The Railways: Nation, Network and People

by Simon Bradley

From the platforms at Newcastle it was still possible to see coal trains running without continuous brakes; when the locomotive stopped, the buffers pushed noisily together as each wagon hit the one in front. This relic of George Stephenson’s railways lingered into 1980s Tyneside, sharing the same tracks as the streamlined Inter-City 125s, the fastest diesels in the world. The raw, archaic sound resounded for a few more years over the ancient quays and crumbling warehouses, a rebuke to the shiny consumerism that was taking over the rest of the city.

Take Newcastle station, an early-Victorian masterpiece, begun in 1846. Its frontage is a mighty display of classical architecture in the local golden sandstone, centred on a round-arched portico as roomy as a concert hall.* Behind, trains still pass through the original curving shelter or train shed of iron and glass, three parallel arched spans following a steady curve, the earliest structure of this kind anywhere. Newcastle’s street plan was revised in order to align with the station entrance, and the viaducts and bridges approaching it created the modern image of the city.

Looking down from a bridge at a train running on the completed line, the headmaster made a remark that has become celebrated: ‘I rejoice to see it … and think that feudality is gone forever.’

‘As lang as ah live, ah winnet forget th’ day we lost the train’ is the refrain of Wor Nanny’s a Mazer, by the Tyneside pitman and balladeer Tommy Armstrong, born in 1848 (Nanny and the singer resort to the pub for a quick drink before the next train comes, then another drink, and then one more …)

A real Mr Harding in London and a real Archdeacon Grantly in Salisbury in the 1850s would have heard the public clocks striking at the same time. Any time-conscious traveller who got out of the train at Basingstoke, roughly halfway between those cities, would (up to 1852 at least) have encountered a puzzling anomaly: the railway kept to standard time, but the town clocks were on the local version, about five minutes faster. This brings up the matter of how the railways transformed the keeping of time itself. Before Victoria’s reign, time was a local matter. East Anglian clocks were several minutes ahead of London’s, those of the West Country and Wales quite a few minutes behind, all measured in accordance with the twenty-four-hour rotation of the earth. The exactitude of these calculations was a sign of sophistication rather than backwardness, the culmination of centuries of scientific clock-making and astronomical observation. The differences could be substantial – Plymouth time was twenty minutes behind that of London – but the practical difficulties that resulted were few. Those most conscious of the disparities included the guards of mail coaches, who carried watches that could be adjusted to gain or lose the correct number of minutes every twenty-four hours. The time observed on the coach could thus be kept in step with that of the towns it passed through.

One common personal object that could not be carried securely on the roof was the gentleman’s hat. These reached their greatest height in the 1840s–60s, as if in sympathy with the soaring chimneys of the locomotives. Too tall to keep on when entering the carriage or standing within, too bulky to be kept easily on the lap, too fragile and valuable – at least without some sort of protective box – to risk kicks, treading and dirt by placing on the floor or in the space beneath the seats: the non-collapsible ‘stove-pipe’ presented the traveller with quite a challenge. The solution adopted in many carriages was to stretch taut cords across the ceiling, in parallel or criss-crossing at right angles, from which hats could be suspended upside-down by the brim. So in each first-class compartment of 1862 we may imagine up to six inverted black hats, juddering and quivering overhead with the motion of the train.

More serious was the danger that cylinders of compressed gas presented in case of accident. Oil- or gas-lit, a Victorian railway carriage was effectively a mobile bonfire awaiting ignition. The various materials that provided this potential fuel were noted in their raw state, ‘stacked in vast piles’ at the Midland Railway’s Derby carriage works, in F. S. Williams’s Our Iron Roads (1883): ‘logs of ash, elm, East Indian teak, Honduras mahogany – worth from £15 to £20 a log – red, white and yellow deals from Quebec and Stettin … and satinwood from Kauri, in New Zealand’. Sawn, planed, mitred, moulded, nailed and glued together, these timbers became the carriage bodies. The process was essentially one of craft manufacture. Oak or teak were the usual materials for the framing, deal (softwood) for the floors, deal or ash for the long, close-fitting planks that made up the roof. The Midland then required twenty-five separate stages of undercoating, painting, rubbing down and varnishing the body, to say nothing of lining-out and lettering. Further painting and varnishing was done within, as well as trimming, lining and upholstery in horsehair, woollen cloth, waxed cloth and linoleum. Taut, waterproofed canvas covered the roof; thick felt layers were used for insulation below the floorboards. When smashed apart and suffused with escaping hydrocarbons, it did not take much input from an unextinguished lamp flame or the coals of a derailed steam locomotive to set these ingredients in...

Alas! thou art a faithless friend, Thy warmth was but dissimulation; Thy tepid glow is at an end, And I am nowhere near my station!

The correlation between passengers’ budgets and social class is suggested by the rather embarrassing names chosen by the London & North Western Railway for its luncheon baskets, the ‘Aristocrat’ (five shillings) and the ‘Democrat’ (two shillings and sixpence). The ‘Aristocrat’ offered the choice of a pint of claret or half a pint of sherry – enough to get you tolerably drunk, though it must be allowed that Victorian claret was weaker than today’s. The plebeian ‘Democrat’ had a bottle containing ale or stout.

Crucial to the levelling-up of standards was the steady rise in the proportion of travellers who took third-class tickets. The early railway decades showed that it was possible to upgrade the experience of travel for the lowest class considerably without discarding the principle of three-way classification. Yet there was quite a difference between shivering in an open pen and sitting in a glazed compartment, however cramped, with the consolation of a lamp somewhere overhead. Second-class traffic therefore tended to leak away to the improved thirds. By 1874, the last year before the Midland’s dual-class service began, 77 per cent of railway journeys were already by third class. Nor was first class immune; on the Great Northern its share fell from 7 per cent to 3.5 per cent of travel between 1872 and 1884, while second class slipped from 25 per cent to 6.5 per cent. By 1913, 96 per cent of all journeys were third-class, accounting for 85 per cent of passenger revenue. It should be stressed too that the ordinary British third-class carriage of the time was greatly superior to the Continental equivalent, where wooden seats were still standard. Baedeker’s guide thus assured overseas visitors that it was acceptable for ‘a superior class’ to go third, especially on longer journeys. This converging experience of travel is one of the greatest instances of social levelling in our history. It is hard to think of any parallel during the period. Living conditions improved, but housing ...

That the great lairds would travel first class was not in any question. The same applied to dukes, earls, bishops, senior military officers and sundry other members of the carriage-owning classes. So it is interesting to note that Gladstone recorded two second-class journeys in his diary for 29 January 1850. There is little superfluous detail in this unchatty chronicle, and it may be that Gladstone chose to note the trips as exceptions to his usual habit. Perhaps it is significant that he was then an opposition MP, without a ministerial salary. There may even be a whiff of status anxiety about these déclassé journeys. That an element of self-policing entered into the system is suggested by a story told of the neo-medieval architect A. W. N. Pugin (1812–52), who liked to go about in a distinctly bohemian outfit comprising a sailor’s jacket, loose trousers, jackboots and broad-brimmed hat. Entering a first-class carriage after disembarking from the Calais crossing, he was challenged by a fellow passenger: ‘Halloa, my man, you have mistaken, I think, your carriage.’ ‘By Jove, I think you are right; I thought I was in the company of gentlemen.’ An apology followed; then, ‘The remainder of the journey was most agreeably passed in examining his portfolio filled with sketches just taken in Normandy.’ (A 1960s variation on the theme: a guard on the East Coast route recalled being summoned to eject some ‘yobboes’ from first class, who turned out to be Jimi Hendrix and his entourage...

How the system worked on the Great Western Railway was summarised in its Time Book (timetable) for 1863, with a fine sense of upholding class differences: Passengers in Private Carriages (not being servants) are required to take first-class tickets, and such passengers may remove during the journey to the Company’s First-class carriages if there be sufficient room in them. Servants travelling on private carriages are required to take Second-class tickets and they may remove to Second-class carriages provided there be room. A groom travelling in a horse-box in charge of a horse is allowed to travel at third-class fare.

A summer Sunday excursion on the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway in 1840 provoked the Scottish minister W. C. Burns to denunciations by placard and handbill, placed all across Tyneside: A Reward for Sabbath Breaking. People taken safely and swiftly to Hell! Next Lord’s Day, by the Carlisle Railway, for 7s. 6d. It is a Pleasure Trip! Easy to laugh at such things today; the organisers in 1840 were less blasé, putting up bills the following day to reassure people that the excursionists had made a safe return.

At Cambridge, academic string-pulling helped to ensure that the station was built well over a mile away from the town proper, to the lasting inconvenience of almost everyone. The Sunday question also loomed large. Both universities agreed church intervals with the railway companies. At Cambridge, there was an extra provision: the railway would be fined £5 every time it transported a passenger to or from Cambridge, or anywhere within a three-mile radius, between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. on the Sabbath. Proceeds were to go to Addenbrooke’s Hospital, or to another county charity to be decided by the university. It sounds like somebody’s pet scheme to do good all round. Whoever framed this clause had not reckoned on the sharpness of the railway’s operating department: soon after the line opened, cheap day tickets from Cambridge to London were issued, starting untouchably early at 7 a.m. (which meant that the visitors could make a really long day of it). Excursion trains came too, bringing more tourists to mill around the haunts of ancient Sunday peace. Well might the vice-chancellor protest in 1851, with what was presumably an unconscious inflation of equivalence, that Sunday excursions were ‘as distasteful to the University Authorities as they must be offensive to Almighty God and to all right-minded Christians’. The position proved impossible to hold; the £5 fines clause, a dead letter long since, was quietly dropped in 1908. By that time Cambridge had become a major junction, wit...

Samuel Sidney’s Rides on Railways (1851) dared to prefer the ‘vulgar and amusing’ companionship of third class to the ‘dull and genteel’ assortment at the other end of the train; this after a starchy outward journey in the company of an Oxford MA, an army officer, a Somerset House clerk and a man who had been visiting a lord, and a cheerful return spent with a tailor, a sailor, a bird-catcher and an ex-convict in greasy velveteens, for whom Reading gaol was the winter resort of choice (‘plenty of good vittles, and the cells warmed’). A similar rigidity was observed by American visitors. Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded of first-class carriages in 1852: ‘Nothing is to be seen or learnt there; nobody to be seen but civil and silent gentlemen, sitting on their cushioned dignities.’ Harriet Beecher Stowe – she of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (also 1852) – found the railway compartment an analogy for ‘that privacy and reserve which is the dearest and most sacred part of an Englishman’s nature … a stranger might travel all through England, from one end to the other and not be on conversing terms with a person in it’.

The railway bookstall thus became something of a cultural battleground. Unlike the ordinary bookshop, market stall or pedlar’s tray, it could be licensed, supervised and controlled, and it played a part too in public perceptions of the soundness of the host company. But the railways themselves were slow to catch on. It took until 1841 for the first recorded bookstall to be set up, at the Fenchurch Street terminus of what was then the London & Blackwall Railway. Before the coming of the stalls, newspapers were simply hawked up and down the platforms. Early interventions from railway management in the running of bookstalls arose from the need to find fresh employment for railwaymen disabled in company service, or sometimes for widows of those fatally injured. The illiterate were not always excluded, so that some stallholders had no idea whether their wares were improving, harmless or disreputable. Nor did the earliest stalls always do a good job with their stock, which was set out ‘in amicable jumble with beer-bottles, sandwiches, and jars of sweets’, as one writer recalled in 1893. That the merchandise was on display for all to see, from bishop to barrow-boy, also brought home the horrid fact that many readers preferred material with a strong flavour of tripe. As Punch later put it: I bought from the stall at Victoria A horrible sixpenny story, a Book of a kind It pained me to find For sale at our English emporia.

The working week suddenly became a warmer affair for many of Smiths’ employees in 1905. Wrangles over licence levels and rates of return finally reached an impasse in that year, losing the company its pitches on the two biggest railways, Great Western and London & North Western. The 250 vacancies thus created went instead to Messrs Wyman, the Great Western’s printing company. Undaunted, Smiths quickly opened new shops and lending libraries as close as possible to the vacated stations: 144 of them in eleven weeks, with more to follow. Suddenly, England had its first high-street bookshop chain.

Britain’s railways were the midwife at the birth of the entire modern system of insurance against accident and liability. The very concept of insurance must also have been popularised and demystified by the availability of short-term, fuss-free policies that could be had for a few pence.

the Queen remained anxious about speed, and a limit of 40 mph was supposed to apply throughout – a rule reminiscent of her neurotic horror of overheated rooms, for which fifteen degrees Celsius was the upper limit. When Victoria suspected that the train was going too fast, she made her feelings known. (Things changed as soon as the reign was over: Victoria’s funeral train from Gosport ran very smartly, so much so that her grandson the Kaiser is reported to have sent an equerry to congratulate the driver of the purple-draped locomotive on arrival at London.) In other words, like many ordinary travellers, she never quite lost her mistrust of the railways. Unlike them, she also had the option of writing letters in the following vein – sent from Balmoral to her least favourite prime minister on 3 October 1873 – with the expectation of receiving an unusually considered reply: The Queen must again bring most seriously & earnestly before Mr Gladstone & the Cabinet the vy alarming and serious state of the railways. Every day almost something occurs & every body trembles for their friends & for every one’s life … There must be fewer Trains, – the speed must be lessened to enable them to be stopped easily in case of danger & they must keep their time.

One famous name has so far been omitted. He was not native-born, nor did he meet his end in Britain, but in a marshalling yard in Canada. Nor was he even human. This was Jumbo the mighty bull elephant, born in the Sudan and killed by a locomotive shunting at St Thomas, Ontario in 1885, after the management at London Zoo had sold him on to Phineas T. Barnum’s travelling show. Even Huskisson is now remembered above all for the manner of his death, but Jumbo is remembered for being Jumbo, which in a way is a sign of greater celebrity.

No less strange were Bulleid’s Tavern Cars, another initiative that appeared just after nationalisation. The concept was the all too literal one of a pub on wheels, complete with draught as well as bottled beer. Since each tavern or bar vehicle was coupled alongside a restaurant car, a similar look was imposed on both. A real pub, the Chequers Inn at Pulborough in Sussex, was reportedly Bulleid’s model. Internally, the bar compartment had a low ceiling of real oaken beams, and oak settles and benches against panelled or rough-rendered walls. Long and narrow leaded windows were set high up in the carriage sides; artificial illumination came from miniatures of the carriage-lamp type, beloved of the stereotypical suburban semi. Only horse brasses and a blazing hearth were missing from this image of olde-worlde conviviality. The hostelry look worked less well in the restaurant car, whose first-class customers sat facing each other in single rows within a timbered interior like that of a giant caravan, or – to look ahead to the motor showrooms of 1952 – the rear end of a Morris Traveller. Again, the windows were of the high-set, thin and leaded type, meant to discourage too much lingering over the tables, but unpopular with those who liked to enjoy the view while dining. The external decoration (‘livery’ is hardly the word) was jaw-dropping. Each Tavern Car was tricked out in painted mock-brickwork and black-and-cream timbering, spliced with the standard BR colours of carmine a...

The rising levels of market-garden traffic of this kind encouraged the Great Eastern to build a tramway-type line in the 1880s along the flat canalside route between Wisbech and Upwell, which was operated by odd-looking steam engines encased in boxy wooden housings. This farm-gate branch was well known to a local clergyman, the Rev. W. Awdry, who represented one of its locomotives in Toby the Tram Engine (1952), the seventh book in his Thomas the Tank Engine series – with the curious result that Chinese factories now turn out model versions of the long-lost engines of this railway backwater to keep the world’s toyshops stocked.

The very existence of such large concerns, with all their human and financial convolutions, was itself a novelty; only the army, the Royal Navy and (while it lasted) the East India Company could compare. The industry thus became a kind of forcing house for new methods of management and control, serving in turn as the model for how other large corporations were run. In that sense, every large commercial organisation – and not just those in Britain – is a descendant of the railways.

there remains something awe-inspiring about the RCH – not so much the scale of its work, which is trifling by the standards of today’s digital technology, but the means by which it was carried out. The lost routines of the thousands of anonymous clerks at Eversholt Street – the endless, patient exactions of mental arithmetic in fractions and non-decimal units, even the neat copperplate writing – seem almost beyond the powers of the modern desk-worker. The same goes for the endurance and vigilance of the overworked engine drivers, firemen, shunters, signalmen and others who kept the Victorian network running.

Brunel himself sent a famously sarcastic letter to the first lessee at Swindon, wondering why the man should buy such bad roasted corn: ‘I did not believe you had such a thing as coffee in the place; I am certain that I never tasted any.’

Baedeker’s warning glossed over the diversities of regional speech, which still made things harder. Cuthbert Bede described in the 1850s how County Durham porters announced Ferry Hill (‘Faweyill’) and Fence Houses (‘Fensoosen’), and joked that ‘Change here for Doom’ (Durham) might cause alarm to uncomprehending southern travellers.