Fire and Steam (31 page)

Although there was no attempt to reinstate the rather risky races, there were moves to reduce overall journey times. With corridor trains that had dining and toilet facilities now being widely used, there was a fashion among train companies to run lengthy non-stop services, the longest being the Great Western service between London and Plymouth, a distance of 225 miles. The Great Western, again, was the leading force behind this rush to speed, running several rapid services down to Bristol and beyond. In 1914, the fastest ran the 118 miles from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads in precisely two hours, an average of 59 mph.
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By the outbreak of the Great War, the fastest scheduled service was a late-evening train from Darlington to York, which took just forty-three minutes to travel forty-four miles, and consequently was a tad faster at 61.5 mph.
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There were several others around the network – from Scotland to the south-east – which averaged over 55 mph, a result of the energy which the train companies had devoted to improving their timings.

As we have seen, most major cities were connected to London by more than one route and competition was undoubtedly a spur to improved service. From December 1908, the London & North Western, in conjunction with the North London with which it had a close relationship, ran a service from Broad Street (the now demolished station next to Liverpool Street) non-stop to Birmingham in just two and a quarter hours. While the Great Western offered a train from Paddington that was fifteen minutes faster, the same time as the normal Euston service run by the London & North Western, the latter had the disincentive of an extra Underground or taxi ride for the busy City businessman who was just a short walk away from Broad Street station. Moreover, the ‘City to City' trains, as the Broad Street services were called, offered an unprecedented extra facility: a travelling typist, ensuring not a moment of the journey was wasted.

Luxury and speed were now being sold even on the previously laggardly south coast routes too. The London, Brighton & South Coast Railway advertised its Brighton
Southern Belle
service with seven smart Pullman cars (four ‘parlour', one ‘buffet and smoking', and two ‘smoking'), ‘exquisitely upholstered, lighted by electricity, comfortably warmed and ventilated and fitted with all the latest
improvements'. The journey would take an hour (little more than today's usual timing, including two stops, of fifty-one minutes) and the company also offered ‘Pullman Drawing Room Cars' for its services between the capital and Eastbourne (including an all-Pullman train on Sundays), as well as a variety of routes to the Continent on its numerous ships. There was even a service operated jointly with the London & North Western on the cheerfully named
Sunny South Special
between Liverpool and Hastings, leaving both termini at 11 a.m. daily, and several others that connected south coast resorts with their huge potential market in the north.

Travelling on the railway for the holidays on these trains was still a source of awe and wonder for many people, particularly children. Philip Unwin
¹⁰
describes starting a journey at Surbiton to board the ‘West of England Express', which was really nothing more than a semifast corridor train to Exeter and Plymouth that was ‘pick-up only'.
¹¹
There was a porter who would ‘transport the mountain of luggage, each with its tie-on label' to the station. He was a ‘tough individual who led a slightly shadowy existence in a corner of the station yard – half porter and half carter; he had no uniform but wore a brass armlet fixed so tight to his sleeve that it seemed almost to be screwed to his arm . . . [and had] that smell of stale sweat almost inevitable for those who did hard physical work in days before their houses had bathrooms'. There was a fantastic array of baggage – trunks, suitcases, and ‘Gladstone bags full of bathing dresses and beach clothes' – which was quite normal even though the Unwin family was by no means rich. The ticket collector was in his best uniform ‘of double-breasted frock and braided peaked cap' and the station-master himself would venture out on the platform to ‘see these important trains away and make sure that a large party like ours found its ENGAGED carriage safely'. The compartment would be ‘ceremoniously unlocked by the stationmaster and the family piled in, each child clutching a small piece of hand luggage while their father took a careful look down the platform to make sure that the pre-tipped porter was stowing all the luggage in the guard's van'.

For most rail companies, profit was most likely to be earned through these long-distance services and with the main lines now all built, the
emphasis was on speeding up services by cutting out diversions created by the Victorians in their need for economy. Cut-offs, the precursor of bypasses, were being developed on various parts of the network to reduce journey times. On the Great Western, for example, once the Severn tunnel opened in 1886 Bristol became a bottleneck for services to Cardiff and Swansea and the alternative via Gloucester was certainly the ‘Great Way Round'. The Great Western, therefore, built a forty-mile route through what is now called Bristol Parkway, which opened in 1901, shaving half an hour off the journey between the English and Welsh capitals and on a route twenty-five miles shorter than the Gloucester one. The local aristocrat, the Duke of Beaufort, showed that
noblesse oblige
survived into the twentieth century by extracting his ha'p'orth for allowing the line to cross his estate; he insisted that he had the right to stop any train at Badminton, his own ducal station, a concession that survived until its closure in 1968. Another Great Western shortcut was the continuation of the Berks & Hants line via Castle Cary, providing a much more direct route to the West Country, also avoiding Bristol, this time to the south.

Cooperation between companies resulted in other new routes and the operation of joint lines to reduce distances on longer journeys. In 1906, the Great Central, which under the management of Sam Fay quickly established itself as a deal-maker in its desperate attempts to generate traffic on its somewhat superfluous railway, joined with the Great Western to build a nineteen-mile line between Northolt in Middlesex and High Wycombe. This new line reduced the distance for the Great Western's trains to Birmingham to two miles fewer than the London & North Western's West Coast route, while providing the Great Central with a new market to tap in outer suburbia.

In the north, a second bridge was built over the Tyne at Newcastle to relieve congestion on the old Stephenson one which had only three tracks. In nearby Sunderland, another massive new bridge, 330 feet in a single span, a combined railway and road bridge on two decks, opened in 1910, a cooperative effort between the local council and the North Eastern railway. South of London, even the merger of the London, Chatham & Dover and the South Eastern bore fruit with a link between the two through the Bickley loop and, later, a junction from
Chislehurst to the Chatham main line that greatly improved services in those areas.

For the suburbs, though, electrification was the key, but the nascent technology was slow to be adopted. Apart from tramways, the earliest electrified railway in Britain was the world's first deep tube line, the City and South London Railway, which opened in 1890. Unable to use steam engines, given the depth and small diameter of the tunnels, it had originally been designed to be run with cables but that proved impractical. The Liverpool Overhead railway of 1893 was next and another deep tube line, the Waterloo & City, opened in 1898. However, it was not until the early years of the new century that the growth of electrified lines gathered pace with the conversion of the District and Metropolitan lines on the London Underground and of several heavily used suburban lines on the Lancashire & Yorkshire, and the North Eastern, which used different and incompatible systems.
¹²
The London, Brighton & South Coast realized that electrification for commuter services offered far more flexibility with quicker turn-around times as well as cleaner trains for its affluent travellers, and opened its south London line, a loop between Victoria and London Bridge via Brixton and Peckham, in late 1909. The Brighton Railway chose overhead electrification but its neighbours, the London & South Western and the South Eastern, both plumped for the cheaper third rail, which then was universally used on what became the Southern Railway after the war. Despite the war, the Brighton Railway had converted all its suburban lines by 1925, at which time several other suburban railways, such as the North London Railway's line between Broad Street and Richmond, and the London & North Western's London to Watford service, had followed suit.

While none of this work was on the scale of the great railway construction of the previous century, it demonstrated that the railway in the Edwardian years was still dynamic, expanding and improving all the time. There was a sense of pride among the big companies – and just a hint of smugness which perhaps prevented them doing enough in the face of the competition from motor vehicles. Their profits were being squeezed by the need to make improvements but nevertheless their businesses were steady and mature, mostly able to compensate their
shareholders adequately, if not richly. Even real financial basket cases, such as the Hull & Barnsley, were profitable in the early years of the twentieth century.

Competition was fierce and for the first time companies began to sell themselves through publicity and public relations. Until the last decade of the nineteenth century, the railways had done little to sell their wares, relying instead on their monopoly position. There was, of course, much free advertising space at stations: bills were posted and checked by ‘bill inspectors', whose job consisted solely of touring around the company's network to ensure that the bills had been properly fixed. Companies advertised extensively in newspapers, listing timetables and fares for regular services as well as announcing excursions and cheap trips, and in the 1870s the Great Western, something of a pioneer in this respect, issued comprehensive summer timetables for ‘Tourist Arrangements', catering for those seeking to enjoy ‘picnic or pleasure parties'.
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However, it was only in the 1890s that pictorial posters and illustrated guides for holiday accommodation became more widespread and the Great Western, serving the country's biggest tourist area, began producing summer timetables listing a few ‘principal places of attraction'.

By the turn of the century, the companies began more actively to rid themselves of the monopolist image that was still the dominant perception of the public. Sam Fay at the Great Central even set up a publicity department with its own manager in 1902 in recognition of its need to market itself. Trainspotting would have to wait another generation before becoming the number one pastime of schoolboys, but already the rail companies were beginning to exploit the affection of the public for trains and, particularly, for steam engines. The London & North Western produced millions of postcards, sold through vending machines, invariably showing trains passing through picturesque stretches of track.

The Great Western, which continued to be the most innovative of the companies in respect of publicity, printed over 100,000 copies of
Holiday Haunts,
a guide to suggested destinations reached easily by rail. More weighty travel books were produced by the company too. The first was a quite lavish 152-page book,
The Cornish Riviera,
published in 1904, costing just 3d, and it set a standard which the company maintained until
nationalization, far outstripping the imitations produced by its rivals. During this period, too, the greatest master of publicity, Frank Pick, was beginning his work at the London Underground, forging an image for that institution which is still evocative today. The famous roundel was a very early example of a logo and the remarkable series of posters advertising the Underground became renowned, transcending the barrier between advertising and art. The Great Eastern produced strange maps which suggested that the straightest way between London and York was via its station at Liverpool Street, rather than the Great Northern's more direct route from King's Cross. The London & South Western also pretended its links between London and Paris were the shortest, compared with those of the Chatham & South Eastern Railway that could genuinely boast the lowest mileage for the journey.

Freight services were also improving and benefited from much-needed modernization. Passenger trains had had priority on the tracks and the increase in their number resulted in freight trains, particularly those loaded with coal, simply getting lost in the system as they waited for the go-ahead to proceed on their journey. The Midland, in particular, carried numerous coal trains that were invariably held up for days in sidings and yards. The fault was the system of regulation – whereby each train was handed on from one signal box to another – and freight trains were often left in sidings, watching passenger services whizz by, for hours on end. The solution to that problem was another recent invention, the telephone. Every morning the local controller would phone all his district managers to find out about any delays and they in turn would contact signalmen up and down the line. Signalmen were then required to phone their controllers, alerting them precisely when each train left their section. This simple communication system ensured that when bottlenecks occurred, they were quickly discovered and extra resources devoted to unblocking them. It might sound basic but the system developed by the Midland in 1907 proved so successful that it was adopted by all railways following the grouping of 1923.

Some freight, however, did take priority – and with good reason. The Great Central exploited its Lincolnshire lines to create a massive one hundred acres of docks around Grimsby and Immingham, and the railway's fast fish services were widely acclaimed. Presumably, fear of
the smell would have ensured that the cargo reached its destination promptly overnight.