Fire and Steam E-Book

Christian Wolmar

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

Seitenzahl: 745

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

The opening of the pioneering Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 marked the beginning of the railways' vital role in changing the face of Britain. Fire and Steam celebrates the vision and determination of the ambitious Victorian pioneers who developed this revolutionary transport system and the navvies who cut through the land to enable a country-wide network to emerge. From the early days of steam to electrification, via the railways' magnificent contribution in two world wars, the chequered history of British Rail, and the buoyant future of the train, Fire and Steam examines the social and economical importance of the railway and how it helped to form the Britain of today.

Leseprobe

FIRE & STEAM

First published in Great Britain in hardback in 2007 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Christian Wolmar 2007

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.

978 1 84354 629 0

ePub ISBN: 978 1 84887 261 5 Mobi ISBN 978 1 84887 261 5

1851 railway network map © Jeff Edwards All other maps © Mark Rolfe Technical Art

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

Dedicated to my wonderful children, Molly Brooks, Pascoe Sabido and Misha MccGwire, even though they think I am a mad trainspotter, and to the Railway Children, the charity that helps less fortunate children around the world (www.railwaychildren.org.uk).

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Maps

Introduction: Why Railways?

1

The First Railway

2

Getting the Railway Habit

3

Joining Up Britain

4

Changing Britain

5

Railways Everywhere

6

The Big Companies: Great But Not Necessarily Good

7

The Agatha Christie Railway

8

Danger and Exploitation on the Tracks

9

Speeding to Danger

10

The Only Way to Get There

11

Fighting Together – Reluctantly

12

Compromise – The Big Four

13

And Then There Was One

14

An Undeserved Reputation

15

The Future is Rail

Notes

Further Reading

Index

List of Maps and Illustrations

PREFACE

There was a great temptation to write a nostalgic book about the railways. The smell of oil and steam emanating from the massive Princess engines in the Willesden depot and the more compact Kings and Castles in Old Oak Common just down the road is still with me. And so is the memory of the policeman who shouted ‘Oi, you’ and chased me around the back of the Willesden depot but lost out when I proved more nimble at jumping over the fence. My childhood is full of such tales as trainspotting was my escape from my mother’s overcleaned flat in Kensington. My journeys with Mr Potter’s Locospotters Club to places as far afield as Birmingham and Glasgow were the highpoints of my early years, even when I ended up in casualty to get a piece of grit removed after I had ignored the injunction not to stick my head out of the window when being hauled by a Merchant Navy-class engine.

However, this book is not it. And my trainspotting days ended when I became interested in girls. There is so much more to the railways than that vague nostalgic ache felt by many people my age, which leads thousands of people to flock to preserved railways across the country for steam galas every summer weekend. The railways deserve a wider appraisal, one which celebrates their achievement in opening up the world in an unprecedented way. The railways turned the Industrial Revolution into a social revolution that had an impact far beyond the routes where the tracks took the trains.

This book tries to do something which few writers – and certainly none recently – have attempted before: to put the history of the railways encompassing both their construction and their social impact in one easy-to-read volume. The railways constitute a fantastic story which has often been told only by those obsessed with particular aspects of the system, individual lines or even specific types of locomotives. This book seeks to do more than that – to provide an overview of the invention and development of this wonderful system that changed the lives of everyone in the nineteenth century and continues to play a vital role in the economies of many countries in the world nearly two centuries after the first tracks were laid.

Of necessity that has meant omissions. Of the fifty famous railwaymen listed in a book of that title, there is no mention in my book of around half of them. There is, in other words, no attempt to be comprehensive. There are more than 25,000 titles listed in George Ottley’s Bibliography of British Railway History, and this book is only 125,000 words long, necessitating a difficult selection of the parts of the history to include. Most importantly, I have made no attempt to give anything other than a cursory explanation of the technological aspects of the railway, many of which require books in themselves (and, indeed, have them). Nevertheless, I hope this book gives enough information to demonstrate that the railways were an invention that was unique in its impact, arguably far greater than any other previous technological development apart, possibly, from the wheel itself.

The choice of what to include has, therefore, been very difficult. After the introductory chapter on the prehistory of the railways, the obvious main starting point in Chapter 1 is the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, a far more significant milestone than the oft-quoted Stockton & Darlington. The Liverpool & Manchester was conceived as a freight railway but in fact developed its passenger business far more quickly, demonstrating the huge latent demand for travel which, it seems, nearly two hundred years later we have yet to satisfy. Trains started the transport revolution that was later picked up by cars and planes, and the success of the Liverpool & Manchester ensured that the railways spread rapidly throughout Britain and, indeed, the world. As Chapters 3 and 4 show, the railways took barely two decades to reach all but the most remote parts of the United Kingdom.

But the railways were not just about enabling people and goods to get around more cheaply and rapidly than ever before. There are so many facets of modern life that they did influence, it is almost easier to list those that they didn’t. This book focuses far more on all these developments than on the technological advances which made them possible. Chapter 4 shows that by the 1850s people were flocking to the trains, taking advantage of guaranteed cheap third-class fares or the numerous excursion trains which gave them the first taste of the seaside. The railways enabled them to sample fish and chips in their home town as well as by the sea, and ensured that towns no longer had to have cows cluttering up the streets and the basements in order to obtain fresh milk. The railways changed the way business was conducted (Chapter 5), leading to the creation of the firm as we know it today; railway companies were, for a time, the biggest commercial concerns in the world.

While initially there was resistance in many rural areas to the advent of the railway, and some towns lost out as a result (Northampton is a tragic example, cited in Chapter 3), by the 1860s virtually every town, village and hamlet was clamouring to be connected to this growing machine (Chapter 7). Throughout the book I have tried to describe what travelling on the railway was like, as in the early days it must have been a pretty grim experience, without heating, lavatories, food or adequate lighting. Gradually the situation improved, as did safety (Chapter 8), but at a pace that was rather too leisurely. The railways became universally used and enjoyed a brief heyday (Chapter 9) before the war intervened.

All through the book, too, I have emphasized the political aspects of the railway and the role of the state – rarely benign and often, frankly, obstructive. Nowhere was this difficult relationship demonstrated better than by the two world wars (Chapters 11 and 13) where the railways’ magnificent contribution to the war effort was inadequately rewarded by government.

While many histories of the railways concentrate on the Victorian period of development and growth, I felt it important to celebrate the role of the railways throughout more recent history too. The interwar period of the Big Four is often perceived as another heyday (Chapter 12) but perhaps the PR was better than the reality. And the reverse is arguably true for the story of British Railways, which was wrongly blamed for many of the calumnies inflicted upon it (Chapter 14). The privatization of the railways (about which I have written in On the Wrong Line (2005), is covered in the last chapter, which also predicts that this nineteenth-century invention has a strong role to play in the twenty-first century.

I realize, too, that some of the information is patchy. There is more detail, for example, on the construction of the Forth Bridge and Settle to Carlisle railway than on the Severn tunnel or the West Highland line, but that is inevitable given the space constraints. For some people, this book will be a taster to explore the rich literature of railway history; for others it will be all they want to know about it, and indeed perhaps a little too much. The book, therefore, is a myriad of compromises between information overload and conciseness, and I am sure many people will dispute my choices and wonder why I have taken the narrative down some strange branch lines, but hopefully that will not detract from getting as much enjoyment from reading it as I have had from writing it.

Christian Wolmar

January 2007

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe considerable thanks to those who read the draft and commented on it. Tony Telford did a fantastic job working on the draft, both saving me from errors borne of ignorance and adding ideas that greatly improve the book, and I cannot express my gratitude to him enough. John Fowler contributed greatly, too, in ensuring that there were no major omissions and Nigel Harris picked up numerous errors. Phil Kelly’s advice was very helpful, and thanks are due, too, to Jon Shaw, Stan Hall, Pip Dunn, Toby Streeter, Rupert Brennan-Brown, Mike Walton, Roger Ford and Mike Horne, all of whom made very helpful suggestions. My partner, Deborah Maby, read the proofs with a practised eye. I am also extremely grateful to my agent, Andrew Lownie, without whom this project would not have happened, and, of course, Toby Mundy and Sarah Norman at my publishers. Colin Nash and Colin Garratt at the railway photographic agency, Milepost 92½, were extremely helpful and generous in finding and providing photographs. The errors, naturally, are mine, and please advise me of them. I can be contacted through my website, www.christianwolmar. co.uk, or via the publishers. There will, hopefully, be further editions and therefore I invite comments and suggestions. Enjoy the journey.

FIRE & STEAM

INTRODUCTION

WHY RAILWAYS?

One of the least known facts about Louis XIV is that he had a railway in his back garden. The Sun King used to entertain his guests by giving them a go on the Roulette, a kind of roller-coaster built in the gardens of Marly near Versailles in 1691. It was a carved and gilded carriage on wheels that thundered down a 250-metre wooden track into the valley, and, thanks to its momentum, up the other side. The passengers would enter the sumptuous carriage from a small building in the classical style that could lay claim to being the world’s first railway station. Then three bewigged valets would push the coach to the top of the incline, giving the overdressed aristocrats a frisson as it whooshed like a toboggan down the hill.

There were other, rather more prosaic railways in the seventeenth century, too, mostly serving mines. Indeed, there had been ‘tramways’ or ‘wagon ways’ (often spelt ‘waggon ways’) for hundreds of years. The notion of putting goods in wagons that were hauled by people or animals along tracks built into the road is so old that there are even suggestions that the ancient Greeks used them for dragging boats across the Isthmus of Corinth. In Britain, the history of these wagon ways stretches back at least to the sixteenth century when, in the darkness of coal and mineral mines, crude wooden rails were used to support the wheels of the heavy loaded wagons and help guide them up to the surface. The logical extension of the concept was to run the rails out of the mine to the nearest waterway where the ore or coal could be loaded directly onto barges, and as early as 1660 there were nine such wagon ways on Tyneside alone, and several others in the Midlands.1 By the end of the seventeenth century, the tramways were so widespread in the north-east of England that they became known as ‘Newcastle Roads’.

These inventions preceded the railway age. They were nothing like the pioneering and revolutionary invention which finally emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century with the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830, and, as a prelude, the Stockton & Darlington in 1825, five years earlier. As with all such innovations, the advent of the railways was rooted in a series of technological, economic and political changes that stretched back decades, even centuries. Each component of a railway required not only an inventor to think up the initial idea, but several others to improve on the concept through trial and error and experimentation. These developments were not linear; there were a lot of dead ends, technologies that did not work and ideas that were simply not practical. Heroic failures are a sad but necessary part of that process and for every James Watt or George Stephenson who is remembered today, there are countless other unknowns, who together may have made a substantial contribution to the invention of the biggest ‘machine’ of all, the rail network.

It was not only knowledge and technology that were needed to create a railway. There was the baser requirement of capital – lots of it – that would enable engineers to turn this plethora of inventions and concepts into an effective transport system. The brave investors who raised the vast amounts required to build a railway were taking a plunge in the dark by putting their money into an unknown concept and it was not really until the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing, that such funds became available. Then there was the difficult matter of harnessing a better source of power than the legs and backs of men and beasts. It was, of course, steam that was to make the concept of rail travel feasible. The first engines driven by steam were probably devised by John Newcomen,2 an eighteenth century ironmaster from Devon, although in the previous century, a French scientist, Denis Papin, had already recognized that a piston contained within a cylinder was a potential way of exploiting the power of steam. Newcomen used the improved version of smelting iron that had recently been invented and developed the idea into working engines that could be used to pump water from mines. His invention was crucial in keeping the tin and copper ore industry viable in Cornwall, since all the mines had reached a depth at which they were permanently flooded and existing water-power pumps were insufficient to drain them. By 1733, when Newcomen’s patents ran out, he had produced more than sixty engines. Other builders in Britain manufactured 300 during the next fifty years, exporting them to countries such as the USA, Germany and Spain. One was even purchased to drive the fountains for Prince von Schwarzenberg’s palace in Vienna.

Working in the second half of the eighteenth century, James Watt made steam commercially viable by improving the efficiency of engines, and adapting them for a wide variety of purposes. Boulton & Watt, his partnership with the Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton, became the most important builder of steam engines in the world, providing the power for the world’s first steam-powered boat, the Charlotte Dundas, and ‘orders flooded in for engines to drive sugar mills in the West Indies, cotton mills in America, flour mills in Europe and many other applications’.3 Boulton & Watt had cornered the market by registering a patent which effectively gave them a monopoly on all steam engine development until the end of the eighteenth century. Steam power quickly became commonplace in the nineteenth century: by the time the concept of the Liverpool & Manchester railway was being actively developed in the mid-1820s, Manchester alone had the staggering number of 30,000 steam-powered looms.4

However, putting the engines on wheels and getting such a contraption to haul wagons presented a host of new problems. There had been several unsuccessful attempts to develop a steam locomotive, starting with Nicholas Cugnot’s fardier5 in Paris in 1769, which was declared a danger to the public when it hit a wall and overturned. It gets mentioned in motor car histories as, arguably, the world’s first automobile. Several devices to run on roads were built in the late eighteenth century but none met with any success due to technical limitations or their sheer weight on the poor surfaces.

It is Richard Trevithick, a Cornishman, who has the strongest claim to the much-disputed accolade of ‘father’ of the railway steam locomotive. Whereas Boulton & Watt had insisted on building only low-powered engines, Trevithick developed the concept of using high pressure steam, from which he could obtain more power in proportion to the weight of the engine and this opened up the possibility of exploiting his other notion, making the device mobile. Rather than developing power for static wheels, these engines could provide the energy to move themselves. His first effort was a model steam locomotive built in 1800 and a year later he produced the world’s first successful steam ‘road carriage’. It was, though, to be short-lived. Trevithick had not devised a proper steering mechanism and on the way to parade the machine to the local gentry, it plunged into a ditch. The assorted party went off to drown their sorrows in the pub, forgetting to douse the fire under the boiler. The resulting explosion presumably cut short their drinking session.

Despite such mishaps, Trevithick built an improved steam engine in 1802 and took the crucial next step of putting it on rails at Coalbrookdale, an iron works in Shropshire,6 which not only obviated the need for steering but also provided a more stable base than the road. Rails, too, had progressed from the simple wooden planks of the seventeenth century by strapping iron to the wood. L-shaped rails were developed to keep the wheels aligned, but the crucial idea of putting a flange all around the wheel – a lip to prevent derailment – only began to be developed in the late eighteenth century. In 1803, travelling on these crude early rails, Trevithick’s engine managed to haul wagons weighing nine tons at a speed of five miles an hour at another iron works, Pen-y-Darren in Wales. This was certainly a world first even if the locomotive proved too heavy for the primitive rails and was soon converted into a stationary engine.

This suggests the answer to a fundamental question about the history of the railways: why did these iron roads (as they are called in every language other than English) evolve and spread across the United Kingdom and the rest of the world some sixty years before self propelled vehicles, what we now call motor cars? The main reason was that the roads were awful. The well-engineered highways built by the Romans had been allowed to decline for more than 1,000 years and it was only in the early eighteenth century that any attempts at maintaining trunk roads properly began. The old system of making parishes responsible for the maintenance of roads, even major through routes, within their area, with free labour having to be supplied annually by the parish folk, was replaced by a network of Turnpike Trusts, groups of local people who would maintain a road in return for the payment of a toll by anyone using it. By 1820, virtually all trunk routes and many cross-country roads came within this system which led to great improvements. For example, the journey between London and Edinburgh took less than two days compared with a fortnight a century previously. Exeter could be reached from London in seventeen and a half hours, an average speed of 10 mph, and for a brief period, with the introduction of the mail coach in 1784, stagecoaches enjoyed a heyday thanks to the network of rapidly improving roads, catering to the small minority who could afford such travel.

This progress had been made possible as a result of the improvement in road-building methods developed by pioneers such as Thomas Telford and John Macadam. Telford tried to build sturdy – and consequently expensive – roads which, he hoped, would be able to take the weight of steam locomotives on metal wheels trundling up and down. However, it was Macadam’s lighter techniques that became almost universally accepted and his success meant that a network of decent paved roads extended quickly and relatively cheaply around the country.

The wider question of why the railways dominated land transport for the rest of the nineteenth century is rather more complex. Steam locomotives for use on roads continued to be developed but were hampered by the heavy tolls charged for using turnpikes – sometimes up to fifteen times the cost of a horse-drawn vehicle – precisely because the road owners recognized that they caused far more damage to the surface. Moreover, the Locomotive Act of 1865, popularly known as the Red Flag Act, killed off any hope of road vehicles rivalling railways as it set a speed limit of 4 mph in rural areas and 2 mph in towns and required a man with a red flag to walk sixty yards ahead of each vehicle warning horse-riders and pedestrians of the approach of a self-propelled machine.

However, it was more than the simple opposition of the turnpike owners and legislators to these embryonic cars that prevented them from posing any serious challenge to the railways until the end of the nineteenth century. The answer lies in the technology. Britain may have been the world leader in developing steam coaches, several decades ahead of any rival, but these vehicles were simply not good enough to compete with railways. Quite simply, rails could bear a much heavier weight and locomotives required little springing because they travelled on a hard, smooth surface. The development of flanged wheels meant there was no need for steering7 and the design of the axles ensured there was no requirement for differential boxes8 to cope with curves. Moreover, steam locomotives on rails could pull a number of carriages and wagons, which would be impossible for a road carriage due to the sharp gradients and curves.

A road carriage, in contrast, had to be light enough to spare the surface while having to carry all the paraphernalia of its own machinery in addition to the passengers or freight, all crammed into the same vehicle and perhaps, at most, one trailer. Steam road carriages ‘were lacking, despite all efforts, in a number of technical respects’.9 Designers had to try to make simultaneous major improvements in steering, suspension, transmission, boiler and engine. Not surprisingly, they failed.

Since technology was at the root of this failure, it may well be that had the pneumatic tyre or the internal combustion engine been developed just that bit earlier, history might have been very different. Given, too, legislation which favoured roads rather than imposing restrictions such as the Red Flag Act, then we might never have had the railways at all. Or at least their rapid expansion would have been stymied. It was partly happenstance that gave railways their technological advantages: the use of rails happened to fit perfectly with the available traction technology and this, fortuitously, gave the railways almost a century of domination across the world.

At the time of the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester railway in 1830, there were more than 1,000 turnpike companies in England, which maintained 20,000 miles of road. Stagecoach travel had reached its peak and was now an industry employing more than 30,000 people – a significant number, but less than a tenth of the workforce the railways would require thirty years hence – carrying both passengers and mail. For the rich there was an efficient but expensive network of post chaises which radiated out from the London Post Office to various provincial centres. Both the stagecoach services and the roads on which they ran would begin to decline from 1840 as railways achieved their stranglehold. By the early days of the nineteenth century, there were already some transport undertakings which called themselves ‘railways’, mostly developments of the ‘waggon ways’, and their principal function was to take heavy material from mines and quarries to the nearest navigable waterway as that was the cheapest form of haulage. A horse that could pull one ton on a road could haul a barge carrying a load weighing 25 tons with the same effort.

The first line that could be used by anyone prepared to pay the toll was the Surrey Iron Railway which opened in July 1803 and therefore became the first public railway.10 It was a freight line serving the industrialized area between Wandsworth and Croydon and was double-tracked throughout to accommodate the heavy traffic. The nine-mile route,11 which mostly followed the valley of the Wandle, had only a very gentle slope and horses could haul half a dozen wagons, each weighing 3.5 tons, at a speed of 2.5 mph, far more efficiently than any alternative on the road or the river. It was, of course, horse-powered and the developers installed L-shaped rails in order to keep the wagons on the track, since the idea of flanged wheels was still not universally accepted, not least because wagons fitted with them were useless on muddy roads and therefore could not be used off the rails. The promoters had ambitions to extend the line all the way to Portsmouth, some fifty miles away, but eventually managed to build only a few more miles out to Godstone and Merstham.

The first passenger service is widely reckoned12 to have been on the Swansea & Mumbles13 Railway built, originally, to connect the docks at Swansea with the mines and quarries at Mumbles five miles away. The wagons were to be pulled by horses, and for a time, remarkably, helped by sails. Interestingly, the Act authorizing the construction of the railway allowed for other forms of power, such as the locomotives developed by Trevithick, who happened to be on good terms with the owners of the line, but they chose to stick with horses. While the Swansea & Mumbles Railway missed out on being the first to use steam power (not introduced on the line until the 1870s), it can lay claim to being the first in the world to carry fare-paying travellers. On its completion in 1806, one of the shareholders of the line, Benjamin French, had the inspired idea to run services for passengers. He bought the rights for a mere £20 (say around £1,200 in today’s money) and began operating coaches on the line in March 1807, charging a shilling (5p and equivalent to around £3 today) for the ride.

There is little record of these early journeys. The main surviving account is by a writer, Elizabeth Isabella Spence, who clearly enjoyed her trip in 1808, although it suggests her previous life must have been unexciting: ‘I have never spent an afternoon with more delight than the one exploring the romantic scenery at Oystermouth (Mumbles). I was conveyed there in a carriage of singular construction built for the conveniency [sic] of parties who go hence to Oystermouth to spend the day. This car contains twelve persons and is constructed chiefly of iron, its four wheels run on an iron railway by the aid of one horse, and the whole carriage is an easy and light vehicle.’14 Indeed, it must have been a lot more comfortable than riding in a carriage along the notoriously bumpy roads of the time, although Richard Ayton, who travelled on the line in 1813, disagreed, perhaps because the track had deteriorated by then. He reported that the sixteen-seater carriage made the noise of ‘twenty sledge hammers in full play’ and described emerging from the experience ‘in a state of dizziness and confusion of the sense that it is well if he recovers from it in a week’.15

Despite the success of the Mumbles railway, it was nearly two decades before the next notable advance towards anything approaching a modern railway. In the meantime, the idea of railways as an exciting new form of transport was beginning to take hold and the notion that one day, possibly quite soon, there might be a network of ‘iron roads’ across the country no longer seemed absurd. The nineteenth century was full of people intent on exploiting the new technologies, even if many of the schemes proved fanciful. Some of the projects that did later come to fruition, such as the Metropolitan Railway running under London or the construction of the Crystal Palace, initially seemed as bizarre as many of those heroic failures. Even before the turn of the century, William Jessop, who built the Surrey Iron Railway, had suggested a ‘waggon way’ between Liverpool and Manchester, and there were many far more ambitious suggestions. Thomas Gray, a native of Leeds who had lived for a time in Brussels, suggested a plan for a network throughout Britain, and indeed Europe, of a ‘general iron railway’16, which received widespread attention, helped by his tireless campaigning. Gray, too, had the prescience to realize that locomotives rather than horses were the obvious power source. Another early proponent of the railways was William James, who in 1808 put forward the idea of a ‘general rail-road company’ which would have required capital of £1m (rather optimistic given the eventual cost!). While nothing came of that idea, James, who was variously known as a miner, engineer and surveyor, later became one of the pioneers behind plans for the Liverpool & Manchester.

There was even an idea in 1821 for a monorail, promoted by an engineer, Henry Palmer, who suggested that ‘a single rail should be supported in the air on stout wooden posts’17: two systems based on his idea were actually built during that decade. Little is known about the first, completed in 1822, which linked the Thames with the Royal Victualling Yard in Woolwich, but the second, at Cheshunt, had a grand opening in June 1825 with a specially constructed carriage in the elegant ‘barouche’ style for passengers. The wagons used to carry bricks from a pit to the Lee Navigation were best described as a pair of panniers strung over a fixed rail at a height of 3ft, hauled by a horse with a tow rope. Since this was not a journey that would ever attract much patronage after the initial opening, it could hardly be called a passenger railway and the barouche carriage, sadly, disappeared.

The origins of the Stockton & Darlington stretch back to the longstanding problems moving coal from pitheads to navigable waterways. The north-east of England, and particularly County Durham, had long been a mining area interspersed with a host of wagon ways that took the coal to water. Transport was always the major component in the cost of coal – except at the pit-head or very close to it – and there were constant efforts to try to reduce that expense through faster or cheaper forms of transport. One particular irritant for the coal owners was the ability of any landowner fortunate enough to be sited between the pit and the nearest river to hold them to ransom by charging ‘wayleave’, as the rent was called. It was the announcement by the Earl of Strathmore in May 1818 that he intended to build a canal to the Tees from his colliery near Stockton that was to prove the spur for the alternative proposal of a railway line. While Stockton’s townspeople were happy with the canal plan, those in neighbouring towns were worried that their own businesses would decline as a result and while initially they campaigned for an alternative canal, they soon started raising support for a railway line instead. By November a committee to promote a railway had been formed which drew up a plan for an ‘iron way’. The plan proceeded swiftly and within a couple of months the promoters had prepared a Parliamentary Bill. There was, however, no shortage of objectors, and such opponents were to be the bane of railway developers for the rest of the century. The Stockton & Darlington set the pattern by giving every self-interested Luddite the opportunity to press their case, pushing up the legal bills which were to become a major expense for promoters of railway schemes. In this instance, the two main objectors were Lord Eldon, who was profiting from the extortionate wayleave payments he was getting from pit owners for crossing his land and could not see why it was necessary for the railway to impose compulsory purchases on the land it required; and the Earl of Darlington, later the Duke of Cleveland, who was terribly concerned about his favourite pastime, fox-hunting, being jeopardized. The Bill was rejected in Parliament so the promoters drew up a new route, avoiding the Earl’s precious fox holes. This was passed in April 1821 but only thanks to a last-minute loan of £7,000 by the key supporter, Edward Pease, to fulfil the requirement that 80 per cent of the capital should be deposited by the time the Bill was presented to Parliament. Thus the route of the world’s first public railway had to be moved to accommodate the pleasures of an Earl. The Industrial Revolution may have been in full swing, but society still had its feudal elements and they were to have a lasting impact on the development of the railway.

Edward Pease and his son Joseph, both Quakers, were the driving force behind the construction of the line and its eventual commercial success. Pease père was not only the largest contributor of the £113,000 (around £6.8m today) investment in the railway but also used his network of Quaker friends, particularly bankers in Norwich such as the Barclays and the Gurneys, to raise further funds. Pease was motivated by far more than a desire to make money as he understood the tremendous social benefit for local people that came with the railway’s ability to provide cheap coal.

The scheme was ambitious. The Bill authorized the construction of nearly thirty-seven miles of single-line track which was to be a public highway, rather like a turnpike road on rails, open to anyone prepared to carry passengers or freight on payment of a toll (or access charge as it is known today). In reality the line was the ‘Stockton to three collieries near Bishop Auckland line via Darlington’18 since the latter was at the halfway point of the twenty-six-mile main line which then ran towards Bishop Auckland with branches to a couple of other pits. Therefore, the promoters of the Stockton & Darlington Railway were already required to balance the convenience of having branches against the extra expense and complexity of junctions that entailed – which would invariably reduce performance on the main line – a dilemma that would face many of its successors.

With the route settled to the satisfaction of the local gentry, there were still a host of decisions to be made. After all, no one had built or operated such a transport system before. The first concerned the method of traction: should it be the long-established tradition of using horses or the new technology of locomotives? It was the equivalent of the choice in the 1960s between the card index and the computer, and the result was inevitably to be a compromise. There was also the gauge – the distance between the two rails – to be settled upon. It is unlikely that any of the promoters of the railway realized that the decision they were to make over the gauge would determine the size of most of the railways around the world, stretching hundreds of thousands of miles. In fact, what is now called the standard gauge – 4ft 8½ins – had been in use for a long time on many wagon ways, particularly those in the north-east of England. There is an often repeated story that the 4ft 8½in width was determined by the size of the backsides of horses pulling chariots in Roman times, suggesting the horses’ rumps determined the width between the wheels of the vehicles that were used on ‘rutways’ with a gap of 4ft 8ins, however it is really little more than an urban myth, as the Romans did not use chariots much other than in races and their roads were smooth without ‘ruts’, as can still be seen from the odd surviving section. However, as with all myths, there is just enough truth to keep it going. As far back as in Ancient Persia, grooves were cut into roads to prevent chariots driven by messengers from toppling over mountainsides when going fast around bends, and these are 4ft 8ins apart. Moreover, carts from time immemorial have been built with their wheels around 5ft apart because that suited the dimensions of a horse.

The reason why 4ft 8ins – the half inch was added later – was chosen therefore remains unknown though many of the wagon ways serving the mines for which George Stephenson first developed his locomotives doubtless used that gauge because of its convenience in relation to the size of a horse’s rear end. If Pease had been left on his own to sort out the form of traction, his conservative and cautious Quaker instincts would have pushed him towards using horses rather than steam locomotives. However, George Stephenson, eager to be involved in what was by far the biggest railway project to date, turned up on Pease’s doorstep in Darlington in April 1821 to argue the case for locomotives.

Stephenson, born in Wylam near Newcastle in 1781, stimulates as much controversy today among railway historians as he did among his peers. While some laud him as the father of the railways, others are ready to pour scorn, suggesting that he merely copied a few good ideas and exploited the skills of others. Even if that were the case, there is no doubt that his role in developing the technology was vital. It is not so much that without Stephenson the railways would not have happened, but rather that they were built earlier and faster as a result of his drive. Given that this self-educated and barely literate man was an obstreperous character who did not suffer fools gladly, it is not surprising that he lives on in history as such a controversial figure. But it is unarguable that he played a vital role in the construction of both the Stockton & Darlington and the Liverpool & Manchester.

Stephenson’s meeting with Pease had a rather longer agenda than just the choice of traction. His principal skill may have been as a locomotive engineer but that did not stop him from involving himself in all aspects of railway construction. Pease had been worried about the route selected by the original surveyor, George Overton, and quickly gave Stephenson the task of drawing up an alternative. He produced a far more direct route, knocking three miles off the original scheme which had been designed with meandering bends as tight as those on a country lane, completely unsuitable for a railway. In designing the new route, Stephenson set the standard for future railways, with their long sweeping curves linked by as much plain straight line as possible. But in other aspects, Stephenson was not always right or forward-looking. His choice of wrought iron rather than the more brittle cast iron for the rails was definitely correct (though, for reasons of economy, some cast-iron rails were used, too), but he used very short lengths which made the ride bumpier.19 Worse, he placed them on heavy stone blocks, whereas the far more stable timber sleepers at right angles to the rails had been used for nearly forty years on some wagon ways. On the question of mechanical versus horsepower, however, Stephenson was unequivocal. He knew locomotives represented the future, but even his ambitions were relatively modest. In 1821 he had written: ‘On a long and favourable railway, I would start my engines to run 60 miles a day with from 40 to 60 tons of goods.’20 It was not long before locomotives would be running several hundred miles in a day.

Trevithick had continued to develop the idea of a steam locomotive on rails for several years after his early failures, most notably with his demonstration of a steam engine with the humorous name of Catch Me Who Can on a circular track near the present site of Euston station. The contemporary pictures of the scene show precious few spectators, which may suggest that it was lack of interest that sent Trevithick off to seek his fortune in Peru.

Others, however, were quick to follow in his steps. The north-east was the Silicon Valley of its day, a ferment of ideas with various locomotive engineers devising more effective forms of steam locomotive to suit the growing needs of the colliery owners. There were all sorts of developments, and while some were universally adopted, others were technological dead-ends. One of the latter, using cogged drive wheels, was developed because of concerns about metal wheels having little adhesion on iron rails, the wrong solution for a genuine problem that has continued to dog railways (just like ‘leaves on the line’). John Blenkinsop subsequently designed an engine whose cogs meshed with a toothed rail for the Middleton Colliery in 1812, the first steam locomotives to run on a commercial basis. However, while rack and pinion later became a feature of mountain railways, they were not really suitable for running on the flat. Then there were what we now with hindsight perceive as completely crazy ideas, including the Steam Horse, which was driven by a series of legs sticking out from the rear like a huge grasshopper which ‘walked’ the locomotive along. Initially it did not have enough power but, disastrously, when it was rebuilt the new larger boiler exploded on its inaugural run at Nesham’s Colliery, killing or maiming fifty-seven people. At the same time, progress was being made on the kind of steam locomotives that, within a couple of decades, would be running up and down railways across Britain. With the help of Timothy Hackworth, whom Stephenson later appointed as resident engineer to the Stockton & Darlington, William Hedley built Puffing Billy without using cogs, proving that metal-on-metal contact could offer sufficient adhesion. He later modified his early engines into eight wheelers to enable them to pull 50-ton loads.

Several of the innovators of this period have some claim to be the ‘father of the steam locomotive’, an appellation often attributed to Stephenson. In fact, as mentioned above, his real skill was in exploiting other people’s ideas; as the Oxford Companion to British Railway History puts it, ‘the peculiar genius of George Stephenson was that he made it happen’.21 In 1812 Stephenson became the ‘enginewright’ at Killingworth Colliery, just north of Newcastle, with the task of building a series of stationary steam engines. But he quickly transferred his energies to locomotives and produced the Blucher that could pull 30 tons up a slight gradient at 5 mph in 1814. He built a further three engines for Killingworth and then five for the Hetton colliery line near Sunderland, which were a great improvement. An eight-mile railway was completed by Stephenson in November 1822 which connected the colliery with the river Wear and on the flat sections these ‘iron horses’, as they were known, could haul seventeen wagons weighing a total of sixty-four tons, more than double the performance of the Blucher. Nevertheless, as the pictures show, all these engines were still primitive beasts that frequently broke down, lost steam through every join and battered the tracks which could barely withstand their weight.

Stephenson was appointed as surveyor of the Stockton & Darlington in January 1822 but the directors still needed some persuasion before they would commit themselves wholeheartedly to mechanical horsepower rather than the hay-eating kind. They made visits to Killingworth colliery – since Hetton was not quite complete – and were sufficiently impressed to choose the new technology. However, since this was to be a public railway, open to all comers using whatever form of traction suited them, many of the trains would in fact be horse-drawn.

Building the line was a laborious process. The big railway contractors of the Victorian era had yet to emerge and the work was undertaken by a host of small companies which required close supervision. The main obstacles were the Myers Flat swamp and the Skerne river at Darlington. Stephenson eventually managed to create a firm base on the swamp by filling it with tons of hand-hewn rock but required the help of a local architect who designed a bridge over the river that was eventually built of stone.22 Despite the length of the railway and ambitious nature of the scheme, the construction proceeded relatively smoothly, and the line was formally opened on 27 September 1825, which was declared a local holiday. It is a mistake to think that because these events took place in obscure northern towns that now boast little more than under performing football teams, they passed unnoticed. In fact, there was worldwide interest in the development of the Stockton & Darlington Railway with newspapers and technical journals covering every detail. Its fame was born of the recognition that this was the world’s first railway to operate steam engines, although most of the haulage in the early years was provided by horses. The crowds clustered around the line on the opening day were also testimony to the fact that people realized this was a ‘Big Story’ that would have a far wider impact than merely reducing local coal prices, the primary intent of the promoters. The spectators were chary of approaching the steaming locomotive too closely, since they were worried, quite rightly, that the boiler could blow up, a relatively frequent experience in the early days of the railways. Stephenson, ever the self-publicist, put on a show for the opening ride. Driving Locomotion, he brushed aside the horseman who had been deputed to lead the procession along the line and raised the steam pressure to reach 12 mph, even 15 mph on a few stretches. He soon outpaced the local riders who had taken to the fields to try to keep up with the train and, after various stops, covered the twelve miles between Darlington and Stockton in three hours.

The railway made a great impression on local onlookers. One recalled: ‘The welkin [sky] rang with loud huzzas [applause], while the happy faces of some, the vacant stares of others and the alarm depicted on the countenances of not a few, gave variety to the picture.’23 That description fairly sums up the mixed reaction to the railway from the public. While overall it was supportive, there were, as ever, detractors. Shortly before the opening, the editor of the local Tyne Mercury24 had thundered: ‘what person would ever think of paying anything to be conveyed . . . in something like a coal wagon, upon a dreary wagon-way, and to be dragged, for the greater part of the distance, by a roaring steam engine’. Others expressed fears that the cows in fields next to the railway would be so terrified by horseless carriages hurtling past them that their udders would dry up. Needless to say, these critics were proved wrong. The railway quickly filled up while the cows remained sanguine.

Mostly, though, the benefits were widely understood. The Newcastle Courant applauded the venture and correctly stressed its importance by predicting the railway ‘will open the London market to the collieries of Durham as well as facilitate the obtaining of fuel to the country along its line’.25

At the opening, the line was not entirely complete as some of the branches had not been built and there were few facilities such as sidings and engine sheds. There was, too, a shortage of rolling stock: the company merely owned ‘a single locomotive (Locomotion No. 1), one passenger carriage and 150 coal wagons’.26 More were delivered over the next couple of years by Stephenson’s company but horses remained the mainstay of the railway. Nevertheless, traffic built up quickly. In the first three months, 10,000 tons of coal were carried on the railway, much of it horse-hauled. The coal was of better quality, as bigger lumps could be carried than on the panniers of pack-horses, and the price had gone down by more than a half: ‘At Stockton, [coal] could be profitably sold for 8s 6d (42.5p) per ton, rather than the pre-railway price of 18s (90p) a ton.’27

Passengers, too, used the railway. The only coach provided on the first day, aptly called the Experiment, was a primitive affair with seats along the side of the interior and was said to resemble a showman’s caravan. It went into service being horse-drawn between Stockton and Darlington, a distance of twelve miles, which it covered in two hours, an hour less than Stephenson had done on that opening day, and was soon replaced by more comfortable carriages. But even these, in reality, were little more than old stagecoaches adapted for rail use with flanged wheels, each carrying sixteen passengers. The railway leased out the rights to run the passenger service to various independent operators including, interestingly, two female innkeepers, Jane Scott of the King’s Head, Darlington, and Martha Howson, who ran the Black Lion in Stockton. A year after the opening of the line, seven coaches were covering the distance and were being charged 3d per mile by the railway. The horses cantered at 12 mph, sometimes reaching 14 mph, though obviously they were far slower when climbing the inclines or when they tired. Locomotives often fared less well. Although notionally they were faster than horses, as Stephenson had demonstrated on the opening day, they were confined to 5 mph when the track passed through woods because of fears that running them too fast would throw sparks far into the countryside, causing fires. Moreover, the company was fearful of excessive speed, as the directors rightly perceived it meant greater wear on the track, and consequently drivers were fined, even sacked, for this offence. The strict Quaker management encouraged the public to report any speeding or other misdemeanours by the drivers, and directors were known to patrol the line themselves, seeking out miscreants who had to appear before a disciplinary committee to explain their actions.

Although traffic built up well, the first days of the Stockton & Darlington were not profitable, due to the high costs of maintenance and the relatively low charges (which, however, were of great value in stimulating the local economy). The economics of the railway were not helped by the fact that Stephenson was frequently away working on the Liverpool & Manchester and his six locomotives were unreliable, often running out of steam and in need of frequent repairs. Indeed, despite Timothy Hackworth’s skill in keeping them working, the railway’s directors came close to reverting to an entirely horse-run railway by the second half of 1827. Hackworth then designed a much improved locomotive, the Royal George, with six wheels each 4ft in diameter and coupled together and with a more powerful and bigger boiler, that was a great improvement. Robert, Stephenson’s son who, it seems, had fallen out with his father and left in 1824 to seek his fortune in South America, returned, and his engineering skills became vital in keeping steam running on the track.

It was not just the unreliability of the locomotives and the slowness of often exhausted horses which made operations on the line chaotic. Running a train along the Stockton & Darlington was a hazardous and difficult business. A great mistake had been to make it single line, with just four passing loops28 every mile to allow trains to pass each other. The points were operated by the driver or his assistants, and, with so much, traffic disputes were inevitable when trains met each other far from a loop, rather like cars meeting head-on on small country roads. There was no signalling and there were frequent altercations between drivers over who should be allowed to proceed first, an area of conflict exacerbated by the fact that these men worked for various private companies, rather than all being employed by the railway. The rule was supposed to be that passenger trains would reverse to the nearest loop since the coal trains were far heavier, but passengers did not like these delays and were known to join in fisticuff fights on the side of their driver. This highlights one aspect of the railway that was to prove a mistake and that consequently other railways did not follow – the idea that it should be run like a turnpike road, open to all comers prepared to pay the toll for their carriage wagons or trains, rather than being operated by the owners.

This open access experiment had its roots in the Zeitgeist of the early 1820s when the idea of a very pure form of free markets and free trade was in vogue. The old traditions of monopoly companies and guilds working as cartels had been discredited in the previous century by Adam Smith and his ideas were being revived. As one historian of the railways puts it, the Stockton & Darlington was created like a free market in transport: ‘Demand would be met by enterprising suppliers; fares would be kept down by competition between carriers; operational costs would be kept down by competition between the aspiring contractors . . . All would be individualism and competition.’29 That is perhaps putting on too much of an ideological gloss, given that, at the time, there was no other way of running a railway, though the very motto of the railway company – ‘At private risk for public service’ – seems to encapsulate Adam Smith’s philosophy.

Even so, railways do not work well under these conditions. As the regular punch-ups between operators showed, there are simply too many interrelated interests where the need is for cooperation, rather than competition, between different users. The open access regime on the Stockton & Darlington lasted only until 1833 when the directors took over the running of services which then became all locomotive-hauled. The Liverpool & Manchester, whose promoters were watching events in the north-east with great interest, would not make the same mistake.

The Stockton & Darlington paid a healthy 5 per cent dividend within two years and, more importantly, demonstrated the impact that railways would have in fostering the development of their hinterland. The line was soon extended to Middlesbrough, five miles from Stockton, then a mere hamlet with a few houses and a population of less than 400 scattered in local farms. The railway quickly turned it into a boom town and the population increased fifteen-fold to 6,000 by 1841. Thanks to investment by Pease and his Quaker colleagues, docks were built and it became a major seaport, later acquiring large shipbuilding yards and iron smelting works. Within half a century, tiny Middlesbrough had been transformed into a thriving industrial town with the largest iron-producing centre in the world, thanks to the advent of the railway. Middlesbrough was, therefore, the first example of the railway as a catalyst for economic growth and urban expansion, although sadly this pioneering railway town is ill-served by the railway as it is not on a main line. As the later chapters show, there were to be countless more.

By the late 1850s the Stockton & Darlington was paying an average dividend of 9.5 per cent, better at the time than any railway company in Britain, although by then it was a rather insignificant little operation ripe for merger with its bigger and newer rivals. It retains a place in railway history but the importance of its role remains at issue. On the one hand it could be dismissed as a mere extension of its predecessors, the dozens of little railways that principally ran from mine to waterway and mostly used horses to pull the wagons. Moreover, the railway’s reliance on sub-contracting to the extent that it did not even operate its own passenger services bore little relation to later nineteenth-century railways. On the other hand it has been argued that the line ‘proved an invaluable testing ground both for the technical development of locomotives and for improvements in track’.30 The way that the promoters of the railway attracted capital was an early example of the raising of finance through personal networks that ‘played a critical role in financing Britain’s early industrialisation’. While the Stockton & Darlington suffered all the disadvantages of being a pioneer, it helped usher in the railway age. That era did not really begin in earnest until five years later with the completion of the Liverpool & Manchester, which has all the appropriate features to back its claim as the world’s first railway.

ONE

THE FIRST RAILWAY

It was not by chance that the world’s first steam-hauled and twin-tracked railway should have run between Liverpool and Manchester. In 1830 when the line opened with much fanfare and, unluckily, a terrible tragedy, they were two ‘world-class cities’ of their age. Manchester and its Lancashire hinterland was the centre of the cotton trade while Liverpool had been built up on a rather more sinister industry – slavery – and despite the decline of that trade remained Britain’s second most important port, thanks to the burgeoning imports of cotton from the USA. The Liverpool & Manchester represented the start of the railway age – just as it marked a significant advance in the technology – and was far grander in scale and conception than any of its predecessors.

While work had progressed on the Stockton & Darlington, there had been something of a mini railway mania, the first of several over the next few decades, as various enterprising promoters put forward ideas for schemes to criss-cross Britain. Lines worth a total of £22m (about £1.32bn today),1 an unprecedented amount of capital at the time, including an ambitious scheme for a London–Edinburgh railway, were put forward in 1824–5, though most never got further than a prospectus and a vague scrawl on a map. The publicity around these ideas, however impractical they may have been, helped shape the public climate. Railways began to be seen as a realistic proposition, rather than a mere pipedream, and this was a key factor in helping promoters win over the public and, most vitally, investors, to their schemes.