The Railways: Nation, Network and People

by Simon Bradley

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...