The Galloping Sausage and Other Train Curiosities E-Book

Geoff Body

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 236

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The formative years of Britain's railway network produced a host of ideas, activities and characters, quite a few of which now seem not only highly unusual, but sometimes little short of ridiculous. Weird schemes and designs, extravagant behaviour, reckless competition and larger-than-life characters all featured in the genuine struggle of the railway system to evolve. While the dawning of regulation and common sense brought about more uniform and responsible practices, factors like the weather and the innate complexity of railway operation continued to produce a stream of nonstandard incidents and outcomes, from wild storms to unusual equipment. This book, by ex-railwaymen Geoff and Ian Body, captures over 150 entertaining snippets, stories, and strange and unusual facts from an ample supply of railway curiosities.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

Introduction, Sources and Acknowledgements

A Hostile Takeover

Doctor Dionysius Lardner

Moments of Passion

Educational Opposition

The First Grand Opening

Protective Clauses

The MP for Lincoln

The Sodden Field

The Middy

Deodand

A Docks Line

The Perfect Locomotive

The Electric Telegraph

Genuine Mistakes

A Bridge Too Near

Stranded

Troubled Trial

Early Coaches

The First Steam Whistle

Slips and Fumes

Rail-Air 1883-Style

Officially Curious

The Atmospheric Caper

Feeding the Habit

Doncaster Races

Season Ticket Perks

The Madness

Road/Rail Coordination

The Merchandise Classes

Dickens to the Rescue

Hair Raising

If You Can’t Beat ’Em ...

Let There be Light

Black Dog

Sleeping Arrangements

Dubious Firsts

Gangs

Trouble

Gloucester

Replacement Bus Service

Two for the Price of One

The Longest Train?

Rhubarb! Rhubarb!

Transitory Glory

A Second’s Reflection

‘Like an Empty Beer Butt … ’

WC&P

Brunel’s Spectres

Nuts

Runaway Reaper

Thirteen into Four

Signal Box Names

Abandoned Train

The Drop

The Innocent Railway

Taunton Brake Van

Brief Glory

Lonely Giant

The Galloping Sausage

18HP

Two Unknown

Not Just Leaves

Thirty-Seven Minutes’ Delay

On the Level

Sidmouth Road

‘Kim’ Saves a Train

Taking the Biscuit

Harbour of Refuge Railway

Bovine Ballast

I See No Ships

Uncommon Carrier

Out of Gauge

The Sounding Arch

A Rare Survivor

Stiffs’ Express

What’s in a Name?

Locomotive Hybrids

Murder and Bedlam

Filling Station

Strange Locomotive, Strange Location

Blending In

Laira Raiders

All the Wheels?

Not to be Despised

Not Amused

Panto

Tiger Hunt

A Bit of a Setback

Missed!

Fly Shunting

Anderson’s Piano

A Double Life

Kippers for Breakfast

400-ton Swing

Exchange Stations

Interlaced

Adding Insult to Injury

Nosedive

The Names Lived On

Extraordinary Specials

Man vs Train

Jellicoe Specials

Fire

Avoiding Action

All Part of the Service

Pitched Battle

Under the Influence

Paternalism

Tunnel Vision

Sleepers

Highland Riot

Brunel’s Wrath

The Long and the Short and the Tall

Runway Clear

Fare Dodgers

Beds and Bailiffs

‘Pursued by the Fort’

Dual Purpose

Heavy Responsibilities

Road and Rail

Pricey

The Old Worse and Worse

Hijack

Push and Shove

Blockade

Access

OTT

Rocket Warning

A Case of Confusion

The Prize Fighting Game

Naming

Beached

Eulogy

Passengers on Top

Incline Skills

Cab Comfort

Uneasy Bedfellows

A Penny a Year

On the Move

Confusion

Circular Routes

Taken by Surprise

Honeymoon Compartments

Tickets

Royal Station

Dickensian

Railway Time

Special Trains

Design Frenzy

Racing

The Racer, the Rasher and the Spud

Copyright

Nickel’s railway. (Illustrated London News)

INTRODUCTION, SOURCESAND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is doubtful whether any strand in the technological development of the railways occurred without deviation from what eventually became the norm. Indeed, imagination and experiment are integral parts of any growth process, and the railway business was no exception. The pioneers starting from scratch had neither precedents to constrain them nor guidelines to fetter their imagination. By later standards many of the methods they tried inevitably attained curiosity status as, in a similar way, did some of the mainstream activity practices which were tried in the search for improvement. Such is the nature of change.

Beginning even before the Rainhill Trials, the course of motive power development not only evolved erratically but wandered considerably in the process. Steam power was always going to replace horses but cable haulage, atmospheric systems and even sail railways were all tried in the quest for superior traction, economy and speed. The same has applied to railway equipment and practices so that there have been no shortage of curious and unusual examples appearing along the way. Nor has there been any lack of out-of-the-ordinary people, both crank and genius.

The aim of this book, following in the path of the earlier Railway Oddities, has been to capture a varied but random selection of the curious and the unusual and present the examples in their setting. Hopefully the result might be a readable and possibly astonishing repast of some of the more outstanding of the odd things that have occurred over two centuries of railway history.

The sources consulted have been many and varied, often, like the Regional Railway History Series from David & Charles, just giving a clue to something intriguing and worth researching further. The railways’ own material, especially the Great Western Railway Magazine, the railways’ own working instructions and the extensive publicity material, have provided equally rich pickings, as have a whole host of early railway books and documents, local newspapers, libraries and the like.

The authors’ own material and experiences are extensive, and many good friends and former colleagues have contributed, especially Bill Parker who has also trawled the goodwill of his own many railway contacts. A number of contributions have also come from library research, aided by people like Linda Tree at Kings Lynn and the Great Yarmouth library staff. Thanks are also due to Jim Dorward and Roy Kethro. We are grateful to all who have made an input.

The illustrations are all from the authors’ collections except where otherwise credited.

Great Western Railway steam railcar.

A HOSTILE TAKEOVER

The year 1845 was a very significant one in Norfolk. On 30 July the Norfolk Railway line from Norwich to Brandon was linked with that of the Eastern Counties Railway (ECR) on through Ely and south through Cambridge to London to give Norwich an important railway link with the capital. This development had already raised concerns in Kings Lynn that it would be left out of the exciting new railway age. There were also real fears that the north Norfolk port would lose some of the extensive and lucrative coal traffic brought in from northern harbours for onward movement within East Anglia. The result was intensive local discussions in Kings Lynn resulting in the promotion and incorporation of three railway schemes of its own. These were the Lynn & Ely Railway to connect with the new line to London at Ely, the Lynn & Dereham to provide a route to Norwich and Yarmouth and the Ely & Huntingdon, a truncated version of the original scheme to reach Bedford. All three were amalgamated into the East Anglian Railway (EAR) in 1847.

Brandon in 1845 was a small and remote place, but important in railway terms as the last link in the creation of the first route from London to Norwich. (Illustrated London News)

Work on the East Anglian group’s lines was started in 1846 and by the following October the main line had reached Ely and much progress had been made on the other routes as well. Their construction involved little in the way of severe curves or gradients but the company incurred high costs in spanning the waterways of the Fenland sections. Already it was being eyed acquisitively by the growing Eastern Counties Railway as part of an emerging pattern among early railways in which small concerns sought to be acquired at inflated prices and large ones aimed to buy up rivals financially exhausted by construction costs.

This was a period in which the unscrupulous George Hudson was directing the affairs of the Eastern Counties Railway. In negotiations with the East Anglian Railway over a possible lease, he insisted on completion of the latter’s Huntingdon and Wisbech lines, knowing full well that they would sap the smaller concern of funds and make it more amenable to acquisition. It certainly did the former and by 1849 the East Anglian Railway was in financial difficulties. It had to sell off land, close stations and reduce its staff levels. A measure of the problem was the decision to provide beds at stations for the use of porters in order to save the cost of night watchmen!

The Eastern Counties Railway had been working the truncated Ely & Huntingdon line between the latter point and St Ives but in 1849 gave notice that it would not continue, leaving the EAR with the problem of how to access this isolated outpost of its network. It did manage to scrape together a few wagons and a tram carriage and find a horse to pull them but then fell foul of the railway commissioners because the horse-drawn ‘trains’ could not achieve the 12mph required by legislation. In the following year, when the EAR tried to link up with the Great Northern (GNR) at Huntingdon, the contractor for constructing the connecting line insisted on having twenty coaches locked up in a shed as security for his account – such was the Kings Lynn company’s parlous financial state.

On 29 June 1850 matters reached their lowest point when possession of the East Anglian Railway was taken by the Official Receiver. Soon various anxious creditors were claiming as security not only the East Anglian’s engines but also anything else they could put their hands on. Many locomotives operated with a creditor’s representative on the footplate while other assets carried a plate with details of the lien claimant.

Underlying all these events lay the tactics of the EAR’s two large neighbours. The Great Northern Railway was anxious to branch out from its new route to the north from Kings Cross and penetrate East Anglia. The Eastern Counties was equally intent on thwarting any such intrusion into what it saw as its territory. It had already offered the East Anglia 25s a day to lease its Huntingdon extremity and now made another derisory offer for the whole undertaking.

Getting to hear of this situation, the local agent for the Great Northern Railway, a Mr Baxter, agreed a more reasonable deal with the East Anglian but his superiors began to have second thoughts when the company tried to run through-trains from Peterborough to Kings Lynn. They found that the ECR had blocked the connection between the two systems and horse buses had to be used to bridge the gap.

Although the East Anglian’s creditors had agreed to the end of the receivership when it was leased by the Great Northern, that deal was challenged by a faction of GNR shareholders, especially when the attempt to get an injunction to prevent the Wisbech blockage failed. There were other troubles too. The Norfolk Railway would not let the East Anglian use its Dereham station forcing it to build its own. The cumulative effect was that good sense had to prevail and finally did so when the East Anglian agreed to a better Eastern Counties deal, which came into effect at the beginning of 1852.

DOCTOR DIONYSIUS LARDNER

This complex character was a baffling mixture of intelligence, imagination, flamboyance and self-misdirection. Born in 1793, he attended Trinity College Dublin where he obtained an MA and, after a brief flirtation with the priesthood and a spell in his father’s legal business, he began writing books and papers on mathematical and scientific matters. He was appointed professor of Natural Philosophy & Astronomy at University College London in 1828 and remained there for three years during which time he began to take an increasing interest in the steam engine and the emerging railway activity. He then went on to make something of a career out of appearing as an expert in this sphere, finding ready employment with those opposing railway legislation and locking horns with Brunel on several notable occasions. Although a learned man who did much to popularise science, Lardner’s largely academic approach led him into some untenable positions, which Brunel’s more practical experience easily exposed.

Lardner crossed swords with Brunel in the fifty-seven-day committee hearing of the first Great Western Railway Bill in 1834. He was responsible for many of the questions hurled at Brunel during his seven-day grilling by opposition counsel. Lardner popped up again in the hearings of the following year when he supported those trying to demolish the case for Box Tunnel. According to the professor’s figures, if the brakes on a train failed on the down gradient through the tunnel it would emerge at the other end at the terrible speed of 120mph and bring disaster wherever it crashed. Brunel was not slow to point out that the pseudo-expert’s calculations had completely ignored both friction and air resistance and that brake failure would not be half the problem that had been suggested.

In 1836 Lardner found time from his prolific writings to give evidence when the London & Brighton Railway scheme was before Parliament. He was back meddling in Great Western Railway (GWR) affairs in 1838, however, when the first section of the company’s newly opened railway was having problems with its permanent way and the riding qualities of its carriages. The directors came under pressure from the North Western group of shareholders who, familiar with the pioneer Liverpool & Manchester Railway (L&MR), believed its 4ft 8½in gauge preferable to Brunel’s choice of 7ft. The outcome was Brunel having to accept having another engineer’s report on the new railway’s choice of gauge and its operational troubles, which he did with good grace.

What Brunel could not have been happy about was finding that the reporting team included his old adversary Dionysius Lardner. That the latter should have a special train filled with his own measuring equipment and allowed to roam the system at will must have been an even harder pill to swallow, especially as Brunel had scant regard for the competence of both the man and the devices he was using. The arrangement for Lardner’s train to go pretty well where it wanted without prior arrangement was just asking for trouble and this duly came on 26 September 1838 when the 8am regular train ran into Lardner’s special and destroyed three of its test carriages. Lardner’s reaction is contained in what has been described as ‘a very improper letter’ to the GWR Board.

Lardner suffered another reverse soon afterwards. The pioneer locomotive North Star had been performing badly and Lardner’s tests led him to ascribe the loss of tractive effort at higher speeds to the atmospheric resistance to the wide carriages; perhaps he had learned something from the Box Tunnel affair after all! Together Brunel and Daniel Gooch quickly proved him wrong by altering the locomotive’s blast pipe and producing a much-improved performance with a lower coke consumption.

Brunel and Lardner were at odds again over Brunel’s plans for the SS Great Western, the huge steamer which was to capture the transatlantic trade, but by 1840 Lardner had other things to worry about. Having run off to Paris with the wife of an officer in the Dragoon Guards he got a good hiding from the husband and an expensive lawsuit to add to his troubles. With his reputation in Britain shattered, Lardner was to remain in Paris until his death in 1859. He did, however, give the United States the ‘benefit’ of his expertise for a while before finally lapsing into relative obscurity.

MOMENTS OF PASSION

Despite losing his parents before he was a year old, Charles Blacker Vignoles managed to pursue a varied and successful career, which reached a pinnacle when he was elected president of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Following a short period in the army he spent time in North America working as a land surveyor. He seems to have been largely self-taught from working on a wide variety of projects whilst there.

At the age of 30, and with a wide range of skills, he returned to Britain in 1823. He then worked on the London Docks, surveyed the route of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway and was involved in several other major railway schemes in a number of different countries. Vignoles met John Braithwaite when helping in the preparation of Ericsson’s locomotive Novelty for the Rainhill Trials, and Braithwaite, in his capacity as chief engineer of the Eastern Counties Railway, was later to involve him in work for that company.

While Vignoles seems to have been a capable man, he was given to temperamental excesses especially when things went wrong. Then he would fly into a tantrum with wild gestures, foot stamping and tearing at his hair. Accompanying this spectacle with a flow of highly colourful oaths he gained a reputation as a man to be avoided when things did not go smoothly.

EDUCATIONAL OPPOSITION

Some nineteenth-century educationalists supported the advent of railways whilst others were implacable in their opposition. None more so than Eton College who opposed both bills for the Great Western Railway despite some strong support for the new company from the town of Windsor. The Eton authorities seemed to fear that the existence of a railway would encourage its pupils to rush up to London to enjoy the temptations offered by the capital. They saw it destroying all the cherished standards of the college even suggesting it might see the traditional English master replaced with the unthinkable, a French mistress, and encouraging the reading of Voltaire in place of Virgil.

Although the Great Western Railway Bill finally received the Royal Assent on 31 August 1835, among its 251 clauses was a prohibition on building any line or station within 3 miles of Eton College and an obligation to employ staff to prevent pupils accessing the railway. These men were to be paid for by the company but take orders from the college headmaster. The 3-mile restriction, in practice, prevented the infant railway from building a station at Slough but, by now adept at overcoming obstacles, the GWR made arrangements for passengers to join and leave trains there without actually building a station. The college authorities sought an injunction to prevent this and took their case all the way up to the House of Lords but they lost in the end and Slough got its station in 1840.

Oxford and Cambridge universities also feared that the new railways might put temptations in the way of their scholars and both secured protective powers in the relevant enabling acts. Among other things, these gave university officials free access to the local station and the right to prevent anyone who had not graduated from travelling on any of its trains.

THE FIRST GRAND OPENING

This was the title given by the Eastern Counties Railway (ECR) to the events of Tuesday 18 June 1839 when the directors and their guests were conveyed over the first section of the company’s new railway line. Planned to link London and Norwich, and subsequently petering out at Colchester, on opening day it managed only to go as far as Romford. On this important Tuesday the ECR was already showing signs of the lackadaisical attitude which was to become all too apparent in its later management and operation.

Four days after the opening ceremony an account of the event appeared in the Railway Times which struck a blow for womenfolk by remarking that the decision to exclude them from the event was ‘by no means worthy of imitation’. Another feature which vexed the reporter was the shortage of champagne, which took a long time to appear and was then limited to ‘a solitary bottle’, whereas supplies on the earlier Croydon and Southampton line openings had been significantly more lavish.

The reporter’s complaint was fuelled by the fact that the day was a hot one and the two official trains had started late from the ECR’s temporary terminus in Mile End due to the non-arrival of an important guest, the Persian Ambassador. They stopped again at Stratford to wait for him and eventually decided to send an engine and coach back to fetch him but no sooner had it left than he turned up, having come by road when he found that the train had left without him.

When the cavalcade eventually arrived at Romford there was further delay in getting the official banquet started and the Railway Times reporter sweltered, champagne-less, in the hot sun. His mood was hardly improved by listening to a speech he could not understand delivered by the ECR chairman, Henry Bosanquet, as well as the added confusion that followed. Being told that the return trains were ready, the chairman asked one speaker to cut his speech short. Obligingly this he did only to be replaced by a local MP going through a lengthy round of fulsome praise for the directors. At last, believing that he could get up and start the move back to the waiting trains, the chairman had to be reminded that no one had recognised the contribution of the railway’s chief engineer, John Braithwaite. This meant more speech-making before the return journey could eventually be undertaken to the relief of all the participants who, by now, had had their fill of speeches, cannon fire and the interminable playing of the band

PROTECTIVE CLAUSES

Generally, people are wary of something totally new and this is exactly what the early railways were to British people in the first half of the nineteenth century. One result was that powerful interests were able to secure protection for their concerns either by discussion with the promoters of a new railway or by their opposition to the bill that had to be laid before Parliament. Most new railways had to accept a number of general clauses protecting things like water supplies, Post Office services and the like but several had to make specific provision for more curious situations.

The Aberdeen Railway had to shade any lights it installed near the coast so that they would not mislead shipping while the Dundee & Arbroath Railway had to ensure that smoke did not interfere with the communications between the Bell Rock Lighthouse and shore establishments. Eton College bathers using their regular bathing place at Cuckoo Weir were ‘not to be disturbed’ by the Great Western Railway and the Kent Coast Railway had similarly to respect the privacy of bathers on Ramsgate Sands.

The provision of screens to make sure trains did not frighten horses used on the adjacent roads was a fairly common provision but a more unusual one was contained in a Liverpool & Manchester Railway Act of 1842, which required the company to erect a fence or wall to shield New Bailey Prison. Later on, Great Western had to underpin the walls of Shrewsbury Gaol to keep its occupants secure and the company had also to be prepared to submit to vibration tests conducted by the Astronomer Royal.

Noise and vibration featured in other protective clauses elsewhere. Trains were not allowed to whistle within 100 yards of the Lord Warden Hotel at Dover or near St Thomas’s Hospital. The Great Western was prohibited from shunting during the times of Sunday services in Bristol Cathedral. The North Eastern Railway (NER) had an even more onerous obligation in two instances, being required to lay its rails ‘on India rubber or similar substance’ in order to deaden train sounds. In one of these cases the protection was for the cemetery at Leeds Parish Church, presumably out of concern for mourners rather than the long-term occupants!

One of the most difficult situations for railway promoters arose if their route passed near or through a country house estate. Many were the provisions imposed to protect the view for which the site had been chosen or had been created by the landowner at great expense. The Furness Railway, for example, was to build its Arnside–Hincaster Junction line for 20 chains on arches or pillars to protect the view from George Edward Wilson’s Dallam Tower. Lord Harborough wanted the Midland Railway’s Saxby line carried in a tunnel beneath his Cuckoo Plantation and the Halifax & Ovenden line was to be arched over its entire length through the Ackroyd estate. Lines at York and Windsor had to be harmonised with their surroundings, another line had to ‘present a neat and substantial appearance’ and the Llanelly Railway could not build its line at all until agreement had been reached with the bishop of St David’s on whether it was to pass in front of or behind his Abergwili Palace.

THE MP FOR LINCOLN

Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorp, elected the Member of Parliament for Lincoln in 1826, spent a lifetime perfecting the art of the negative objection. He railed against free trade, water closets, taxes and the ‘lamentable influx … of foreigners talking gibberish’. Sibthorp certainly did not approve of railways, which he said were ‘run by public frauds and private robbers whose nefarious schemes will collapse.’ Even Gladstone’s Cheap Trains Act gave him no pleasure. What he wanted was an ‘Act for the Annihilation of Railways’.

Not that railways were alone in attracting Sibthorp’s strictures. ‘Reform,’ he said, was ‘a thing which I detest as I detest the devil’ and Sir Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace was ‘a transparent humbug and bauble’. It took all of Paxton’s guile to save the building from Sibthorp’s enmity when it had to be dismantled and removed from Hyde Park at the end of the Great Exhibition.

THE SODDEN FIELD

Achieving rail access to Weymouth and transit through Dorset and East Devon to Exeter was a source of bitter rivalry. The London & South Western Railway (L&SWR) wanted to expand westwards and the Great Western wanted to protect its access to Exeter via Bristol and Taunton. Several smaller companies got caught up in the struggle between these two emerging railway giants including the Salisbury & Yeovil Railway, which had to endure a significant number of setbacks in getting its scheme off the ground (or on the ground to be more precise). A leading shareholder and unofficial company historian described the ceremony of cutting the first sod in 1856 in the following philosophical terms:

In keeping with the bitter elements of turbulent hostility which the Salisbury & Yeovil Railway undertaking had had to encounter, but at this time seemed to have subdued, were the deluge of rain, and the bitter blasts of wind, which it flung into the faces of the people who were going to the town of Gillingham to be present at the ceremony of ‘turning the first sod.’ It seemed as though, human adversaries having done their worst to impede, Nature had now taken up the work of baffling and obstructing. That fickle Jade, the Weather, whirled sheets of water on our heads, blew garments into ribbons, and cast our speeches back in our teeth. And when the sodden field was left, and the party sought some protection from the bitter elements under a large marquee, Pluvius made his unwelcome way through the canvas, and, crowning insult of all! mingled our wine with water. These would have been trials enough to break the hearts of many men, but the promoters of the undertaking had had too much of the buffeting of adversity to be depressed now; and they simply raised the diluted champagne to their mouths with the quiet remark, ‘We have had so much cold water thrown upon us before that a bucket or two extra can make no difference now.’

THE MIDDY