The Landmark Library is a record of the achievements of humankind from the late Stone Age to the present day. Each volume in the series is devoted to a crucial theme in the history of civilization, and offers a concise and authoritative text accompanied by a generous complement of images. Contributing authors to The Landmark Library are chosen for their ability to combine scholarship with a flair for communicating their specialist knowledge to a wider, non-specialist readership.

Frontispiece

Hal Morey, Grand Central Station, c.1929

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Front cover image: The Gare Saint-Lazare: Arrival of a Train, 1877 / Fogg Art Museum, Harvard Art Museums, USA / Bequest from the Collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class 1906 / Bridgeman Images

Homage to A.M. Cassandre’s Étoile du Nord

Why Railways?

No one person invented the railways. It was a joint effort by many people, most of whom are long forgotten and consequently nameless, as it took centuries for the various components that make up a railway system to be developed and brought into use. It was only when all these various inventions could be brought together that the age of the iron road could begin.

Leaving aside the wheel, whose origins stretch back as far as 4,500 BC, and the chariot, which probably first appeared around 2,000 BC, there were three key developments: the concept of making tracks to bear a carriage’s wheels in order to reduce resistance, the invention of steam engines, and then, the Eureka moment, combining the two.

Putting down wooden planks to ease the progress of carts or wagons was a practice that stretched back to long before the birth of Christ. It has been suggested that it was used by the ancient Greeks to drag boats across the isthmus at Corinth (where the canal was not hewn out of the rock until the end of the nineteenth century). A stained glass window in the Minster of Freiburg im Breisgau in southwestern Germany, dating back to 1350, depicts wagons that appear to be running on rails. There is also evidence that crude tracks were used to haul wagons up the steep slopes of Hohensalzburg Fortress in the Austrian city of Salzburg in the early sixteenth century.

In England, during the first decade of the seventeenth century, a mining engineer called Huntingdon Beaumont – a name that seems to come straight out of a Jane Austen novel – went much further by laying 2 miles (3.2 km) of track linking a pit belonging to Sir Francis Willoughby in Nottinghamshire to the River Trent. That was to be the pattern for the vast majority of what came to be known as ‘wagonways’, whose principal purpose was to take coal, and sometimes other minerals, from pits to the nearest river or, later, to canals, and thence to the coast, from where the cargo could be taken long distances by sea. Transport was the main determinant of the price of coal and reducing its cost was therefore the key stimulus behind the development of these wagonways and, later, the early railways.

It was not in England’s East Midlands, however, but in the northeast, with its vast number of pits, that these wagonways spread rapidly from around the mid-seventeenth century. The wagons were, of course, pushed or pulled on the tracks by men or horses and sometimes simply by gravity if there were an incline for them to roll down. This was not always safe. Indeed, what could be called the first railway fatality occurred in 1650 when two boys were, according to a contemporary report, ‘slain with a wagon’ on a wooden wagonway at Whickham in County Durham.

These early ‘railways’ were not cheap to build and one report suggests a cost of £785 per mile for a track laid in 1726. While comparisons with today’s money are tendentious, a reasonable estimate would be around £1m a mile in today’s money, which means it was a considerable amount for a mine owner. However, the tracks could increase the productivity of the wagon drivers fivefold, as well as making the transport less dependent on the weather. (Rain rapidly turned the dirt roads of the time into quagmires.) By greatly reducing the cost of producing coal, the tracks ensured that mines became more profitable. By the end of the seventeenth century, they were so widespread in the northeast that they were known as ‘Newcastle Roads’, but later the term ‘tramway’ became commonplace.

Maintenance of the tracks was also a considerable expense. The wood on which the wheels travelled invariably wore out within a couple of years and this quickly led to iron being used for the rails, initially as an overlay on the wood, but by the second half of the seventeenth century, the idea of rails made entirely of iron had been mooted. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was an extensive network of tramways, some of which were interconnected as the owners of the pits formed consortiums to merge lines. On occasion, however, rivalries led owners to ban their neighbours from crossing their land or to charge exorbitant ‘wayleaves’ for permission to do so.

Conservative estimates of the extent of these wagonways nationally put it at 133 miles (214 km) by 1750 and just under 300 miles (483 km) by the end of the century. Their growth thereafter was rapid, Tyneside alone boasting 225 miles (362 km) by 1820. These early nineteenth-century tracks were crude and lightly constructed. Most of them used flanged tracks which had a lip to prevent derailments and consequently enabled ordinary wagons with the right axle width to use them without adaptation. Later, as more sophisticated wagons were developed for use solely on rails, the flange was shifted from rail to wheel, where it remains to this day.

Steam engines for use on the tracks were also developed over a long period of time. As with tracks and wheels, the origins of steam power stretch back to antiquity. The Roman writer and civil engineer Vitruvius, writing in the first century BC, mentions a device called an aeolipile, comprising a ball spun by steam jets. While this was a bit of nonsense with no constructive purpose, it was the first recorded attempt to harness steam power. Various patents for steam power were taken out during the seventeenth century in Europe and Arabia but the first prototype of what became a steam engine was developed in 1663 by Edward, Marquis of Worcester, who produced a sort of pump that used a cooling system to create the vacuum that is the basis of steam power. A Frenchman, Thomas Savery, produced a similar device but the real breakthrough was made by Thomas Newcomen, an ironmaster from Devon, who around 1705 built the first device using a piston inside a cylinder, the key to all future steam engines. Making use of a recently invented, improved version of smelting iron, he built machines that were able to pump water from mines. His invention helped to keep the tin and copper ore industry viable as his pumps were able to draw water from mines that could no longer be worked because of flooding, and put them back into production. The installation of his pumps quickly spread and by 1733, when his patent expired, there were more than fifty, and possibly 100, in operation.

The other great innovator was James Watt, who, during the final third of the eighteenth century, made a series of refinements to Newcomen’s engines, greatly enhancing their efficiency, and adapting them for a wide variety of uses. Boulton & Watt, the business he created in 1775 with Matthew Boulton, a manufacturer from Birmingham, became the world’s leading builder of steam engines. Thanks to a series of patents, the company gained a monopoly on all steam engine development to the end of the century. The steam age was born and Watt was undoubtedly its midwife. The scale of the Industrial Revolution he helped trigger can be gauged by the fact that there were 30,000 steam-powered looms in Manchester alone in the mid-1820s when plans for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the first to rely entirely on steam power, were first set out.

Boulton & Watt had provided the engine for the first successful steam-powered boat, the Charlotte Dundas, but combining steam power with wheels to produce locomotives was a far trickier task because of the heavy weight of the equipment needed to produce and make use of the steam. In the final third of the eighteenth century, there had been various attempts to create a self-propelled wheeled vehicle powered by steam engine, starting with Nicholas Cugnot’s fardier à vapeur, which made its inaugural and only run in Paris in 1769. Unfortunately, it hit a wall and overturned and was consequently declared a danger publique, but it still gets fond mentions in motor-car histories as the first powered and wheeled device to operate on a road.

While other attempts were made to run steam engines on roads, most of them failed to get off the drawing board and there are few challenges to the claim that Richard Trevithick, a Cornishman, was the ‘father’ of the railway steam locomotive. His ground-breaking innovation was to use high-pressure steam that gave a better power-to-weight ratio than the low pressure that was the basis of the Boulton & Watt engines. In 1801 his road carriage, nicknamed the Puffing Devil, was able to travel a short distance under its own steam, but Trevithick had failed to devise a proper steering mechanism and the vehicle plunged into a ditch. Worse, Trevithick and his friends, having decided to drown their sorrows in a local hostelry, forgot to douse the fire under the boiler, which promptly exploded. Undeterred, Trevithick built an improved engine and sensibly put it on rails, thereby getting round the problem of steering. The use of iron also enabled a significant improvement in rail technology and in 1803 Trevithick’s engine hauled a set of wagons weighing 9 tons at an impressive 5 mph (8 km/h) at Pen-y-Darren ironworks in south Wales. While this is reckoned to be a world first in terms of steam engine haulage, the weight was still too great and the locomotive was soon converted to a stationary engine which used cables to haul the wagons.

Richard Trevithick’s ‘portable’ steam engine Catch Me Who Can ran on a circular track near the present site of Euston station for several weeks in the summer of 1808 carrying passengers who had to buy a ticket like the one shown here.

UIG / IMechE / akg-images

It was another five years before Trevithick produced his final and most famous effort, the locomotive playfully called Catch Me Who Can, which he demonstrated on a circular track in Bloomsbury just south of the present location of Euston station in London. It was announced with a fanfare and lots of hype, and Trevithick promised odds of 10,000 to one if ‘any mare, horse or gelding’ could outpace his engine. The train and tracks were presented to the public in the summer of 1808 as Trevithick’s ‘Steam Circus’ and were hidden behind a high fence, so the curious had to fork out a couple of pennies even to get a glimpse of the new-fangled device. The braver ones who dared to ride on the train, which reached speeds of up to 15 mph (24 km/h) on a good day, had to pay another shilling (5p, equivalent to around £5 today). The venture lasted for a couple of months but interest had already started to wane even before the line’s closure after the rails – yet again – proved insufficiently strong to support the locomotive, leading to a break and a derailment. As for Trevithick’s challenge to quadrupeds, no race between horse and engine was ever run, so the inventor did not have to pay out. Trevithick went bankrupt the following year nonetheless, and left England to seek his fortune in distant Peru as a mining consultant. He returned but died in 1833, broke and long forgotten.

Trevithick’s legacy, though, was crucial. Others, notably George Stephenson, would pick up the baton. While no innovator himself, Stephenson was adept at improving and adapting other people’s inventions, a talent that has earned him, slightly erroneously, the reputation of being ‘father of the railways’. Born in 1781 in Wylam, 8 miles (13 km) west of Newcastle, in a house that directly abutted the local mine’s wagonway, Stephenson started life as a brakesman in that colliery, a duty which required overseeing the pump and winding wheel mechanism for hauling the coal up from the pit. In his spare time, he would work at ways of improving the various machines that were being introduced to facilitate the extraction of coal. Stephenson developed a reputation as a repairman, capable of bringing broken-down machinery back to life, and his interest soon turned to steam locomotives. He went to see the operation of the Leeds & Middleton Colliery line, a wagonway that had first operated in 1758 and which, in 1812, had just become the first railway to use steam locomotion commercially.

Its locomotive, designed at the instigation of John Blenkinsop, the Middleton colliery manager, and based on Trevithick’s Catch Me Who Can, was revolutionary in two other ways: it used a rack-and-pinion system to cope with the steep incline; and rather than having only a single cylinder – as had been the case with all previous engines – its engine had two cylinders, which provided a far more balanced thrust. Stephenson was greatly impressed and within a couple of years had produced his first engine, Blücher, named after the Prussian general who had led the army fighting alongside the British at Waterloo, for use at the Killingworth colliery in Durham where he had been appointed engine-wright. The tracks from the mine involved a steep incline but Stephenson’s engine successfully hauled eight loaded coal wagons weighing 30 tons at a speed of 4 miles (6.4 km) an hour. He went on to develop several more locomotives for Killingworth, and subsequently for the nearby Hetton colliery line near Sunderland.

Several other pioneers were active in producing locomotives at this time, but some colliery owners and other promoters of railway lines continued to believe that the tried and tested method of using horses to haul wagons was the cheapest and most efficient. Stephenson, however, remained adamant that they were wrong and never deviated from his conviction that steam locomotives, and not horse power, represented the future for railways. But all these early locomotives remained primitive, frequently breaking down, putting almost unsustainably heavy loads on the tracks, and losing steam through every join. Nevertheless, the loads they carried were increasing rapidly, transforming the economics of both the coal and transport industries. In 1822 Stephenson completed an 8-mile (12.9-km) line linking the Hetton mine with the River Wear and his ‘iron horses’ were used on the flat sections where they were able to haul a remarkable load of 64 tons.

By the mid-1820s both locomotives and railway tracks were beginning to be a proven technology and the idea that the development of the railways could have a major impact on society was beginning to be understood. In one respect, the railways were lucky, in that other potential technologies, which might have made alternative methods of transport more efficient, had either not been developed yet or were found wanting. There is quite a long catalogue here. First, the tarmac surface which is now universal even on lightly used roads was only just emerging. Roads had begun to be upgraded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by pioneers such as Thomas Telford and, particularly, John McAdam, who developed the concept of binding small pebbles with stone dust to create a smooth surface. Thanks to McAdam’s techniques and the transfer of responsibility for maintenance from local parishes to the Turnpike trusts, which had been set up by Parliament to collect tolls to finance the upkeep of the principal roads in Britain, many main roads were improved radically. Journeys by stagecoach, the only available form of long-distance travel, became faster and smoother. Nevertheless, the surface of the roads still cracked in severe weather conditions and ruts and potholes invariably slowed down the traffic. Average speeds were 12 mph (19.3 km/h) at best: the fastest stagecoach service of the time, the London–Shrewsbury ‘Wonder’, in 1835 boasted of a service that covered the 153-mile (246.2-km) journey in thirteen hours. As Stuart Hylton, the author of a history of the early railways, remarks, this was ‘scarcely better than the record for the distance travelled overland in a single day by the Roman Emperor Tiberius’: he had covered 200 miles (322 km) using relays of horses and chariots.1

Away from the main roads, at the time the first railways were being developed and, indeed, throughout much of the nineteenth century, the condition of the vast majority of roads remained atrocious, little more than rutted paths that could barely take the weight of a coach and horses. They were certainly not up to coping with a heavy steam engine, although this did not deter some brave inventors from trying out the idea of running locomotives on them. They were hampered, however, by legislation which greatly constrained road use. The turnpike owners – rightly wary of the damage that such vehicles might do – imposed prohibitive tolls, sometimes up to fifteen times that for a horse and cart. Then, just as the technology was improving and the roads becoming more stable, making the concept feasible, in 1865 the government passed the Locomotive Act, known popularly as the Red Flag Act, which limited speeds to 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in rural areas and just 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in towns where, to the ignominy of the drivers, a man waving a red flag had to walk 60 yards (54.9 m) ahead in order to warn the townspeople of the approach of a self-propelled vehicle; given the noise the engines made, this was a clearly unnecessary but onerous restriction.

As well as the absence of a network of paved roads, another key invention not available at the time of the development of the first railways was the pneumatic tyre. This was a crucial requirement in making road transport more economic and enabling a far smoother ride for vehicles. The internal combustion engine was also an invention of the late nineteenth century and it is not fanciful to suggest that, had these breakthroughs been made earlier, they might well have stymied the development, or at least the rapid spread, of the railways. Steam power required such a large weight-to-power ratio that it was never likely to be able to be deployed on roads; it is the low level of friction between steel wheels and iron (or steel) rails that is critical to the railways’ efficiency.

The railways arrived at a time when the need for transport – and not just of coal – was beginning to increase. The latent demand for travel across the country can be illustrated by the extensive use of stagecoaches. By 1835, there were around 4,000 stagecoaches hurtling round the country, carrying 10 million passengers per year. However, there was little potential for growth. The volume of traffic on the roads had increased, causing both congestion and damage to the surfaces, and there were fundamental problems with the use of horses, as some of the early railways which experimented with them found to their detriment. The cost of feed had risen rapidly after 1820 because of the rise in demand; and the need for the stagecoach companies to run frequent fast services led to a decrease in the horses’ life expectancy, adding further to running costs. The experience of the stagecoach operators showed the railway companies that such a large number of horses would have been required to provide services on a long stretch of track that the idea was unfeasible. Locomotives were the only viable alternative.

The railways not only superseded the stagecoaches, but also later effectively put paid to the canals. The network of canals that had first emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century expanded rapidly in the fifty years or so before the advent of the railways. By 1820, the United Kingdom had just over 100 navigable canals, with a total length of around 2,700 miles (4,345 km). However, horse-hauled barges were slow and, while more suited than the roads of the era for carrying heavy minerals or aggregates, they were of limited use to passengers. There were some passenger barges on a few short-distance routes but long-distance journeys were clearly out of the question. This was not merely because of the length of time they would have taken, but because there was no national network of canals – rather, a haphazard collection of waterways with differences in widths and lock sizes and a complex ownership pattern, resulting in an arbitrary system of tolls that made it too expensive to run profitable services.

Railway technology also enjoyed the advantage of being further developed than any of its potential rivals, and the economic imperative of reducing the cost of coal was a crucial factor in its continued enhancement. All this pointed to the railways as an invention whose time had come. They had everything going for them and the success of the first railway lines would give further impetus to technical progress. The coming of the railways also captured the imagination of the public, whose enthusiasm would help the railway companies to acquire the capital they so desperately needed for future development.

In fact, the railways had an almost unquenchable thirst for capital investment. The symbiotic relationship between the railways and economic growth, however, is difficult to unravel. The minds of many great economists have dwelled on the chicken-and-egg nature of the issue, but all agree that the two go hand in hand. Railways stimulated economic growth, but then also expanded relentlessly and rapidly themselves because of the nation’s increasing affluence, an affluence that they had actually helped to bring about. Once the railways appeared, the economy began to grow more quickly wherever its tentacles spread around the country, allowing the fruits of the Industrial Revolution to be shared more widely. This economic growth in turn helped fulfil the key requirement for the creation of railways, the availability of capital. Early promoters struggled to find backers but, as the success of the railways became evident and industry boomed, capital became available from a wider range of investors and a burgeoning middle class seeking potentially profitable ventures in which to put their money.

It was invariably local business interests that supported the promotion of the first lines. Not only did they have a direct commercial incentive but they were also often the only source of capital. There are fierce disputes among railway historians over what was Britain’s, and indeed the world’s, first major railway, but the claims of the Liverpool & Manchester, which opened in September 1830, cannot realistically be challenged. Since the turn of the century, there had been numerous lines that were pioneering in one sense or another, but none had the characteristics of a modern railway. They were basic affairs whose principal function was to carry coal or other minerals, mostly to a waterway.

The 5-mile-long Swansea & Mumbles Railway was the first in the world to carry passengers. It opened in 1807 and was horse drawn until 1896, after an experiment with a sail failed. Later run by electricity, it closed in 1960.

Hulton Archive / Stringer / Getty Images

These precursors, nevertheless, created the conditions necessary for the Liverpool & Manchester’s birth. For example, there was the 9-mile-long (14.5-km-long) Surrey Iron Railway, incorporated in 1801, and opened two years later, which ran between Wandsworth and Croydon and has claims to be the first line open to anyone prepared to pay the toll. This was a horse-hauled railway used to carry minerals and agricultural produce in this heavily industrialized area around the River Wandle. It was later extended further out to Godstone and Merstham, but plans to create a 50-mile-long (80-km-long) line to Portsmouth never materialized.

The Surrey Iron Railway carried only freight and it is the Swansea & Mumbles Railway that is widely recognized as the first for passengers. The main purpose of the 5-mile (8-km) line, opened in 1806, was to connect the city’s docks with the mines and quarries at Mumbles, at the western end of Swansea Bay. It was operated by horses and, in another world first, occasionally by sails. One of the original shareholders, Benjamin French, had the novel idea of offering rides to passengers and bought the rights to do so for a mere £20. Trips in his coaches started the following year, at a cost of a shilling (5p, or around £5 in today’s values) and the railway thrived. Remarkably, it did not replace its horses with steam engines until the 1870s.

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Frontispiece

Contents

1

Why Railways?