Fire and Steam E-Book

Christian Wolmar

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

Seitenzahl: 756

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

Christian Wolmar has written for every national newspaper and appears frequently on TV and radio as a commentator on transport issues. His previous books include the widely acclaimed The Subterranean Railway; Blood, Iron and Gold; Engines of War; The Great Railway Revolution; To the Edge of the World; Railways and the Raj; Cathedrals of Steam; and British Rail. His latest book is The Liberation Line: The Last Untold Story of the Normandy Landings.

‘Wolmar never forgets the human dimension. He is excellent on the various personalities who created and ran the railways, including a viciously kind portrait of Beeching. And he answers questions that anyone who takes a train in Britain must have asked: why are the first-class carriages always nearest to the barrier at a terminus? Why are the lines in Kent so much worse than anywhere else? And, most importantly for this reader, why do trains no longer say “tagadada tagadada”? Fire and Steam solves these conundrums, and more.’

Judith Flanders, Daily Telegraph

‘Our leading writer and commentator on the railways is Christian Wolmar… Wolmar says that it would be easier to list the things the railways didn’t change than the things they did, but he pinpoints many vivid instances of their power… A particular strength of Wolmar’s book is the way it makes the past relevant to the present. He unpicks the speculative free-for-all that resulted in the tangle of lines south of the Thames, the legacy of which is the raised blood pressure of thousands of commuters daily.’

Andrew Martin, Guardian

‘A lively history of the world’s oldest railway system from its beginnings between Stockton and Darlington, Liverpool and Manchester, through a golden age of porters and dining cars to British Rail, curly sandwiches and beyond. There’s not much Wolmar doesn’t know about his subject, so expect plenty of technical detail as well as an in-depth look at the wide-reaching changes the railways brought to society in spite of initial hostility.’

Caroline Jowett, Daily Express

‘A marvellous account of the part played by the railways in Britain’s recent history.’

Rod Liddle, Sunday Times

‘A comprehensive survey of the way the iron rail really did open up the world… The story of how the railways created modern society is told with verve and vividness. Handlebar-mustachioed Victorian railway spivs, demarcation-conscious trade unionists and slide-rule Sixties network planners live in Wolmar’s pages. And the human account is overlaid with something else: the sorrier tale of how politics got in the way… Fascinating.’

Andrew Gilligan, Evening Standard

‘Get your bacon and eggs on the shovel and grab a pot of tea – you’re on the footplate for a marvellous journey through Britian, with no need to be a trainspotting ‘anorak’ to enjoy this refreshing ride.’

David Graham, Manchester Evening News

‘This breathtaking tour-de-force study of a revolutionary transport system that transformed the social, cultural and economic base of society is written for a general audience and comes from the pen of Britain’s foremost expert on public transport…Wolmar fires and inspires his reader with this fresh account of how our railways came to form the Britain of today… As a social history, it is indispensable.’

Morning Star

‘Before railways came to London, the capital had some remarkably rural features; 20,000 cows lived in the city to provide it with milk. But the railway revolution meant milk could be brought in quickly and easily from outside, making the cows redundant. This is only one example of the ways in which the railways helped to shape modern Britain, and Christian Wolmar’s new book is as much about these social changes as engines and navvies. Fire and Steam doesn’t dwell on technical details; it is, instead, a fine overview of the significance of railways that would interest even the most dedicated of motorists.’

Jon Latimer, TLS

‘Wolmar has a mine of knowledge about the past, at last brought to full, glorious light in Fire and Steam.’

Giles Foden, Conde Nast Traveller

‘Attractive and well-illustrated… This new history of Britain’s railways comes from the prolific pen of the nation’s most passionate and well-known advocate of rail transport and travel… Wolmar’s history promises to be more accessible to a lay readership than earlier academic treatments; it is a popular history, in the best sense of that term, rich in anecdotes without being anecdotal, firmly rooted and referenced in a broad knowledge of our railways yet still an entertaining read… Even the most knowledgeable railway aficionado is bound to find something new.’

Peter Lyth, BBC History Magazine

‘Fire and Steam will I am sure open many eyes to the day-to-day struggle that our railways and railwaymen have, to satisfy the shareholder, the public, the press and the politician.’

Andrew Dow, The Journal of the Friends of the National Railway Museum

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

Revised and updated edition first published in 2024.

This paperback edition published in 2025.

Copyright © Christian Wolmar 2007, 2024

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.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

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.

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

Paperback ISBN 978 1 80546 470 9

E-book ISBN: 978 1 84887 261 5

1851 railway network map © Jeff Edwards

All other maps © Mark Rolfe Technical Art

Railway 200 logo © 2024 Network Rail. Used with permission.

Printed in Great Britain

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Product safety EU representative: Authorised Rep Compliance Ltd., Ground Floor, 71 Lower Baggot Street, Dublin, D02 P593, Ireland. www.arccompliance.com

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

CONTENTS

List of Maps and Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgements

Maps

Foreword

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 All Change

Notes

Further Reading

Index

LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. The railway network in Great Britain in 1851.

2. The railway network in north-east England in 1907.

3. The railway network in north-east Scotland in 1947 and 2007.

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Lithograph commemorating the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, 1825. National Railway Museum.

2. The opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 1830. National Railway Museum.

3. ‘The Pleasures of the Rail-Road’, 1831. National Railway Museum.

4. Caricature of John Bull, 1836. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

5. Railway carriage classes, 1837. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

6. Ladies ticket, 1840. National Railway Museum.

7. Open carriages crossing the Bridgwater Canal, 1830s. Milepost 92½.

8. Bristol Temple Meads station, 1846. Milepost 92½.

9. ‘Battle of the Gauges’, 1846. Milepost 92½.

10. ‘Unemployed Horses’, c. 1850. Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

11. Brunel and Stephenson, 1857. National Railway Museum.

12. Primrose Hill Tunnel, c. 1840. Milepost 92½.

13. Construction of St Pancras, 1868. Milepost 92½.

14. Tay Bridge disaster, 1879. Milepost 92½.

15. Construction of the Forth Railway Bridge, 1880s. G. W. Wilson Collection, Aberdeen Library.

16. ‘Modern Advertising’, 1874. Milepost 92½.

17. Wealthy rail passengers, 1876. National Railway Museum.

18. ‘Summer and Winter Resorts’ poster, 1897. National Railway Museum.

19. Locomotives on the Highland Railway, 1890s. Milepost 92½.

20. Midland Railway porters unloading milk, 1890. National Railway Museum.

21. Train driver, 1907. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis.

22. Women railway workers, 1917. National Railway Museum.

23. Ambulance train, c. 1915. Imperial War Museum.

24. Accident at Penistone, south Yorkshire, 1916. Arthur Trevena Collection.

25. Strike-breaking staff and volunteers, 1926. National Railway Museum.

26. Southern Railway poster, 1926. Milepost 92½.

27. Interior of a London, Midland & Scottish refreshment car, 1920s. Milepost 92½.

28. ‘Take Me By The Flying Scotsman’ poster, 1932. Milepost 92½.

29. ‘So Swiftly Home’ poster, 1932. National Railway Museum.

30. A4 Pacific locomotives, c. 1938. Milepost 92½.

31. Post Office carriage, 1935. National Railway Museum.

32. Repair gang, 1940. Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images.

33. Evacuees, c. 1940. Fox Photos/Getty Images.

34. ‘Food, Shells and Fuel Must Come First’ poster, 1940. National Railway Museum.

35. Breakdown crew, 1943. Harry Todd/Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

36. Miners waiting for a train, 1950s. Milepost 92½.

37. Holidaymakers queuing at Waterloo, 1946. Fox Photos/Getty Images.

38. British Railways’ coat of arms, 1950s. Milepost 92½.

39. Diesel train, 1960s. Milepost 92½.

40. Train liveries, mid-1990s. Milepost 92½.

41. ‘Intercity Sleepers’ poster, 1985. National Railway Museum.

42. Norwich station, 2006. ATOC/Paul Bigland.

43. Eurostar train at St Pancras, 2007. London & Continental Railways/TROIKA.

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.

This edition reissued to mark the 200th anniversary of the Stockton & Darlington railway has been updated with a new chapter on the post privatization period and a few minor corrections. Peter Hendy, now Lord Hendy and the transport minister in the House of Lords, has kindly provided a foreword to mark the anniversary.

Christian WolmarJuly 2025

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 921⁄2, 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. I would also like to thank the many readers who pointed out errors and made suggestions from the first edition: several amendments have been made. These readers include John Ainslie, Jim Ballantyne, Jeff Chambers, Richard Crockett, Mike Johns, Richard Maund, Martin Pilgrim, Colin Spackman, David Spaven, and John Trowbridge. Please forgive me if your name has been omitted. Please do, however, contact me with any further corrections or suggestions for future editions. Enjoy the journey.

The railway network in 1851: 6,100 route miles across Great Britain.

The railway network in its heyday in 1907: 19,500 route miles across Great Britain. Detail of north-east England.

The death of the branch line: The railway network in north-east Scotland in 1947 (above) and 2007 (below).

FOREWORD

On Sunday 11 August 1968, the last British Rail operated steam train in Britain set off for its final journey. I was lucky enough to be a passenger on what became known as the Fifteen Guinea Special. I remember getting covered in soot and the train staff enjoying it almost as much as the passengers did, but most of all I remember feeling that I was part of something special that I would want to tell my children about. I still have the ticket framed on my office wall.

Some may look back at this moment as the end of the golden era of railways; a move away from the romance of steam to something more brutal and soulless. I prefer to see it as representing change and innovation, something that the railway has excelled at for over two centuries and which it continues to do.

The pioneering work of the historic engineers such as the Stephensons, Brunel, Barlow and others has been discussed and examined at length, not least in this book, and is rightly held up as an example of great British innovation and engineering. Their physical legacy is visible to us all, whether we use the railway or not. It can be seen in architecture, in changes to the landscape of Britain, and in the literal existence of towns like Middlesbrough, Swindon and Derby which saw exponential growth due to the railway. However, the railway is more than just track and trains, and it is more than engineering and industrial techniques, no matter how advanced, innovative or large.

The railway is, more than anything, about people. It is about connecting people from different communities. It is about people’s experiences of travelling by train. It is about where the railway takes them and what they do when they get there. It is about the railway’s impact on popular culture and the wonderful memories it creates. And it is about the brave and dedicated people who have worked in the industry, sometimes in very difficult and, sadly, prejudicial conditions.

People like Karen Harrison, who fought to be the first female train driver, and Asquith Xavier, who challenged racial discrimination to become the first non-white train guard at Euston. Both of whom should be considered as pioneering as, and frankly braver than, any single Victorian engineer.

And of course, we should remember that the railways would not be here today without the thousands of people who built them and who worked in truly dreadful conditions, often without adequate housing or sanitation, and at daily risk of serious or fatal injury. In some places the rate of death amongst these ‘navvies’ was higher than for soldiers at the Battle of Waterloo.

Thankfully, the railway is now a much safer and more inclusive place to work. However, it still faces difficult but much more modern challenges such as climate change and, increasingly, extreme weather conditions, including intense rainfall and long periods of drought, which make maintaining the existing infrastructure and structures increasingly difficult.

Despite the difficulties the railway faces, it is as popular as ever, with over 1.5 billion journeys being made and over 75 million tonnes of freight being moved across the length and breadth of Great Britain in 2023 alone. To support this, political parties across the spectrum invest to allow the railway industry to continue to build new infrastructure on a grand scale, investing large sums into new lines, stations and trains, and introducing new and exciting technology like digital signalling and drones. All of which will allow us to move more people, more quickly and more safely, than ever before.

Investment in railways has not always been popular and historically there has been vociferous opposition to new lines or, sometimes, to spending in general. However, one only has to look at the huge and obvious success of the Elizabeth Line, despite initial hostility to its construction, to see what happens to demand when the railway creates the supply. The railway is the most obvious example of connectivity producing economic growth, jobs, housing, social change and sustainability.

The 200th anniversary of the opening of the Stockton & Darlington Railway provides an opportunity to look forwards as well as backwards; something that we will do by continuing the industry’s tradition of celebrating this event.

The railway is a complicated patchwork of organizations and people; but what this may sacrifice in terms of simplicity and coherence, it gains in terms of diversity. Our Railway 200 celebrations capitalize on this by involving the widest possible breadth of people from the railway, freight operators, heritage railways, charter operators, train operating companies, community rail groups, museums and railway charities. This will provide an opportunity for everyone in rail to tell their own story in the way they want to tell it, and to deliver a genuine legacy by inspiring young and diverse people to choose a career in the industry.

We’ve come a long way since my journey on the Fifteen Guinea Special, and in a world where sustainability is increasingly important, travelling by train will be as central to our future as it has been to our past. There simply is no other way to travel that is as efficient, direct, clean and fast.

I am pleased to have been asked to write this foreword. Christian is a highly distinguished railway writer, and it is quite right for him to take the opportunity presented by Railway 200 to release an updated version of what I think is his best work. I invite you to use this book as a jumping-off point into the story of the railway as we celebrate its 200th anniversary.

Peter, Lord Hendy of Richmond HillChair, Network RailApril 2024

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 Thomas 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 loco-motives 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 long- standing 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 81⁄2ins – 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 81⁄2in 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