The World the Railways Made Read online

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  CONTENTS

  Welcome Page

  Main Text

  FOREWORD by Christian Wolmar

  INTRODUCTION

  Railway or Railroad?

  I

  THE FIRST IMPACT

  William James – the Forgotten Pioneer

  The Battle of the Gauges

  Fanny Kemble in Love

  II

  THE HOPES AND FEARS OF ALL THE YEARS

  The First Nimby

  Thomas Hardy and the Gravediggers

  III

  RAILPOLITIK

  1

  Progressive, Modern, Democratic and above all National

  2

  Politics and Politicians

  The Pereires: the Pure Believers

  Was the Curmudgeon also a Murderer?

  Whistle Stops and Other Political Tours

  IV

  CAPITALISM, CAPITALISTS – AND CONTRACTORS

  Sir Samuel Morton Peto

  Charles Francis Adams: the Patrician Fights Back

  V

  THE ECONOMY OF RAIL

  1

  The Railway Regions

  2

  The Industries the Railways Created

  Ice: The Disappearing Traffic

  The Grapes of Rail

  VI

  IMPERIAL RAILWAYS

  1

  Colonies: Direct and Indirect

  Don Enrique – and his Dynasty

  ‘Without our railway, there is no Szechuan left’

  Hirsch: Railway King Extraordinaire

  2

  Dreams of Empire

  VII

  THE ARMIES OF STEAM – AND THEIR BATTLEFIELDS

  1

  The Great Captains – and their Mercenaries

  Samuel Smiles’s Navigators

  George Pauling

  Lion Fighting with Station

  2

  The Railway Community

  An Extraordinary General Manager

  VIII

  SOCIETY ON THE MOVE

  1

  Social Changes – and Social Relationships

  Expresses to the Orient

  Fred Harvey, the Man and the Movie

  The Reluctant Emigrant

  2

  The Habits the Railways Changed

  3

  The Leisure the Railways Stretched

  Thomas Cook the Social Revolutionary

  Arcachon

  Flagler Beach

  IX

  RAILWAY IN TOWN AND CITY

  1

  Growth and Creation

  Cheyenne

  Surbiton for Smugness

  2

  The Monuments of Steam

  X

  WAR ON THE RAILS

  The Great (Railway) Game

  The Carriage at Compiègne

  The General

  XI

  THE GREAT RAILWAY RENAISSANCE

  About this Book

  About the Author

  Also by this Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright

  ‘Dawn’ reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber from The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke by Rupert Brooke (edited by Geoffrey Keynes); ‘Oh Mr Porter’ by Thomas and George Lebrunn published by permission of Warner Chappell Music Ltd; excerpt from ‘Travel’ by Edna St Vincent Millay, from Collected Poems, Harper & Row, copyright 1921, 1948 by Edna St Vincent Millay, reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett, literary executor; ‘I like to see it lap the miles’ reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas H. Johnson (ed.), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, copyright 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; ‘To a Locomotive in Winter’ by Walt Whitman and ‘The Locomotive’ by Archibald MacLeish published by permission of Houghton Mifflin.

  FOREWORD

  This book has the best title of any railway book I have encountered. It does precisely what it says on the cover. From start to finish, Nicholas Faith explains in great depth and with rigorous argument how the advent of the railways affected virtually every aspect of the way people lived.

  The World the Railways Made is the antithesis of so many other railway books which focus on the railway as if the technology were their most important aspect. Of course the developments and changes in technology are important but the story of the railways is so much more than that, as demonstrated by almost every page of Faith’s book.

  Let’s just set out a few societal changes covered in the book. Faith starts with the big picture, how railways helped to forge and unite nations. Vast nations like the United States, Canada or India, or even relatively smaller ones like Germany, did not exist until they were able to become federal states thanks to the connectivity that the railways afforded. The United States lived up to its name only when it became possible to travel across the continent. Russia managed to retain its hold over the distant lands of Siberia thanks to the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway.

  They were, too, a democratising force. Here, though, as with many aspects of this account, the issue is more complex. On the one hand, the railways allowed people to travel and therefore to become more knowledgeable about their own – and indeed other – nations. By helping people form informal groupings which could meet to discuss anything from a common interest in butterflies to ways of changing the world, the railways empowered people. On the other hand, they could also be an instrument of repression. There were several early movements on the railways of troops sent to quell rebellions and restore order – the established order. The railways helped build these nations and glue them together permanently. But by creating the greater ability to travel, the railways also allowed the creation of forces that the authorities would find harder to control. It is inconceivable that the democratic forces which grew in strength throughout the 19th century were not, at least in part, due to the advent of the railways.

  So was the growth of capitalism. Railways, as Faith points out, were by far ‘the biggest projects undertaken since the time of the Romans’. This involved the gathering together of people on a scale of people which previously would only have been for bellicose purposes. Now it was the peaceful function of building railways across and between nations.

  Technology to serve the railways developed far faster than otherwise would have happened. The huge requirement for bridges and tunnels, for example, led to rapid changes in the way these were constructed. Locomotives became more efficient almost every year, and signalling systems more sophisticated. The telegraph was an invention that was symbiotic with the railway and its spread was made far easier by allowing lines of poles to be sited alongside the railway tracks. The demand for steel from the railways stimulated the industry producing it.

  There were numerous consequences resulting from the sheer scale of these enterprises. The impact on the wider economy did not end with the completion of the line. Quite the opposite. Railway companies quickly became the largest businesses in their respective countries. To cope with their investment needs, banks had to expand and find new sources of funding. In turn, the railway businesses, spread out over large areas, required new forms of management and even accounting. In short, the railways were the catalyst for the spread of the Industrial Revolution and its inventions.

  Their very size meant they were able to change the nature of the
cities they served by building big stations to show off their importance and the increasingly wide swathes of tracks sometimes required large scale demolition.

  A whole host of industries were made possible by the transport opportunities that were created. Craft factories that may not have been viable previously could now prosper. Perishable goods, like fish, could be transported far further, enabling many more people to purchase them. Farmers were no longer dependent on their local market. Meat and milk could be refrigerated and transferred long distances.

  The impact on warfare, too, was profound and long-lasting. The ability of the railways to supply armies meant that battles could be waged over a far wider area and lasted far longer. Wars became bloodier and the railways themselves became key battlegrounds.

  All this and much more is covered extensively in this ground-breaking and comprehensive book. Faith shows conclusively that the railways were the most important invention of the 19th century if not, arguably, of any century. The book only lacks a chapter on what the railways did not change. It would have been a short one.

  CHRISTIAN WOLMAR

  London, September 2014

  INTRODUCTION

  The modern world began with the coming of the railways. They turned the known universe upside down. They made a greater and more immediate impact than any other mechanical or industrial innovation before or since. They were the first technical invention which affected everyone in any country where they were built – which, effectively, meant most of the world. They were the noisy, smoky, obtrusive heralds of a civilisation destined to be increasingly dominated by industrial innovations.

  Because they were the first such intrusion, their effects, combined with the traumas that accompanied their arrival, were inevitably more profound – and more fascinating – than the influence of any subsequent invention. They provided the human frame, the human spirit, the human imagination, with the first and most shattering mechanically-induced shock they had ever experienced or are ever likely to experience.

  The shock was both sudden and universal, far more so than that of the steamship, the railways’ marine equivalent. Within fifty years after 1830, when the first regular passenger service came into operation, the railways redefined, transformed, expanded the limits of the civilised world. With the railways came the development of modern capitalism, of modern nations, the creation of new regions from the American Mid-West to Siberia, from Lake Victoria to the pampas of Argentina.

  Their most obvious effect was on speed. Throughout recorded history, travel on land had never been faster than that of a galloping horse. The railway represented the first quantum leap. All subsequent inventions – the motor-car, the aeroplane – are merely continuing a revolution which began in 1830 with the steam locomotive.

  Today, over a hundred and fifty years later, they retain their fascination. Mention them, and you are instantly surrounded by a crowd of ‘railway bores’, each anxious to contribute their special insight into some aspect, often highly recondite, of the subject. This fascination is not new. Tens of thousands of books have been written about railways, about the men who built them, about their locomotives and rolling stock, the trains themselves, the stations, the history, financing and construction and operation of individual lines, hundreds more on the romance of travel on trains old and new.

  Unfortunately, most of these works are not remotely concerned with the effects of railways on society; they totally ignore anything outside the narrow world of the railways themselves. Until now, no-one has systematically turned the subject inside out, has looked out of the carriage window and analysed the world the railways created, the transformations they effected in every aspect of people’s lives, economic, social, environmental. And because the emphasis has almost always been on specific railways, there has been no systematic world-wide comparison of the many themes that recur whenever any individual railway is examined.

  When dealing with technological advances, authors have also largely ignored the social, economic and political climate which determined their spread and their success. In researching this book I have learnt to make the distinction between railways as passive forces, enabling changes to take place, but depending on other people’s initiatives, and the rather fewer instances where they instigated change themselves.

  Much of the existing literature, especially books about British railways, is marred by self-indulgence, the result of what the historian John Kellett calls:

  a personal urge to escape and … to make ‘A Journey into Childhood’. The psychological roots of this … subjective form of nostalgia run extremely deep … no readers are more insatiable and compulsive than those who are seeking their own past. The result, inevitably, is a mass of books to be wallowed in rather than read.

  The imbalance and inadequacy of existing published treatment is obvious, and will be rectified only as the extraordinary spell which has been cast over the subject is broken, and contributions are made to railway history by writers whose main interests extend beyond the railways themselves and to whom the sights and sounds of the steam locomotive are not so overwhelmingly personal a memory.1

  By contrast the best historians have always been fully aware of the railways’ importance. Eric Hobsbawm grasped how:2

  the 100,000 railway locomotives, pulling their almost three quarters of a million carriages and wagons in long trains under banners of smoke … were part of the most dramatic innovation of the century, undreamt-of – unlike air travel – a century earlier … the railways collectively constituted the most massive effort of public building as yet undertaken by man. They employed more men than any other industrial undertakings. They reached into the centres of great cities, where their triumphal achievements were celebrated in equally triumphal and gigantic railway stations, and into the remotest stretches of the countryside where no other trace of 19th century civilisation penetrated.

  A handful of authors, like Jack Simmons, Michael Robbins, Wolfgang Schievelbusch and Kellett himself have broken out of the spell of nostalgia; though not enough of them to provide any comprehensive coverage of most of the themes evoked in this book.

  One of my hopes in writing it, therefore, is to encourage more historians to relate the railways’ hardware, their lines, their locomotives, to the story of the countries through which they ran and the lives of the people involved. The unevenness of the existing literature has often forced me to bridge the gaps with guesses, all the while aware of my temerity in daring the crossing at all. But the subject is so vast that I can only behave like the railway itself, driving a rough and, I hope, more or less straight, path through the jungle, leaving the great majority of the ‘railway country’ untouched, awaiting the arrival of a later explorer.

  I have attempted to analyse, to present in words and pictures the drama, the excitement, the universality, the sheer novelty of the railroad revolution. It was an upheaval which has all the charm, the inconsistencies, the waste, the tragedies, the dramas, the quirks and comedies, the sheer depth of interest of real life as interpreted by a great novelist – they were a truly Dickensian form of transport. Not surprisingly, imposing any sort of order onto such a narrative was a major task.

  To do so I have had to impose a chronological limitation, for the railways’ effects echoed for generations after they were first built. Industrially it often took up to half a century for their full impact to be felt, just as it is only now, forty years after the development of the first computer, that they have entered into people’s everyday lives.

  For reasons of simple manageability I have confined myself to the railways’ first, ‘primary’ impact, and ignored their delayed, ‘secondary’ impact. Nevertheless the story is bound to sprawl, chronologically as well as geographically. In England the major lines had been built by 1852, but a century later the Chinese were only just embarking on their most ambitious programme of rail building, opening up regions the size of Europe in the subsequent couple of decades. In most cases, though, my story is confined to th
e railways’ heroic age, the period between 1830 and World War I, before the world-wide spread of the internal combustion engine, the railways’ great rival.

  Even when I had devised the themes into which I hoped to group the railways’ effects and the period I would explore, I was left with a major problem of arrangement. Railways have produced some splendid outbursts, magnificent poems and prose passages. Some are familiar, others less so, but I was anxious to include some of even the best-known ones, partly because of their inherent quality but also to present them in their true – and sometimes unexpected – context. Nevertheless they could not be included in the main body of the text without seriously interrupting the flow. Equally, many of the themes I explore are best illustrated with stories or individual pen portraits which, again, are too substantial to be included in the main text. So I have separated these passages, these stories, as separate features at the end of each chapter.