The World the Railways Made Read online

  During the Civil War the need for through traffic overrode narrow corporate considerations and some mileage was standardised, at least in the North, though even after the war the mileage of 5 ft gauge line in the former Confederate states nearly doubled. During the 1880s however all the major lines, North and South, shifted to 4’ 8½” as the requirements of an increasingly-integrated national market demanded through transport.

  The individualistic Australian colonies added a political dimension to deliberate bloody-mindedness and built their lines with gauges ranging from 2’ 6” to 5’ 3”. What Mark Twain described as ‘the jealousy between the colonies’ ensured that through trains could not run between the country’s two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, for half a century.

  Even Brunel recognised that mountainous railways demanded narrower gauges to enable curves to be tighter (although the ‘narrow’ gauge he recommended for the Taff Vale railway was 4’ 8½”. But he would not have approved of the other reason – simple economy of construction – for the plethora of truly narrow-gauge railways, often of a metre or less, built, especially in the developing world. These greatly hampered and still hamper integration. It has proved too costly and inconvenient to convert most of the world’s narrow-gauge railways to 4’ 8½” or even to match the width of their neighbour’s lines.

  Actress and worshipper of George Stephenson, Fanny Kemble.

  Fanny Kemble in Love

  Fanny Kemble was not what was usually meant by an ‘actress’ in the early 19th century – part music-hall artist, part courtesan. The Kembles were the most distinguished theatrical family in London and she herself was received, in the contemporary phrase, in the highest society. She was pretty, witty and delightful, so naturally Stephenson was at his most charming when she climbed aboard the Northumbrian on the newly-built Liverpool & Manchester railway. The conquest was mutual.

  We were introduced to the little engine which was to drag us along the rails. She (for they make these curious little firehorses all mares) consisted of a boiler, a stove, a small platform, a bench, and behind the bench a barrel containing enough water to prevent her being thirsty for fifteen miles – the whole machine not bigger than a common fire-engine.

  … This snorting little animal, which I felt rather inclined to pat, was then harnessed to our carriage, and, Mr Stephenson having taken me on the bench of the engine with him, we started at about ten miles an hour. The steam-horse being ill-adapted for going up and down hill, the road was kept at a certain level, and appeared, sometimes to sink below the surface of the earth and sometimes to rise above it. Almost at starting it was cut through the solid rock, which formed a wall on either side of it, about sixty feet high. You can’t imagine how strange it seemed to be journeying on thus, without any visible cause of progress other than the magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace, between these rocky walls, which are already clothed with moss and ferns and grasses; and when I reflected that these great masses of stone had been cut asunder to allow our passage thus far below the surface of the earth, I felt as if no fairy tale was ever half so wonderful as what I saw. Bridges were thrown from side to side across the top of these cliffs, and the people looking down upon us from them seemed like pygmies standing in the sky … After proceeding through this rocky defile, we presently found ourselves raised upon embankments ten or twelve feet high; we then came to a moss, or swamp, of considerable extent, on which no human foot could tread without sinking, and yet it bore the rod which bore us.

  … the engine having received its supply of water, the carriage was placed behind it, for it cannot turn, and was set off at its utmost speed, thirty-five miles an hour, swifter than a bird flies (for they tried the experiment with a snipe). You cannot conceive what the sensation of cutting the air was; the motion is as smooth as possible, too. I could either have read or written; and as it was, I stood up and with my bonnet off ‘drank the air before me’. The wind, which was strong, or perhaps the force of our own thrusting against it, absolutely weighed my eyelids down … when I closed my eyes this sensation of flying was quite delightful and strange beyond description; yet strange as it was, I had a perfect sense of security, and not the slightest fear.

  Part of the security clearly came from ‘the master of all these marvels’ George Stephenson with whom she claimed to being ‘most horribly in love’.

  … A common sheet of paper is enough for love, but a foolscap can alone contain a railroad and my ecstasies. There was once a man, who was born at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, who was a common coal-digger; this man had an immense constructiveness, which displayed itself in pulling his watch to pieces and putting it together again; in making a pair of shoes when he happened to be some days without occupation … he is a man of from fifty to fifty-five years of age; his face is fine, though careworn, and bears an expression of deep thoughtfulness; his mode of explaining his ideas is peculiar and very original, striking and forcible; and although his accent indicates strongly his north-country birth, his language has not the slightest touch of vulgarity or coarseness. He has certainly turned my head.

  In the event the enchanting Fanny married a rich American slave-owner and disappeared from the British social scene. Her deservedly famous account is contained in a letter published in her Record of a Girlhood.

  * See page 32.

  * See page 37.

  * Quoted by Francis, op. cit.

  * For a full discussion of gauges see ‘The Battle of the Gauges’, p. 34.

  * In the words of Baron de Jouvenel: ‘Le génie de notre nation a cela de particulier qu’il faut toujours un mouvement intellectuel pour préparer une réforme, même de l’ordre industriel et commercial.’ (‘The genius of our people has the special characteristic that it requires an intellectual movement to prepare a reform, even in the commercial or industrial sphere’.) Quoted by H. Peyret, Les Chemins de fer en France et dans le monde.

  † Followers of Claude Henri de Saint-Simon, whose creed was the paramountcy of useful, productive labour, of which railways were the supreme servant. See section on the Pereires on page 96.

  II

  THE HOPES AND FEARS OF ALL

  THE YEARS

  Railways proved able to absorb and reflect the theories and fantasies of generations of writers. Novelists, poets, men of letters, recognised the incomparable opportunity they offered. As Robert Louis Stevenson rattled across the United States he noted that railways ‘brought together into one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social ranks’. They ‘offered to some great writer the busiest, the most extended, and the most varied subject for an enduring literary work. If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we require, what was Troy town to this? (The Amateur Emigrant).

  Writers naturally exploited railways for their own purposes, as backdrops, as symbols, as points of departure for their imaginings, revealing their own deeper selves in their attitudes. In later years Rupert Brooke was racialist, Frances Cornford superior (and was duly slapped down by G. K. Chesterton),* Hardy was melancholy, contemplative†, Jack Kerouac naturally focused on the railway bums. From the very beginning the balladeers seized on the numerous tales of heroism, romance and accident involved. Railways – and more especially stations – were the ideal setting for farewells and greetings, redolent of first ventures into new worlds, memorable punctuation marks in people’s lives.

  The railways exploded on the scene at a time when spoken and written English were both incomparably vivid, without any of the pomposities of the eighteenth or later nineteenth centuries. So any quotation, from a politician, a man about town or – as is shown by Fanny Kemble’s reaction – by a young actress, was expressed in irresistibly quotable language. Professional writers and lay observers alike illuminated many a railway scene, and contemporary accounts remain invaluable and colourful witnesses to the themes explored in this book, though some of the hopes and fears the railways evoked related specifically to the writer’s internal expe
riences, his psyche as much as his travels.

  The amateurs who transmuted their often extraordinary experiences into such memorable prose presented a considerable challenge to professional writers, even though the latter could interiorise the railway, exploit its symbolic or allegorical importance. Nevertheless, some writers, most obviously Rudyard Kipling, had the confidence to meet the ‘descriptive’ challenge from the amateurs head-on. Not for nothing had his earliest work appeared in a series designed to while away the hours spent on travelling on Indian railways.

  Rail travel itself was an unprecedented experience. It evoked the enchanting temptations offered by a new world, their trains’ destination. In Edna St Vincent Millay’s words:

  My heart is warm with the friends I make,

  And better friends I’ll not be knowing,

  Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take

  No matter where it’s going.

  Her yearnings were echoed a century later by Paul Theroux: ‘Ever since childhood when I lived within earshot of the Boston & Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.’1

  Sometimes the dream was more narrowly targeted. To the provincial they symbolised the metropolis at the other end of the line. Even in the 1950s William Whyte, a trainee cosmetic salesman stranded in the hills of Eastern Kentucky, could write how ‘often in the evening I would somehow find myself by the C & O tracks when the George Washington swept by, its steamy windows a reminder of civilisation left behind.’2

  The first generation of railway travellers all felt what Humphrey House calls ‘an early astonishment which we can never recapture’.3 The philosopher-naturalist Henry David Thoreau, while aghast at the effects on the nature he loved, was in awe of the challenge it presented to mere mortals. ‘When I hear the Iron Horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new mythology I don’t know) it seems as if the earth had sent a race now worthy to inhabit it.’ More simply, frightened negroes in the Southern states called trains ‘Hell in harness’.

  Once aboard the train, travellers found, often to their astonishment, that rail travel was much smoother than any means of transport involving a horse-drawn vehicle. ‘The animal advances not with a continued progressive motion, but with a sort of irregular hobbling, which raises and sinks its body at every alternate motion of the limbs,’ wrote one early observer.4 ‘With machinery this inconvenience is not felt; the locomotive engine rolls regularly and progressively along the smooth tracks of the way.’ ‘Mechanic power is uniform and regular,’ emphasised Thomas Gray, ‘whilst horse-power, as we all very well know, is quite the reverse.’ ‘People talk of the dangers of railways,’ wrote R. S. Surtees, ‘but all horse owners know that there was no little danger attendant on the coaches. If a man had a vicious animal he always sold it to a coach proprietor.’5

  Comfort was a relative term. Early trains were not only bumpy, noisy and uncomfortable, they also smelt strongly, not only from their human cargo but also because vegetable oil or animal fat was used as lubricating fluid until mineral oil was introduced in the third quarter of the century. Nevertheless coaching had been worse at least for those without romantic preconceptions. Samuel Smiles recalled how ‘to be perched for twenty hours, exposed to all weathers, on the outside of a coach, trying in vain to find a soft seat … was a miserable undertaking … Nor were the inside passengers more agreeably accommodated. To be closely packed up in a little, inconvenient straight-backed vehicle, where the cramped limbs could not be in the least extended, nor the wearied frame indulge in any change of posture, was felt by many to be a terrible thing.’6

  But, quite naturally, it was the speed which most immediately impressed the average observer. Charles Greville found ‘the velocity’ of rail travel delightful ‘and the continual bustle and animation of the changes and stoppages make the journey very entertaining … it certainly renders all other travelling irksome and tedious by comparison.’ The Reverend Sydney Smith waxed lyrical: ‘Before this invention man, richly endowed with many gifts of mind and body, was deficient in locomotive powers; he could walk four miles an hour while a wild Goose could fly eighty in the same time; I can run now much faster than a fox or an Hare and beat a Carrier pigeon or an eagle for a hundred miles.’7

  Smith and Surtees were both realists, men of the world, and therefore natural supporters of the railways. So was Balzac. Loving risk, he invested his own and his mistress’s money in the shares of the Compagnie du Nord; loving modernity, he berated the French for their tardiness in building railways; an impatient traveller, he bemoaned the problems created by the lack of connections when he travelled on the railways in Russia, and looked forward to the day when Europe would be covered with an iron web.

  Nevertheless for many British writers of the same generation travel by train provoked a sense of loss, primarily because it removed the excitements, the petty dramas, associated with horse-drawn travel. The stage coach represented the glamour of travel as perceived by their childish selves. The stage coach had been a short-lived phenomenon, coming into its full glory only in the 1820s and 1830s. In The Dickens World Humphrey House noted that:

  The boys of Dickens’s generation were coach-conscious as their predecessors had never been. Power over speed and efficiency of movement was then first becoming a focus of childish admiration: boys were ambitious to be coachmen, as later to be engine-drivers … A young man of 1836, whose earlier ambition had focused on the box seat of the Birmingham Mail, found it very difficult to transfer the thrill and glamour to the footplate of an engine on the London and Birmingham Railway … a whole generation, in which were many writers, caught by admiration of the coaches in their short-lived pride, was unable to work off in the boredom of adult experience the glamorous ambitions of boyhood … It is often said that Dickens never grew up: in this respect the course of history made it hard for him to do so.

  Dickens was not alone. In his autobiography, Anthony Trollope recalled that ‘A journey on the box of the mail was a great delight to me in those days – days somewhere in the third decade of the century; and faith! I believe would be still, if there were any mails available for the purpose.’ ‘We who have lived before railways were made,’ wrote Thackeray, ‘belong to another world’; while in France Alfred de Vigny and Théophile Gautier, of the same generation, experienced the same gut reactions – although Vigny did allow for the railways’ practical advantages.

  Their childhood love was inevitably veiled in a nostalgic mist, to the detriment of the railways’ reputation. The recorders remember the stagecoach as part of the excitement of youth, not as an inconvenient and relatively slow means of transport. Similarly, for my own generation the dirt and inconvenience of steam travel is veiled with a romantic patina.

  Because, as we see in Chapter III, railways were associated with democracy they naturally induced a new type of snobbery, one which was to be repeated in turn with every new form of transport. Each novelty has produced its own automatic glorification of an automatically romanticised past.* William T. Brigham, an early American traveller in Central America, showed all the symptoms. ‘When the northern railroad extends through Guatemala,’ he wrote, ‘and the Nicaraguan canal unites the Atlantic and the Pacific, the charm will be broken, the mulepath and the mozo de cargo [carrier of bundles] will be supplanted, and a journey across Central America become almost as dull as a journey from Chicago to Cheyenne.’*

  Previous travel methods had been organic, inextricably linked with nature, with the horses, with the country, with the coachmen. It was production on a small scale, ‘artisanal’ as the French would say. Rail travel was impersonal, its scale inevitably industrial, its instruments made of hard, unyielding iron, not sympathetic wood and leather. ‘Seated in the old mail-coach we needed no evidence out of ourselves to indicate the velocity’ wrote Thomas de Quincey, ‘we heard our speed, we saw it,
we felt it as a thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind insensate agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery eye-balls of the noblest among brutes, in his dilated nostril, spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.’8

  Rail travel, unlike any previous form of transport, but like all its successors, was mechanical, speedy, inhuman, alienating. You were distanced from reality, cut off as never before from the natural world. ‘The echoes in this place are very distinct,’ wrote one early traveller, ‘and whilst traversing its extent you seem shut out from all communication with the world.’ The traveller perceived the landscape through a filter provided by the machinery of the train itself as well as its rhythmic progress. ‘Looking out a train window in Asia’, wrote Paul Theroux, ‘is like watching an unedited travelogue without the obnoxious soundtrack.’ And yet, this apparently ‘inhuman’ method of transportation now appears human compared with travel by air.

  With alienation came dehumanisation. In the words of a recent observer:9

  Just as the path of travel was transformed from the road that fits itself to the contours of land to a railroad that flattens and subdues land to fit its own needs for regularity, the traveller is made over into a bulk of weight, a ‘parcel’ as many travellers confessed themselves to feel … mechanized by seating arrangements, and by new perceptual coercions (including new kinds of shock), routinized by schedules, by undeviating pathways, the railroad traveller underwent experiences analagous to military regimentation – not to say ‘nature’ transformed into ‘commodity’. He was converted from a private individual into one of a mass public – a mere consumer.