Fire and Steam (12 page)

The inaugural one-way fares between London and Birmingham were £1 10s (£1.50, or around £100 adjusted for inflation) in first class, and £1 (£67) in second. Dogs were an outrageous 10s, though you could put a two-wheel carriage on a wagon for a mere £1 17s (horses extra!), rather like the car sleeper services still widely used in Europe. The additional 10s for first class must have definitely been worth the money given the primitive conditions of second-class, which still had open wagons for a journey that was three times longer than that on the Liverpool & Manchester. These high fares suggest that the railway companies were still making no attempt to serve the working classes for whom a pound would easily represent a week's wages or more. They enabled the wealthier middle classes to live far away from their work and to flee the unpleasant centres of cities more easily, while not offering any such opportunity for the poor. However, as we see later, with the advent of cheap fares both for workers and leisure travellers, the railways did become a catalyst for wider social change and even some
rapprochement
between the classes.

Despite the high fares, the ride on these long journeys was not necessarily enjoyable. The author of an early guide to train travel, Francis Coghlan, may have been trying to be helpful in advising second class passengers where to sit in their ‘wagons', but after reading his advice they might well have decided to stick to the stagecoach or pay
the extra for first class where ‘all the seats [are] alike . . . comfortably fitted up': ‘Get as far from the engine as possible – for three reasons: first, should an explosion take place, you may happily get off with the loss of an arm or a leg' whereas nearer ‘you would probably be smashed to smithereens'. Secondly, he continues, ‘the vibration is very much diminished' and third, ‘always sit with your back towards the engine . . . to avoid being chilled by a cold current of air which passes through these open wagons and also saves you from being nearly blinded by the small cinders which escape through the funnel'.
⁷
Perhaps this explains why first-class carriages are always those furthest from the direction of travel at London termini.

Coghlan goes on to explain how once passengers were aboard their carriages, having been helped up by a ‘stone platform, protected from the weather by a light handsome shed', and the ticket offices were closed, the train was at last ready to depart. The porters and police then had to push the train, ‘which was attached to a thick rope worked by a [stationary] steam engine' for two hundred yards before the line would become taut and drag the train up the incline to Camden where it was attached to a locomotive. The slope is still there, of course, and was an operational hazard, frequently causing wheelslip to engines starting off from the platforms. I remember vividly as a child seeing the stuttering of the huge wheels on the massive Duchess locomotives before they could get a grip on wet rails, and wheelslip remains a problem even on today's railway.

The rather unwieldy process of using ropes, which continued until 1844 when locomotives were deemed to be sufficiently strong to climb the incline under their own steam, rather diminished the grandeur of Euston station. The station entrance was a Doric portico, a clear statement of the importance of the railway, and within a few years a great hall built in a classical style with a sweeping double flight of stairs leading to upstairs offices was added.
⁸
Euston would retain its status as the sole ‘gateway to the north' until the completion of the rival Great Northern in 1852 with its King's Cross terminus. With the opening of the Birmingham & Derby Junction Railway, which connected with the London & Birmingham at Rugby and then went on to join the North Midland Railway, both Stephenson
père
enterprises, passengers could
also reach various Midland towns and, indeed, travel all the way to Leeds from Euston by 1840. Within a decade of the completion of the two railways, they had merged – together with the successful Trent Valley railway which bypassed Birmingham (used today as the main route for trains between London and Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow) – to form what later became the biggest railway company and, for a time, the largest business concern in the world, the London & North Western Railway.

The third major Bill passed in the busy parliamentary period of the mid-1830s authorized another of Britain's major railways, the Great Western, which, right from the beginning, established a monopoly over a large swathe of the country. At last this was a railway with which the Stephensons had little connection and only because of an abortive attempt to run it into Euston. The moving spirit behind the railway was Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose grand name showed remarkable prescience on the part of his father, Marc, a French emigré and himself a notable engineer. Brunel vies with the younger Stephenson for the title of the greatest railway engineer and, apart from his achievements on the railway, he designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol, three large steamships and much else. Unlike his engineering contemporaries who tended to be self-taught and often rather eclectic in their backgrounds, Brunel had received a formal training in engineering as an apprentice, initially in France and then working on the first tunnel beneath the Thames, under the tutelage of his father who designed it. Brunel's self-confidence and drive would have been called arrogance in anyone less talented but his achievement in creating the Great Western railway, known fondly to its supporters as God's Wonderful Railway (its detractors later called it the ‘Great Way Round'), speaks for itself.

Brunel came early to the project. The idea of a railway between London and Bristol, at the time the nation's most important port, had been mooted as far back as 1824 but it was not until January 1833 that a group of Bristol businessmen formed a committee to take action on the project. The first idea had been to follow the route of the rather windy coach road (the present A4), but Brunel, who learnt of the scheme, rushed to Bristol to argue the case for a much more ambitious project. Indeed, Brunel was not going to have any old railway built by
the cheapest contractor to minimum standards. No, he was going to have the best railway, so perfect that rivals would never venture on to its territory through fear of being outshone by its excellence.

Sometimes pure chutzpah pays off and by a majority of just one the committee appointed Brunel as surveyor even though he had little experience on railways, having previously failed to obtain a similar post he had sought from the Newcastle & Carlisle Railway. The committee was rewarded with what one railway historian calls ‘a masterpiece of strategic planning . . . with easy gradients which would pass over a summit at Swindon half the height of that at Marlborough [on the coach road route]'.
⁹

There were the usual parliamentary struggles. While the landowners again extracted every penny they could, receiving £750,000 in compensation, the most fanciful objection expressed in the forty days of parliamentary hearings came from John Keate, the headmaster of Eton College. He suggested that London's riff-raff would travel to the town and ruin its college and, worse, that the scholars would be tempted to travel into the capital, where they would fall into ‘degrading dissipation'. For some reason, he was even worried that the railway would result in an ‘increase in floods' that would endanger the life of the boys. Such nonsense could easily be dismissed but Brunel's initial idea of having the terminus at Vauxhall Bridge fell foul of various landowners with parks on the fringes of London and the first Bill had to be dropped. It was replaced with a scheme that would have gone to Euston and was accepted by Parliament, but following a dispute over the gauge with Robert Stephenson, the eventual project with a grand terminus at Paddington received parliamentary assent. The railway was, indeed, ‘Wonderful'. Not only were there few gradients, but on the principle that expense should not be spared in seeking perfection, Brunel decorated stations, tunnel mouths and viaducts playfully with all kinds of mock castles, using an eclectic range of classical, Tudor and Jacobean styles. The two most difficult structures, the Maidenhead Bridge with its flat arches, at the time the widest in the world, and the 1.75-mile-long Box tunnel near Bath, were both great achievements in their own right.

There was more in this desire to create an elegant railway than just engineering showmanship. The railways were a tremendous imposition
on the British countryside, unprecedented in scale and extent, and they needed to blend into the environment. The railway pioneers like Brunel realized the importance of winning over the public and to have merely built structures such as bridges and viaducts in the cheapest and most shoddy way would certainly have alienated the more affluent and influential section of the population whose support they needed. Railway stations, too, were designed on a far grander scale than the size of their location might have required in order to appease and flatter local interests. With few exceptions, these railways enhanced the local landscape, rather than destroyed it, unlike the roads and airports of the twentieth century. As Michael Robbins comments, ‘the railway etches in fresh detail to the scene. It rarely jars and usually pleases.'
¹⁰
That is in no small measure due to its great early builders.

It is hardly surprising that Brunel's engineering brilliance has survived the passing of time and his designs have proved robust, but that does not mean he was always right. His decision to go for a different gauge from any other railway was to prove one of the great blunders of railway history. It was born of the same self-confidence that resulted in Brunel's masterpieces and since so many of his ideas proved to be successful, it was a brave man who stood up to him. Virtually all the railways authorized up to that point had been built to Stephenson's favoured 4ft 8½ins but to Brunel, ever the perfectionist, that was not good enough. He had once ridden on the Liverpool & Manchester and had found it wanting because he could not draw freehand circles and lines in his notebook due to the bumpy ride. He vowed to create a railway on which ‘we shall be able to take our coffee and write whilst going noiselessly and smoothly at 45 mph'.
¹¹
He rather forgot about the coffee bit, and train refreshment services would have to wait until long after his death – the first dining cars were introduced in 1879 – but he pressed ahead with his choice of gauge, which was to be 7ft,
¹²
half as wide again as Stephenson's ‘standard' gauge.

Brunel was also concerned with safety, having seen steam locomotives derail and concluded that their centre of gravity was far too high. To lower it meant putting the bottom of the boiler between the main frames, and consequently the wheels had to be further apart. Brunel did not underestimate the inconvenience of creating this new gauge but
was foolhardy enough to believe that his would prevail over the others and that the older railways would end up having to fall into line with the Great Western. He was to be proved wrong, at great cost to the company, as his decision not only increased the expense of building the railway but after he died resulted in the need for conversion initially to mixed, and later to standard, gauge.

The choice of gauge was no mere technical detail. It meant that no through trains would be able to proceed on to another company's tracks once the limits of GWR's own territory were reached, causing great inconvenience to passengers who were forced to swap trains. Brunel had rather airily told his directors that passengers would simply be able to walk from one train to the other while their luggage would be conveyed mechanically, though he omitted to outline the nature of the device to be used, which presumably was some notion of a primitive conveyor belt. In the event, nothing emerged and the resultant chaos with hordes of porters and passengers struggling to manhandle luggage from one end of the platform to the other at Gloucester were highlighted in a famous
Punch
cartoon.

At first, given the railway was largely self-contained, the Great Western's separate gauge did not create too many problems, but as various railways interwove its network, the situation became increasingly intolerable. Bizarrely, Brunel had not really taken advantage of the opportunities afforded by his wider gauge, which was supposed to allow a better quality of ride for his passengers: the carriages he ordered were barely an improvement on those of other railways. Brunel appeared to have misunderstood the key issue: it was not so much the distance between the wheels, but the overall width of the carriage, which in practice was not much greater on the Great Western because platforms and bridges had been built closer to the tracks than on other railways.

Parliament finally resolved the gauge issue in 1846 through a commission which decided, after hearing at great length evidence from proponents of both gauges, that all future railways should be 4ft 8½ins. Gradually the Great Western installed an extra rail to enable mixed gauge running and eventually converted fully to the standard gauge in May 1892 (see
Chapter 9
), marking the end of Brunel's failed experiment.

Brunel made another, less well-known mistake, but one that would also cause great stress to the railway's directors long after his death in 1859. Inevitably, during construction, costs soared: the original estimate had been £2.5m but running to Paddington, further into London, and building that superb terminal had added £1m. With other additional costs, notably difficulties with the Box tunnel, the total bill came to more than £6m. Consequently Brunel was under great financial pressure and during the construction of Swindon station and works, he agreed to a deal with the contractors, a pair of brothers called Rigby, that was to compromise the efficient running of the railway. The Rigbys agreed to build the station and the housing for the workers at their own expense, in return for the rents and a lease on the station refreshment rooms, with the obligation that Great Western stop all trains there for ten minutes for the next hundred years and refrain from offering alternative catering! There was the exceptional very fast train which only stopped for a minute, but mostly, for half a century, trains made unnecessarily lengthy stops at Swindon until in 1895 the company bought itself out of that disadvantageous contract.