor and later the engineer, and, crucially, when the promoters hesitated over whether to use horse or locomotive power, he was able to convince them that steam engines were the future. In 1829, the year that public mass transport started in London with the introduction of the horse omnibus, the remarkable Rainhill Trials were organized by the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester to find the best locomotive for the line. The event proved to be a virtual walkover, as Stephenson's Rocket was the only entrant to complete the course without mishap. His locomotive covered the one and a half mile course repeatedly at an average speed of 14 mph without problem while the three other entrants all suffered breakdowns, and on the final run he opened the valve to let the engine go far faster, reaching 30 mph to the amazement of the assorted crowd of the great, good and merely curious. Stephenson, therefore, not only won the prize of £500 and the contract to build four more locomotives for the line over the next three months, but, more important, the performance of the Rocket persuaded the promoters to use only steam locomotives for traction, except on a section of the line where stationary engines had been mandated by the Parliamentary Act which had given permission for its construction.

Obtaining the right to build the line was not the only difficulty facing the directors. Technically, the railway was far more sophisticated than any of its predecessors and George Stephenson, who for a period had been shunned by the directors in favour of another engineer, Charles Vignoles, was recalled to ascertain the most suitable alignment. This involved the crossing of Chat Moss, a damp marshy plain whose crossing required the innovation of ‘floating’ the railway embankment on a bed of brushwood and heather. It was the first example of the way that railway engineers would develop new engineering methods on the hoof in order to surmount the ever more daunting range of obstacles that barred the progress of so many railways.

Development of the thirty-one-mile-long Liverpool & Manchester Railway had been stimulated, like its predecessors, by the need to carry freight. Liverpool was the main arrival point for raw cotton, which needed to be processed in Manchester's mills. It was a booming port with rum and sugar imported from the West Indies and tobacco from Virginia, while movements of coal in the whole north-west region of the UK were rising sharply as factories using steam equipment sprang up. By the 1820s, the road between Liverpool and Manchester was completely inadequate to the task and canal transport, the only alternative, was expensive and slow. Given the booming Lancashire economy, then the most industrialized region in the world, it was not simply happenstance that led to the world's first major railway being constructed between these two growing towns.10 However, while freight had been the main motivation for its construction, the railway opened initially for passengers as the freight wagons were not yet ready and its owners quickly discovered that there was enormous demand for travel.

Despite the notorious tragedy on the opening day, when the government minister William Huskisson was killed by a passing train, people were immediately attracted to this new and fast means of travel, turning the Liverpool & Manchester into an instant success. In 1831, the first full year of operation, it carried nearly 500,000 passengers, enabling the company to pay generous dividends to its investors. Additional services for the journey between the two towns were quickly introduced and goods also began to be carried. At first, the freight consisted principally of cotton and coal but soon live animals were being taken. In May 1831, a consignment of forty-nine squealing Irish pigs was carried to Manchester, each costing the owners 1s 6d (7.5p) to transport, and later sheep were carried at half the price, just 9d. Farmers and fishermen soon realized that the railway opened up a huge market for their produce. The transport of fresh dairy products, vegetables, meat and fish helped to revolutionize the diet of ordinary people, in particular the urban masses who previously had rarely seen much fresh food. Passengers, though, remained the mainstay of the company's income, a lesson that was not lost on railway promoters around the world.

The railway in Britain spread rapidly. Within a decade there was a main line through the spine of England, linking London with Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester, and lines from the capital to Bristol and Southampton. Even though the trains were slow, averaging barely 20 mph in the early days, journeys that had taken days by stagecoach could be undertaken in a few hours. Goods which previously had to be transhipped from carts to canal boats and back again could be taken rapidly into termini in the centre of towns, saving shippers and industrialists vast amounts in transport costs.

Britain's more advanced industrialized position allowed it to keep ahead of its European counterparts and as a result it was the first nation to exploit fully the boundless potential of this new technology. It would retain that lead for some time, experiencing a series of railway manias, most notably in the early 1840s, the opening years of Queen Victoria's reign, that would result in the construction of over 7,000 miles of railway within two decades of the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester. While other countries would also undergo such periods of railway mania, the British version was the first and one of the most fruitful.11 Britain was, too, the first country to experience a railway scandal. George Hudson, who melded together a vast railway empire controlled by the Midland Railway, for a time Britain's largest railway company, was exposed as a fraudster who cheated investors out of their money. The railways were also beginning to be recognized in arts and literature. In 1844, J.M.W. Turner painted Rain, Steam and Speed, the first major artwork to feature the railways, producing a rather romantic view of a train speeding out of swirling mist.

In the early 1830s, Britain may have been the pioneer of railway development but it was not alone in taking an interest in this new technology. As we have seen, there had been wagonways on the Ruhr for hundreds of years and similar systems had been developed elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Indeed, even before the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, promoters of railway lines were emerging in several European countries although, apart from France, they would not see their first lines opened until the mid-1830s.

Mostly, as with the Liverpool & Manchester, the purpose of these early lines in Europe was economic but there were other reasons for their construction, too, including one that will be seen many times in subsequent pages, nation-building. In France, as in Britain, it was a coal-producing region that was the site of the country's first public railway. In 1823 the reinstated monarch, Louis XVIII, signed the Act permitting the construction of the country's first railway, the eleven-mile line between St-Etienne and Andrézieux in the Massif Central which was intended to carry coal from the mines to the Loire. France's answer to George Stephenson was Marc Seguin, though, as a scientist and inventor, he was a very different man from the self-educated Northumbrian. Seguin, in fact, advised Stephenson prior to the Rainhill Trials to use the Frenchman's concept of the tubular steam boiler for the design of the Rocket, and this was a crucial part of the locomotive's design which greatly improved its efficiency and consequently contributed to its victory.12 It was to prove a useful Anglo-French cooperation as Robert Stephenson went on to build locomotives designed by Seguin.

Since work started on the St-Etienne line in 1825, the same year as the opening of the Stockton & Darlington, the line bore far more resemblance to that railway than to the far more sophisticated Liverpool & Manchester. When the French line opened in 1828, the trains were hauled by horses, usually with two in tandem, and it was principally used for carrying coal. When, in 1832, the horses were put out to grass, and replaced by locomotives with the line being extended all the way from St-Etienne to Lyon, a total of thirty-six miles, the railway began to attract considerable numbers of passengers, as well as freight. The facilities for passengers, however, were rather more comfortable than those endured by travellers on the Stockton & Darlington and even on the early trains of the Liverpool & Manchester, whose carriages consisted of little more than stagecoach bodies mounted on wheels. The French coaches, though also based on a stagecoach design, were far more elaborate and the accommodation was divided into separate compartments, a design that became the blueprint for early railways across the world. Moreover, some were designed with two decks; the lower ones had open sides for all three compartments but with curtains that could be drawn to give some limited protection against the weather, while passengers in the upper deck, who were effectively in second class, found themselves exposed entirely to the elements.

Apart from France, the other country which began to develop railways early was the United States and typically it was on a large scale. The population of America was growing; in 1831, it had 13 million people, 800,000 more than Britain, concentrated largely on the east coast. Not for the Americans a little coal railway of a few miles, but instead a long double-track railway different in scale from its predecessors. The United States already had various small lines serving mines or wharves, using mostly either standing engines or horse power, but they were small scale and mostly limited to carrying freight. The equivalent of the ground-breaking Liverpool & Manchester was undoubtedly the Baltimore & Ohio Railway, the first American railroad13 to carry both passengers and freight on a regular schedule using steam locomotives. The railroad was conceived by two far-sighted Baltimore citizens, Philip E. Thomas and George Brown, who had visited the Stockton & Darlington and other railway projects in Britain in 1826.

They returned to Baltimore where they organized a meeting of local merchants, an echo of a similar gathering which had been the genesis of the Liverpool & Manchester, at which the idea for a 380-mile double-track line linking Baltimore in Maryland with the Ohio river at Wheeling, West Virginia, was mooted. There was a clear need for better communications between the four major seaports of New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore with the rapidly developing hinterland west of the Allegheny Mountains. All four cities were jostling for primacy and realized that communications were key to their development. While the other three cities opted for canals or, in the case of Philadelphia, a grandiose ill-fated project called the Main Line which ran nearly 400 miles to the Ohio through a combination of canals involving passing through no fewer than 174 locks, inclined planes using stationary engines and sections of railroad. The journey necessitated frequent inconvenient changes between canal and rail, and the obvious disadvantages of this convoluted system pushed Baltimore into choosing a railroad. Rivalry was the key stimulus, particularly concern that the 364-mile-long Erie Canal between Buffalo and New York across upper New York State, completed in 1825, gave the latter a huge competitive advantage. Proposals to construct a Chesapeake & Ohio canal that would parallel the Potomac river also threatened the viability of Baltimore's port, and consequently there was widespread support for the railroad project which quickly obtained permission from the Maryland legislature. It was realized that the railroad would provide a far faster alternative for goods produced in the Midwest to reach the east coast than the putative canal with its eighty-three locks and horse-drawn barges.

It was a courageous decision as the economics of building such a long line were totally unknown and the capital required was the enormous sum of $5 million. It was brave, too, from a technological point of view since it was unclear whether the British know-how, developed for a milder climate and shorter distances, could be adapted for the United States. Indeed, as we see in Chapter 4, American technology soon deviated from its British origins.

Construction started in 1828 with a ceremony that suggested the importance of the Baltimore & Ohio as a national event was well recognized. With typical American exuberance, the first sod of earth was turned with a silver spade by the only surviving signatory of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the ninety-year-old Charles Carroll who, at the ceremony, said: ‘I consider this among the most important acts of my life, second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that.’14 Given the role of the railways in uniting the United States of America and creating a nation out of separate states spread over 3,000 miles, his statement was prescient indeed.

The railway largely followed the line of the rivers to make the gradients as gentle as possible and it was feared – wrongly – that the resulting sharp curves would make it difficult for steam locomotives to be used because the wheels could not negotiate the bends. Therefore initially, just as in Britain, there was a debate about what form of traction to use. Peter Cooper, an industrialist and inventor from New York had invested heavily in Baltimore land and was keen to ensure the success of the railway which he realized could only be guaranteed with the use of steam locomotives. Cooper, who also later patented gelatine, the principal ingredient of Jell-O, America's favourite dessert, built an engine called Tom Thumb which, as the name suggests, was a relatively small locomotive, described by an onlooker as having a boiler ‘not as large as the kitchen boiler attached to many a modern mansion’. Nevertheless, on a test run along the first thirteen miles of track, it reached an exhilarating 18 mph, impressing the assorted investors and VIPs who had come along for the ride.

On the way back, however, Cooper exceeded himself and agreed to race against a horse to prove that the locomotive was superior. The powerful grey horse was initially in the lead thanks to its faster acceleration, but once the engine gained purchase on the track and its safety valve opened up to give extra power, Tom Thumb glided past the galloping steed and was a quarter of a mile ahead when disaster struck. Just as the horse rider was ready to give up, the belt that drove the pulley on the locomotive snapped and the engine gradually eased to a halt. Cooper struggled to replace the belt, and did manage to finish the course, but, with his hands lacerated by burns caused by the heat of the engine, he was by then hopelessly behind.

The equine victory, though, proved pyrrhic. The investors had been sufficiently impressed with the performance of the little engine to realize that steam haulage, rather than horse power, was the only way that the line would become viable. While some horse traction was used early on, locomotives were dominant and eventually, by the time the line had extended westwards, were used exclusively. In fact, progress inland was slow as result of opposition, not least from some legislators, and it would actually take a quarter of a century for the line to reach Wheeling, the original planned destination, by which time the east coast was peppered with railways (see Chapter 4) and the great project to link the two coasts would have started. By then, too, the Baltimore & Ohio was linked with various other railways including a branch to Washington opened in 1835 which, interestingly, was partially funded by the state government.

In Europe, however, railways were progressing rather more slowly and on a far less grand scale. It was not only the more advanced state of the economy in Britain, the original seat of the Industrial Revolution, that gave it the early advantage. It was also the greater political stability, particularly after the fall of the Duke of Wellington's anti-reform government in 1830. The political upheavals, revolutions and wars being experienced by various European countries did not create the right climate for the long-term investment required by railways and by the mid-1830s the railways had established little more than a toehold in various countries. However, their value, often as a tool of nation-building or for helping to move military forces around the country to quell protests, was beginning to be widely recognized by even the most reactionary governments. Already a distinction was emerging between types of railways that, very broadly and with inevitable exceptions, can be defined as British, continental and North American;15 these are covered in the next three chapters.

TWO

EUROPE MAKES A START

The first railways in most European countries either used British technology or copied it. Moreover, many used British train drivers – engineers as they were often rather misleadingly called – who were sought after because of their experience and who were prepared to travel abroad thanks to the higher wages and the esteem they attracted. This spread of British technology and know-how was hardly surprising given that Britain had a decade start on its rivals and was, for a time, the only country producing locomotives. Britain also had the Stephensons whose unique skills and experience meant that putative railway promoters would ‘send for the Stephensons’ to provide advice in designing and constructing railways. Even the men who built these European railways were sometimes British. The British navvy, who had rightly earned a fierce reputation for both hard work and hard drinking, was recognized as superior to local workers, recruited from agriculture, who did not have the experience and strength required. They were brought over by British contractors like Thomas Brassey on projects such as the Paris–Rouen railway, and might then travel around the continent finding work on different projects. They impressed the locals, as one of Brassey's timekeepers on the Paris–Rouen reported with admiration after looking ‘on as fine a spectacle as any man could witness . . . every man with his shirt open, working in the heat of the day . . . such an exhibition of physical power attracted many French gentlemen who came on to the cuttings at Paris and Rouen, said “Mon Dieu, les Anglais, comme ils travaillent.”’1

Europe's early railways were constructed on a continent that was markedly different from its geopolitical situation today. While France's boundaries remain similar, neither Italy nor Germany existed as we know them today. Much of the French Riviera belonged to an Italian-speaking state called Piemonte-Sardinia, one of many states on the Italian peninsula, and while there was a ‘German people’, they resided throughout central Europe. Prussia was the biggest country in the north and the Austrian Empire dominated the south, while thirty-seven smaller Germanic states were sandwiched between them.

Other than France, the countries which made a start in the 1830s in Europe were Belgium and ‘Germany’ (Bavaria and later Saxony) in 1835, the Austrian Empire in 1838 and Italy and Holland the following year. The success of the Liverpool & Manchester's locomotives had not immediately convinced every railway promoter that steam was definitely the future. In the Austrian Empire, lengthy railways using horse power continued to be developed well into the 1830s. Indeed, it boasted the world's longest horse railway, connecting Linz in Upper Austria with Budweis in Bohemia (home of the famous beer and now in the Czech Republic), a distance of 90 miles, and soon after extended even further to salt works at the health resort of Gmunden. By 1836, just before steam began to replace the horses, the network of interconnected public horse railways in Austria covered an impressive 170 miles.

Nevertheless, for the most part locomotive traction was seen as the favoured option, although horses were used for some services, especially goods transport. While the various European railways retained elements of British practice, such as running on the left and using similar semaphore signals, they soon established their own traditions and practices. The continental railways diverged quickly from the British model in several important respects, notably the size of the trains. While for the most part they used the Stephenson gauge of 4ft 8½ins, as explained in the previous chapter, the loading gauge – the limits above and outside the rails which determine the size of the rolling stock2 –

were more generous, allowing wider and thus more comfortable and spacious carriages.3

There was another crucial difference, too: the role of the state. In this respect, Belgium probably represents the opposite extreme from the British model. The development of railways in Britain rather took the government by surprise and they were operating before any policy towards them could be formulated. In Britain the railways were laid out according to the requirements – whims, even – of the private companies that developed them, whereas on the continent the state's involvement was invariably more prominent. British railway promoters did, indeed, have to obtain a bill from Parliament for the construction of a line, but this did not involve the government but rather the elected members whose decision-making process was not based on any strategic view of the needs of the country. Quite the opposite. Obtaining the legislation was a haphazard process dependent, often, on whether the MPs concerned had a vested interest in favour – or indeed against – the line.

This was not the case on the continent where the government or, in instances where there was still an absolute monarchy, the king or emperor, would decide whether to support a railway proposal. In several countries, the state itself would draw up plans for a line and designate the route. The railway historian Michael Robbins has characterized the continental approach as more ‘authoritarian’4 and certainly it illustrates the two contrasting styles of governance that extend far beyond railway policy, which could be broadly characterized as Anglo-Saxon and European, differences that still pertain today. The British method, which was also adopted in the United States, was more organic, a bottom-up process driven, largely, by the obvious local economic benefits of better transport connections which reduced the price of coal or dramatically cut the cost of carrying goods or minerals for use in nearby factories. This was translated into pressure from local entrepreneurs to build a line and it was often they who drew up the proposal, drafted the bill for the parliamentary process and sought the finance for the project.

Right from the beginning, European governments were aware that the railways were such an important part of their country's infrastructure and would play such a vital role in economic development that the state had to be involved. While in Britain the government stood aloof, allowing Parliament with its various factions and vested interests to determine what railways should be built, European governments took a much more active role in planning their railway networks. As a result of this planning, they avoided the duplication that was a feature of the British model and the unnecessary expense of many towns being served by two or more rival companies.

In Europe, as mentioned in the previous chapter, it was not only the obvious economic advantage that stimulated the building of railways, but also the realization that they were a way of unifying nations with, usually, a focus on the capital cities out of which the network invariably radiated. Nor did it escape the attention of many governments that having fast transport links with outlying regions of their country gave them a way of responding quickly to unrest and rebellion. The advantages of a developed railway network appeared so obvious that it is the British state, with its casual disregard for the way the railways spread out higgledy-piggledy across the land, that is the exception rather than the norm.

The European state-sponsored approach was taken up most strongly by the Belgian government for a good reason. Belgium had only recently, in 1830, carved itself out of the Netherlands and building a railway system was perceived as a way of stimulating a sense of nationhood in a country which, to this day, remains fractured between two distinct groups, the Flemish speakers of the north and the largely French-speaking Walloons in the south. The Belgian railway was both planned and owned by the state, and there was a military aspect to its development, which, as we see several times later, is a recurring theme. The separation of Holland and Belgium had left the latter without direct access to the main waterways of northern Europe, particularly the Rhine, leaving the country vulnerable to a blockade in the event of a dispute. Since these waterways provided the only efficient route for goods to and from western Germany, an alternative was needed quickly. The country's first king, Leopold I, readily approved the design of the network and in 1834 work started on the first line, which was intended to link Antwerp with Brussels and Mons in the south-east, and eventually to continue right into Prussia via Aachen to Cologne, a total of 154 miles. Together with an Ostend–Liège line, broadly on an east– west axis, the plan was to provide Belgium with a national rail network right from the outset. The first section, from Brussels to Malines, was opened within a year, and inevitably George Stephenson played a role. Not only were the three locomotives produced by his company, but he rode incognito on the first train carrying the royal party and, when it broke down, he went to the engine to help fix the problem. He was soon knighted by the king and continued his travels to Switzerland and Spain to advise on their inaugural railways.

The advantages of government support and a coherent plan meant that the Belgian system was able to expand quickly, not least because the government could brush aside reluctant landowners who had caused so much difficulty in Britain and elsewhere. In 1836 the line was extended to Antwerp providing a route between the port and the capital without the need to use the inland waterways, and by 1843 most of the basic cross that forms the heart of the system had been completed, giving heavily industrialized Belgium the densest network in the world in terms of mileage relative to its surface area. There was, however, still much ambivalence about state dominance and this later led to the development of several lines by private enterprise, the first of which, the Liège–Namur railway, was opened in 1851 by a British company. The state, though, remained in control as private railways were only granted twenty-year licences before their lines reverted to government control, and its aim of using the railway to unify the country succeeded: ‘Without the revolution [of 1830] the railway could never have existed; without the railway the revolution would have been compromised.’5