Fire and Steam (29 page)

But there was a negative legacy, too. The races had led to renewed concerns about safety: speed was still a relatively new concept as, for the first half-century of their history, the railways had concentrated more on expansion. There was no doubt that during such races, drivers, excited by being allowed to open up their regulators, adopted a gungho spirit that may well have resulted in unnecessary risks being taken, particularly given that they were at the controls of massive machines which did not have speedometers. Certainly, the drivers were taking curves at a far greater speed than that recommended by the permanent way (track) engineers. Although no accidents occurred during the races, a crash a year later in Preston on 15 August at the height of the holiday season revived the concerns of the doomsayers. In fact this derailment of the night train heading for Scotland was caused by the inexperience of the drivers on the London & North Western train. Travelling northbound through Preston involved negotiating a curve with a nominal restriction of 10 mph, but most trains regularly went round it at double that speed. Neither of the enginemen had driven a train that was scheduled to go through the station without stopping, and must have been conscious that keeping good time in the holiday season was
important. However, that should not have excused their attempt to speed through the town at 45 mph, which inevitably led to disaster when the leading engine jumped the rails. Although the accident claimed the life of only one of the sixteen passengers on board, according to O. S. Nock ‘this was the case of an accident where the outcome was out of all proportion to the casualty list. Few accidents in British railway history have had a more profound effect on both public and railway opinion. [It] resulted in express running times between London and Scotland being slowed down and remaining stagnant for more than 35 years'.
¹⁵

Not all companies were so timid. The Great Western, for example, retained a focus on reducing journey times and races broke out on other lines such as those between London and Manchester. There were even a couple of sections of four-track railway where different companies raced directly against each other, notably from York south to Church Fenton where the tracks of the North Eastern and the Lancashire & Yorkshire ran side by side for eleven miles. Southbound trains belonging to both railways left York at 2.35 p.m. every day and normally the North Eastern, which ran lighter trains, beat off its rival.

While on the Scottish routes a tacit agreement between the companies spelt the end of the races, a decade later further competitiveness arose between two rival railways for passengers arriving at Plymouth from the United States. Plymouth was the best disembarkation point for passengers coming across the Atlantic as they could save a day, by not remaining on the boat all the way to Southampton. The rail companies were eager to serve this market, which included plenty of affluent first-class passengers, and competition to be the fastest service to London arose in the early 1900s between the Great Western and the London & South Western.

Focusing on speed was a relatively new development for the Great Western, which, since a series of amalgamations in the 1860s, had become the railway with the greatest route mileage. Until Daniel Gooch, the great locomotive engineer and latterly chairman of the Great Western, died, still in post, in 1889, the railway had long been a ‘majestically slow, stately, superbly well-engineered railway'.
¹⁶
Its biggest challenge had been converting its broad gauge lines to the
standard ones, a process that had started as far back as 1868. The task was finally completed in a spectacular weekend in May 1892 when all the 213 miles west of Exeter were converted, an almost unimaginable achievement of project management and coordination. To undertake this enormous task, 3,400 men were drafted in from around the country, divided up into gangs of twenty, each of which was allocated about a mile of track to convert. While straight sections of track were relatively easy, on curved sections the rails had to be shortened and every set of points presented particular difficulties.
¹⁷
In 1886, the Great Western had also completed one of the great engineering feats of railway history by building the 4.4-mile Severn tunnel, the longest on the British railway network and wettest.
¹⁸
It took thirteen years to finish as the site was dogged by flooding which required constant pumping operations (and still does today).

After the death of Gooch, the Great Western began to take an interest in modernizing and speeding up its services. In March 1892 the railway launched what Adrian Vaughan has called the first ‘modern express train in Britain'
¹⁹
on its Paddington–Birkenhead route, offering the kind of comforts that were soon to be taken for granted. The train accommodated first-, second- and third-class passengers in carriages that were heated by steam through radiators under the seats and had corridors with connecting gangways that would enable restaurant cars (which Great Western introduced four years later) to be added. The clerestory roofs allowed for extra height and light and the coaches were panelled with walnut and satinwood that would not have been out of place in a gentleman's club. There was an electrical bell-push to ‘summon' the guard and a novel form of emergency cord. Although emergency cords for passengers' use had been fitted on some services as early as the 1850s, the Great Western's new trains adopted a much more sophisticated system that allowed passengers to alert the driver who would stop the train as soon as practicable.

Even after the Preston accident, the caution being exercised by the West and East Coast railways found no echo at the Great Western. Quite the contrary. With the broad gauge gone, the Great Western managers seemed eager to show that they could live up to the railway's nickname – ‘God's Wonderful Railway' – rather than the name that was being used
in the popular press, ‘Great Way Round'. Locomotive design was improving rapidly, and trains became heavier. The
City of Truro,
one of the Great Western's new types of locomotive designed by the greatest traction engineer of his time, George Churchward, became the first to achieve the magical three figures when it was allegedly timed at just over 102 mph on a mail train down to Plymouth one evening in May 1904.
²⁰

The railways serving the country south of London were very different. Here there was, as
The Times
called it, a ‘crawl to the south'
²¹
rather than a race to the north. The slowness of travel to the Kent Channel ports has already been mentioned in
Chapter 7
but the Brighton line was also famous – or rather infamous – for delays and tediously long journeys. The town was served by two railways, the South Eastern and the London, Brighton & South Coast, but a shared section of track between Coulsdon and Redhill gave them the opportunity to blame each other for delays. Delays on the Brighton line had turned into a national joke, becoming the butt of music-hall routines and regular comments in
The Times:
‘Very bad they both are, this at least the most severe critic must admit, difficult as he would find it . . . to say with certainty which of the two has the better right to call itself absolutely the worst line in the country.'
²²
Spurred on by this constant criticism, a new six-mile section of line opened in 1900, bypassing Redhill and leading to much better service patterns. The joke was over, and even the old South Eastern and London & Chatham, which had merged, were now offering a better service, blending their rival lines into a homogenous network that catered for the burgeoning London commuter network. Travel did remain slow, however, on many branch lines, where it seemed in keeping with the cadence of life. David St John Thomas, who wrote much on rural routes, reckoned that the slowest service was from Bournemouth to Bath through the Mendips on the Somerset & Dorset joint main line, which took over four hours to cover just seventy-one miles, gruesomely slow progress.

The London & South Western always had a better reputation than its southern neighbours, offering efficient and frequent services from its ‘untidy and confused collection of platforms, passages, stairways, cab yards and offices'
²³
at Waterloo to Southampton and Bournemouth that did much to stimulate growth in those towns. The company may have
lacked the charisma of the East and West Coast companies but it was a good solid railway serving a variety of useful markets ranging from soldiers stationed at Aldershot to holidaymakers heading for the Isle of Wight, and it had expanded by buying Southampton Docks and running ferry services to France and the Channel Islands. However, the staff of the London & South Western won no prizes for politeness, according to its passengers; railway historian Hamilton Ellis reckoned that South Western was one of the lines ‘which had a bad reputation for uncivil behaviour by officials' but then again, while the Great Western's men were more pleasant, ‘a traveller could spend much time waiting at Great Western stations'.
²⁴

It was the Great Western's ambition to do away with its fusty image and establish itself as Britain's premier railway that led it into a fully fledged battle with the London & South Western. While the Great Western went through Bristol and Newton Abbot, the London & South Western's competing route to Plymouth was over the West Country moorland, running on the same tracks as the Great Western for just a couple of miles outside Exeter and then on a more southerly route through Salisbury.

The London & South Western, which had traditionally carried most of the Atlantic passengers from Plymouth, as well, of course, as all those from Southampton, could not resist entering the fray when the Great Western, which already transported the mail, threw down a challenge by improving its times to London. O. S. Nock, that illustrious chronicler of accidents and much else on the railway, is in no doubt that the race for the lucrative Atlantic passengers led to corners being cut: ‘In the heat of the competition . . . considerations of safety gradually seemed to recede and there is no doubt that in the running of some of the rival trains . . . serious risks were taken on the curves.'
²⁵
The accident, on the curve beyond Salisbury, bore uncanny similarities to the one at Preston: disaster struck at a station which was being run through at speed by a driver accustomed to stopping there. Like the Scottish sleepers, these special boat trains were exceptional and not run to a normal schedule. Once it was known that a liner was to arrive at Plymouth, a train was despatched as soon as possible, whatever the time of day, and it was a point of honour to run these trains at fast speeds. Special sleeping cars were laid on if the journey was to be overnight.

To shorten journey times, the London & South Western ran non-stop from Plymouth, apart from an engine change at Templecombe, about halfway through the trip, which meant running fast through Salisbury where there was a sharp curve with a speed restriction of 30 mph. A special boat service had left Plymouth just before midnight on 30 June 1906 but had been running behind schedule after the Templecombe engine change. By the time it reached Salisbury, however, the train had picked up speed and – disastrously – attempted to go through the town at 70 mph, more than twice the permitted level. The engine toppled over, hit a milk train on the adjacent track and the carriages were wrecked so comprehensively that twenty-four out of the forty-three passengers on board were killed. More care was taken with the boat trains thereafter but it was not until 1910 that a formal agreement was reached between the two railways, ending their battle.

As with the Preston accident, the Salisbury disaster had a powerful effect on public opinion and ‘any speeding on the railways was for a time looked upon with the gravest apprehension'
²⁶
irrespective of whether the conditions were risky or perfect for fast running. The public's fears were exacerbated by a further totally unexplained crash at Grantham just three months later, when another night sleeper, due to stop at the station, ran through at 45 mph and was derailed at points that had been set for a goods train to go to Nottingham. Here, too, the effect was disastrous with a fire compounding the damage, but as both the driver and the apprentice acting as fireman were killed, the real reason why the train missed the stop was never ascertained.

Nevertheless, despite these concerns about safety, the railways were at the height of their pomp in the Edwardian period, still unchallenged by the motor car or even buses: at the outbreak of the First World War, there were only 39,000 motor buses and taxis in the whole of Great Britain, and just 64,000 lorries. The railway companies may have fooled themselves that these new-fangled vehicles would go the way of the steam road carriages mentioned in the Introduction. They were wrong but nevertheless they continued to enjoy a period of monopoly and dominance for a few more years.

TEN

THE ONLY WAY TO GET THERE

All the significant lines on the railway, and indeed most of the insignificant ones, had been completed by the start of the twentieth century. The last major new line to be built was the Great Central, opened in 1899 and often portrayed as a late-Victorian folly.

The Great Central was the brainchild of Sir Edward Watkin, who pops up in this story in various guises, not only a genuine entrepreneur but also the best-known railway director who was rarely out of the newspapers because of his penchant for courting controversy. Watkin, like George Hudson, was a flawed character, described as a ‘megalomaniac and a gambler' by Jack Simmons
¹
but a contemporary writer, John Pendleton, suggests rather more kindly that Watkin was ‘one of the busiest and most versatile of men'.
²
He not only wrote a biography of a renowned Manchester alderman but was busy discovering coalfields, buying Snowdon, attempting, unsuccessfully, to build a rival to the Eiffel Tower at Wembley (see
Chapter 7
; it reached 155 feet, the first platform, before being abandoned) and planning the construction of a Channel Tunnel.