The World the Railways Made Read online

  I believe that I have written this book at a particularly appropriate moment. It was in fact sparked off by a series I wrote for The Economist in 1985, entitled ‘Return Train’, which, somewhat to my surprise, established that virtually every country in the civilised world was investing heavily in railways, each in their very different manner. For railways remain, as they always were, sturdily national growths, reflecting the character of the individual countries which they did so much to form during the 19th century. From the outset, nations defined themselves by their railways: first whether they had any, then by their relative efficiency. The test did not die with the onset of the motor-car. The post-war Japanese economic miracle was signalled in 1964 with the opening of the New Tokkaido line, with its trains running regularly and safely at over 100 mph.

  Even at the height of the delusion that road transport could replace the railways – an aberration which lasted only a generation – many people still believed in them as essential elements in the life of a community. ‘Perhaps the trains will disappear from Maine forever’, wrote E. B. White, ‘I hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime, for I think one well-conducted institution may still regulate a whole country.’

  “Westward the course of empire takes its way” – how Currier & Ives saw the railroad in North America, 1868.

  Paul Theroux, a fellow New Englander, provides a clue to the reasoning behind White’s lament. Theroux had noticed how trains accurately reflected the culture of a country: ‘The seedy, distressed country has seedy, distressed railway trains; the proud, efficient nation is similarly reflected in its rolling stock, as Japan is. There is hope in India because the trains are considered vastly more important than the monkey wagons some Indians drive.’3 Railway systems represent a country’s capacity to organise its transport – and thus, by implication, many less obvious public functions – in a sane and economic manner, keeping a just balance between the interest of the community, the economy, the state, the workers and the customers, be they individual passengers or major industrial concerns. Newspapers, it is said, represent a nation talking to itself. Railways represent a society, a community, in motion; so it is perfectly reasonable to judge its general health by its success or otherwise in organising this, the most public of communal activities, and the priority the society and its elected representatives attach to its railway system.

  The balance is a difficult one. If – as in too many countries – the railways are run by the state as a haphazard addition to the welfare state, then the public interest is liable to be forgotten. The interests of employees – or specially-favoured groups of customers – will be given priority over the overall public weal. In the United States by contrast, railways have been condemned as hopelessly outmoded, resulting in another type of imbalance: the ability of private lobbies – motor manufacturers, road hauliers, road builders – to persuade a gullible public that the immense sums they receive in government assistance are somehow morally and economically superior to the minuscule amount of aid required to keep even a skeleton passenger rail service in operation. Considerations of pollution, safety, land use, even the establishment of a basic economic equation between rival forms of transport, were swept aside.

  But the United States is now showing signs of catching up, for everywhere we are witnessing the birth of a new railway age as the limitations and inconveniences of the motor car have become increasingly apparent. Railways are again being treated as they were at the time of their first impact, as essential elements in a truly civilised life.

  Railway or Railroad?

  Originally the two terms were used indistinguishably. The first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary – compiled towards the end of the 19th century – noted that railroad was ‘at one time equally (or more) common in Great Britain and still usual in America.’

  The first generation of British rail users mostly called them railroads and, in the way that people retain the usages of their youth, continued to use the term throughout their lives – as John Ruskin did into the 1870s. But the two countries had grown apart long before that date. In 1838 a British periodical noted that ‘railway seems now we think the more usual term’.4 And in an unpublished article on ‘American and British Railway English’ Kurt Moller traces the distinction back to ‘the publicity given to the very first railways, the Stockton & Darlington railway in Britain and the South Carolina railroad in the US … by 1850 ‘railway’ had disappeared almost completely from American English, with two exceptions: printed matter of the more formal kind, and street railways – and even these soon became “streetcars”.’

  To my mind the British publicity was reinforced by the needs – conscious or sub-conscious – of railway promoters to emphasise that theirs were not public roads but private ways. In this book I follow what I believe is a sensible way (or road) and use ‘railroad’ only when referring to North America.

  I

  THE FIRST IMPACT

  I will do something in coming time which will astonish all England. – George Stephenson

  Stockton to Darlington 1825:

  Stephenson on the sparkling iron road –

  Chimney-hatted and frock-coated – drives

  His locomotive while the Lydian mode

  of Opus 132 may actually be

  In the course of making. At twelve miles an hour

  The century rushes to futurity,

  Whose art will be mankind-destroying power.

  – Roy Fuller

  In the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century British engineers triumphantly demonstrated that steam locomotives provided adequate power to propel economic loads of passengers or freight along a railway; that such railways could be built over or through the most rugged terrain; and that the resulting lines could be highly profitable for the promoters and benefit the towns and landowners along their route. By 1840, railways had become the most important symbol of industrial, economic and financial power, the most characteristic vehicle for men’s dreams of power, wealth and glory. It was soon equally clear that they would also bear an inescapable load of financial malversation.

  The idea of a ‘rail-way’ was not new. For hundreds of years horse-drawn carts had run on tracked ways to carry coal from the face to the pithead and then to the nearest navigable waters. In 1803, in the face of fierce hostility from the manufacturers of low-pressure steam engines, a high-pressure steam locomotive designed by Richard Trevithick had hauled a ten-ton load along a ‘rail-way’ near a Cornish tin-mine.

  George Stephenson, not a great engineer, but a great visionary.

  Yet the idea of steam locomotion is indissolubly associated with the name of George Stephenson. His triumph, like that of Winston Churchill over a century later, was based on his character, on an obstinate determination, on fixity of purpose, combined with the luck of being the right man in the right place at the right time. Like Churchill, Stephenson is honoured more in retrospect than during a long career largely spent battling the established order. ‘Almost to a man’, wrote his biographer L. T. C. Rolt, ‘his fellow-engineers dismissed him as an unprincipled and incompetent schemer, but all their shafts broke against the armour of that stubborn determination to succeed which was to triumph over every obstacle, including his own weaknesses.’1 These included an almost pathological jealousy of other engineers, total autocracy, and a profound managerial incompetence.

  The applause is not undeserved. In John Rowland’s words,2 he ‘did not originate the steam locomotive, he did not invent a new type of machine; but he used other people’s inventions and improved them so completely as to make them peculiarly his own’. Stephenson was lucky: during the first quarter of the nineteenth century the North-East of England, where he first found fame as the leading expert on mining engines, contained a concentration of mines, of rail-ways – and thus of capital – denied to Trevithick in distant Cornwall. Stephenson had lived almost all his life on a ‘tramway line’ from a mine to navigable water, so he could also draw on the experience o
f dozens of colleagues, all accustomed to the manufacture and maintenance of steam-engines reliable enough for men’s lives to depend on the pumps they powered. So he was backed by both the money and skills required to assemble the package – engine, wheels, track – required to make steam locomotion an economic proposition.

  His experiments covered the ten years after the Battle of Waterloo, a period when the price of fodder – and thus of horse-power – was rising rapidly. The resulting replacement of natural fodder with industrial coal was a major step in freeing mankind from dependence on nature. But the railway also improved the very nature of movement. In his Observations on a General Iron Rail-Way, Thomas Gray emphasised how ‘no animal strength will be able to give that uniform and regular acceleration to our commercial intercourse which may be accomplished by railway’. Without the efforts of Gray and other propagandists the railway promoters could never have mobilised the capital and labour required, and the public would never have accepted the massive upheavals involved in building railways on a large scale.

  The first crucial sign that the steam locomotive running on an iron way was the transport medium of the future came in 1818, when Thomas Telford, greatest of canal engineers, pronounced himself in favour of an iron way rather than a canal for a new route between a mine and a river. That same year George Overton, builder of the tramways used by Trevithick, wrote that: ‘Railways are now generally adopted and the cutting of canals nearly discontinued.’

  Overton’s report, and Stephenson’s insistence on steam traction, led to the construction of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, financed by local Quaker capital, the first railway line designed from the outset to employ steam locomotives as well as the horses used exclusively on earlier railways. The S & D – ‘the Quakers’ Line’ – opened in 1825 – the same year that Beethoven was writing his last quartets. It used the 15-ft long, malleable iron rails invented by a local engineer the previous year which immediately replaced the existing and inadequate wrought-iron rails. Stephenson had already proved that locomotives with flanged wheels could run on edged rails, a great improvement in efficiency. By that time it was understood, as a French author put it in 1821, that: ‘The railroad and its carriages [should] be considered as one machine.’

  The very first railway linking Darlington with the nearest waterway at Stockton, 1825.

  The Stockton & Darlington, the world’s first public railway, did not involve much technical innovation. Appropriately it was the sun which provided the fire for the first run of ‘Locomotion’, the Stockton & Darlington’s first locomotive. In the words of an old labourer, that day: ‘Lantern and candle was to no use so No 1 fire was put to her on line by the pour of the sun.’ Thus, accidentally, through impatience rather than design, a direct link was established between the fire in heaven and a man-made flame which was to travel round the globe.

  From its opening in 1825 the Stockton & Darlington was a triumphant success. Unexpectedly, it carried not only passengers by their thousands, but also coal by the hundreds of thousands of tons. A local grandee, Mr Lambton, had tried to sabotage the prospects of the line as a freight railway by ensuring that coal destined to be sent onwards by sea would pay only the apparently ruinously low railway freight rate of one shilling and twopence per ton per mile, an eighth of the rate to be charged if the coal were to be used locally. Yet, far from ruining the S & D, the low rate enabled the new means of transport to show its economic potential. It was soon carrying half a million tons of coal annually, fifty times the anticipated figure.

  The S & D also gave birth to Middlesbrough, the first town which owed its very existence to the railway. Like so many of its future brethren it grew up where a busy railway line reached navigable water. According to Samuel Smiles:3 ‘When the railway was opened in 1825 the site of the future metropolis of Cleveland was occupied by one solitary farmhouse and its outbuildings. All round was pasture-land or mud-banks; scarcely another house was within sight.’ The local municipality wouldn’t help, so four years after the S & D was opened ‘Mr Edward Pease … joined by a few of his Quaker friends, bought about 500 or 600 acres of land, five miles lower down the river – the site of the modern Middles-brough – for the purpose of there forming a new seaport for the shipment of coals brought to the Tees by the railway. The line was accordingly extended thither; docks were excavated; a town sprang up; churches, chapels and schools were built, with a custom-house, mechanics’ institute, banks, shipbuilding yards, and iron-factories. By Smiles’s time, a couple of decades later, the port of Middlesbrough had a population of 20,000, and was one of the busiest ports in the North East of England.’4

  While the Stockton & Darlington was being built William James, the true ‘Father of the Railways’*, had surveyed an ambitious national rail network to be worked by steam engines. In doing so he freed railways from their previous automatic connection with mining. James was almost a second father to young Robert Stephenson, who clearly found his real father, George, such an unbearable autocrat that he spent some years seeking his fortune in the mines of Latin America.

  James’s dreams had one major practical result: they awoke the merchants of Liverpool and Manchester to the potential the railway offered to break the monopoly of transport between the two towns held for fifty years by the Bridgewater Canal Company. As recounted in the note about him at the end of this chapter James got into financial difficulties and the scheme was transformed into a practical project by a local man, Joseph Saunders, who called in George Stephenson. In the absence abroad of his son, the father made virtually no progress in improving his locomotives. His limitations were further exposed during Parliamentary hearings over the vague and unsatisfactory survey he had conducted for the projected line.

  However, after the early setbacks he demonstrated the confidence and the innovatory common-sense required of all railway and locomotive builders, when he showed how to tackle Chat Moss, the much-dreaded marsh between the two cities. Orthodox drainage ditches simply filled with water, but George Stephenson triumphantly showed that railways would be able to overcome natural obstacles previously considered to be impassable. In L. T. C. Rolt’s words: ‘Stephenson’s plan of floating his railway embankment across the Moss on a raft of brushwood and heather was put into operation. A vast tonnage of spoil was tipped only to be swallowed up, but Stephenson never lost heart and gradually a firm causeway began to stretch out into the Moss to confound the sceptics.’

  Robert Stevenson. A greater engineer than his father.

  It was Robert Stephenson who finally ensured that the mobile steam engine would triumph over its stationary equivalent, which, it was generally assumed at the time, would be required if any substantial load were to be hauled up any kind of gradient. Trevithick had already shown that the power of a locomotive could be greatly increased by diverting the exhaust steam into a specially narrowed chimney. In the late 1820s both Henry Booth, the treasurer of the Liverpool & Manchester, and the French engineer Marc Séguin, suggested that the two tubes in the boiler be replaced with a host of smaller ones, thus ‘drawing hot gases from a separate fire box and so greatly increasing the heating surface … at last they had solved the steam-raising problem and ensured that the locomotive would be capable of a sustained power output over long distances.’ But it was Robert who put these ideas into practice with a quick succession of improved engines.

  As a result of the partnership between father and son the modern world was conceived on 8th October, 1829, during the trials held at Rainhill to decide how the trains on the Liverpool & Manchester would be powered. Robert Stephenson’s Rocket attained a steady 29 mph on his later runs, proving that his design was far more reliable than the competing locomotives.

  These came from two sources: other engines from Northumbria and, also, and more fundamentally, entries from London. In the capital a whole group of manufacturers had developed steam-powered locomotives designed to haul economic loads on ordinary roads, and these were the clear favourites before the Rainhill tr
ials. The Stephensons’ triumph at Rainhill, therefore, was not only personal: it also deprived roads of their hopes of carrying mechanically-propelled vehicles for three quarters of a century.

  In the year between the trials and the opening of the railway itself Stephenson garnered a great deal of mostly favourable publicity by driving specially-favoured visitors along the completed sections of the line. The ecstatic reactions of the actress Fanny Kemble quoted below* were not necessarily typical. The gossip and man-about-town, Thomas Creevey, was scared stiff. At twenty miles an hour, ‘the quickest motion is to me frightful; it is really flying and it is impossible to divest yourself of the notion of instant death to all upon the least accident happening. It gave me a headache which has not left me yet.’ But even he had to admit that at 23 mph they were travelling ‘with the same ease as to motion or absence of friction as the other reduced pace’ – the passengers were comparing travel in the four-wheeled unsprung carts used as railway carriages with even rattlier horse-drawn coaches. Moreover he – and the equally frightened Lord Sefton – were in the minority. ‘He and I seem more struck with apprehension than the others.’

  On 15th September, 1830, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway was officially opened. After what today would be termed amazing media hype, and amid scenes which combined tragedy and farce in equal proportions, eight special trains carried six hundred important guests between the two cities. These included the Tory Prime Minister, the much-hated Duke of Wellington, and the most out-spoken Tory reformer, William Huskisson, MP for Liverpool and friend of the city’s merchants, victim that day of the world’s first and most-publicised railway accident, which also nearly cost the life of the Austrian ambassador, Prince Esterhazy.