Fire and Steam (11 page)

It was a stunningly ambitious scheme that cost nearly £1m, virtually the same as the Liverpool & Manchester which was nine times longer. For operational reasons, involving the shared use of the line out of
London, in 1850 the London & Greenwich started running trains on the right-hand side, a little curio since it is the only British railway ever to do so (and the practice continued until 1901). As ever with new rail lines, the London & Greenwich was opened with great fanfare, special trains, speeches by notables, a brass band (provided by the Scots Fusiliers) and the inevitable banquet. Although the railway was the first to be devoted solely to passenger transport, its developers still did not dare commit themselves entirely to the concept and hedged their bets by building a ‘pedestrian boulevard' alongside the railway, charging users a penny toll. To allay passenger fears about the dangers of travelling on top of the endless viaduct, the trains were designed with a special low centre of gravity to reduce the risks of toppling over the 4½-foot parapet walls. However, fears must have been overcome as the railway was soon joined by the London & Croydon, with a separate station alongside at London Bridge. Passenger numbers built up rapidly with 1,500 people per day using the railway and the ‘boulevard' was quickly replaced by additional tracks. Nevertheless, the line struggled to make a profit until a much wider network of suburban services built up in south London in the 1850s to cater for the growing job market in the city centre of London.

While all these lines were pioneers in one way or another, helping to establish the viability of the railway concept, the big project in the offing was the construction of the main line railways which still form the spine of the network today. Because of the political uncertainties in the early 1830s and the sheer scale of the task, it would be eight years before another major new railway would join together two major conurbations like the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. Then there would be two in quick succession, first the Grand Junction and then the London & Birmingham. They would both be grander in scale and scope than anything that had come before and would involve their promoters and builders in overcoming much greater obstacles than their predecessors had faced.

THREE

JOINING UP BRITAIN

With the opening of the London & Greenwich in 1836, the story moves further south. There were good reasons why the early railways had been developed in the north: not only was the demand for better transport great, but that was also where the liquid capital, the enterprise and the engineering skills could all be found. However, with the success of the Liverpool & Manchester, the potential benefits of railways to the rest of Britain became too obvious to ignore and groups of promoters formed in major towns across the country. While it had become clear that Britain was to get a national rail network, its precise nature and routes would be thrashed out in the rather archaic and chaotic parliamentary process. Parliament would set rules for these new companies, restricting them in various ways, but would not initiate the creation of any railway; neither would the government, which showed no interest in determining where the railways would go, let alone planning a network. This was in marked contrast to other European countries where the state played a far more active part in the process. In Belgium, the only country where the railways developed as quickly, after the first line opened in 1835, the government laid out the shape of the network with four main lines departing from a central hub and funded their construction.
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But at least the financing of schemes had been made easier. Until 1826, only the Bank of England was accorded joint stock status, in other words, allowed to have a multitude of investors underpinning its financial activities. Other banks were until then restricted to the amount of capital that could be raised by six people, but once the regulation had been removed several banks operating on the joint stock principle quickly emerged. Moreover, railway companies had a privileged
position in relation to other enterprises. Until 1860, they were the only type of companies that could raise capital from more than five people, a restriction imposed on manufacturers following the South Sea Bubble collapse in the eighteenth century. This ensured that the railway companies were the most favoured alternative investment to government stocks. While, at best, the latter yielded 4 per cent, people with a bit of spare cash saw that the Liverpool & Manchester was paying dividends of just under 10 per cent. Crucially, too, railway investors were protected right from the beginning by limited liability – in other words, they could not be held responsible for any losses beyond the amount they had already paid for their shares.

With the creation of a more accessible banking system and the return of a stable political climate, the railway promoters began pushing their schemes once again. The eventual passage of the Reform Act of 1832 had given the vote to a quarter of a million more people, and this important measure began the move towards a democratic society, a process that was speeded up by the arrival of the railways. The feeling that society was changing, coinciding with a brief period of bright economic prospects, encouraged the development of a succession of major new railway projects on a far grander scale than the Liverpool & Manchester. Between 1833 and 1836, a series of Bills were passed by Parliament that were to lay the foundations of the main line network.

The most important were two railways which, though promoted separately, were always envisaged as a joint operation and eventually created a line that ran from London through Birmingham and on to Liverpool and Manchester. The southern part was the London & Birmingham, a 112-mile railway from Euston through Watford, Rugby and Coventry to Birmingham. There it was to meet the 78-mile Grand Junction which ran through Staffordshire to join the Liverpool & Manchester at a junction near Warrington. Again, the Stephensons were ubiquitous. George was the chief engineer for both projects but in practice Joseph Locke did most of the work on the Grand Junction and Robert Stephenson was responsible for the London & Birmingham. The combined two railways were to be six times longer than the Liverpool & Manchester and therefore far more expensive to build, but from the outset the financial case was very strong since the two railways would
link up the four major conurbations in the country. Raising the money, therefore, was not the biggest obstacle faced by the promoters; rather, it was the forces of reaction, the landowners and canal owners with their vested interests.

The first attempt at a Bill for the railway between the two Lancashire towns and Birmingham collapsed when the government fell over the failure to push through the Reform Bill. When the Bill for the Grand Junction returned to Parliament, the usual opponents argued strongly against its authorization but surprisingly those who stood to gain so obviously from the cheaper and quicker transport – the Staffordshire iron and pottery makers – jumped on the bandwagon and tried to extract their tuppennyworth, demanding exorbitant sums for land as well as compensation for disturbance. Opposition may have been boosted by the fact that the Grand Junction was a project initiated from the north end of the line, without the involvement of any prominent Birmingham or even Midlands investors, and therefore the local benefits were not immediately apparent. Remarkably, a key objector was James Watt, none other than the son of the great steam-engine pioneer and the owner, thanks to his father's legacy, of considerable canal interests. He lived in Aston Hall and refused to cede any of his land to the railway company. Reluctant to force a confrontation in Parliament with such a powerful opponent, the company was obliged to reroute the line around the estate to connect with the London & Birmingham at Curzon Street in a station alongside the Grand Junction's terminus. This was a far less convenient arrangement since it made through-running of trains impossible, and forced passengers to suffer the hassle of changing trains at Birmingham. Moreover, the station was a mile away from the city centre, a journey that cost a shilling in a hackney cab. It was replaced in the 1840s by New Street station, which did allow through-running but Curzon Street's impressive classical façade survives to this day.
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Opposition to the London & Birmingham Railway was also widespread and an earlier version of that scheme had been rejected by Parliament. As with the Liverpool & Manchester, much survey work had to be done under cover of darkness to avoid attracting the attention of landowners and their often violent servants. Robert Stephenson
described the kind of attitude he had to contend with when he met a ‘courtly, fine-looking old gentleman, of very stately manner'. This was a certain Sir Astley Cooper, an eminent surgeon and the owner of land at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, through which the railway had to pass. The old doctor called the scheme ‘preposterous in the extreme' and could not understand why ‘our estates' had to be ‘cut up in all directions for the purpose of making an unnecessary road'. Why, he concluded, if ‘this sort of thing be permitted to go on, you will in a very few years destroy the
noblesse'.
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There was really only one way to counter this sort of opposition: buy it off. Railway promoters realized that to push their schemes through Parliament they had to simply open their chequebooks and bear the pain. Between them, the Grand Junction and the London & Birmingham paid more than £700,000 in payments to the landowners to acquire what in effect were narrow slivers of land used, if at all, for agriculture. This enormous sum represented a fifth of the two railways' combined initial share capital of £3.5m.

Work on the two railways started very soon after authorization. The Grand Junction involved four major viaducts and a two-mile cutting at Preston Brook which also required the construction of an aqueduct to carry the canal over the railway.
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The most impressive of the new structures was the Dutton viaduct over the river Weaver, which is nearly 500 yards long, a distance covered by twenty red sandstone arches that reach sixty-five feet above the river. It took 700 men two years to build, without the loss of a single life. The projects for major structures on the line were undertaken separately and simultaneously by a variety of contractors, since the scale of the railway had put an end to the notion that Stephenson or his fellow engineers could both organize and oversee the work themselves without the intermediary of a contractor. It was to be the start of a boom period for railway contractors, one of whom, Thomas Brassey, became the greatest and most efficient of all (see
Chapter 6
). Brassey completed the Penkridge viaduct in Staffordshire on time and on budget. Indeed, the cost had been greatly reduced with Brassey's agreement, when Joseph Locke had spotted that the viaduct had originally been greatly overpriced relative to the cost of others on the line.

The construction of the Grand Junction was a great engineering success, thanks to Locke's skills as he, rather than Stephenson, saw the scheme through. However, it was the London & Birmingham that was to catch the public imagination and attract the plaudits. Partly that was because the construction of the railway meant that, at last, London would have a main line railway which immediately opened up large swathes of the country to travellers from the capital. It was also the scale of the task which had impressed people, along with the magnificence of the engineering. Apart from the initial mile out of Euston which, as at Liverpool station, was operated by a cable system because of the 1 in 70 incline,
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Robert Stephenson created a virtually level railway all the way to Birmingham. Aware that the line would be heavily used as soon as it was completed, Stephenson designed the route for ease of operation but that meant spending extra sums on nine tunnels and three long deep cuttings. It was a stupendous engineering achievement, created in five years by, at its peak, 20,000 workers. The Victorians themselves had difficulty in grasping the scale of the task and one contemporary writer, Peter Lecount,
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worked out that it outstripped the achievement of the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza. He calculated, laboriously, that while the pyramid only required the raising of 15,733 million cubic feet by one foot, to build the railway required lifting 25,000 million cubic feet, two thirds more and, moreover, the task was undertaken in just five years, a quarter of the time it took to build the pyramid. The precise figures may be rather fanciful, but such calculations demonstrate that the building of the railways was by far the biggest construction feat of modern times and arguably the greatest in human history. The London & Birmingham ensured Robert Stephenson's lifelong reputation as the most renowned railway builder in the world and while the work was carried out by contractors, Stephenson himself was reckoned to have walked the length of the line twenty times during the five years of construction. Even he could not prevent the occasional disaster, most tellingly at Watford, where a group of navvies was killed during the tunnelling when the gravelly ground gave way.

The London & Birmingham opened in sections – with stagecoach connections linking train journeys at either end while the Kilsby tunnel
was being completed – and through-running along the whole line started in June 1838. The journey between the two cities took six hours as the locomotives commissioned by the railway were rather under-powered for the task and had to be changed at regular intervals. There were surprisingly few intermediate stops, partly because the aim of the railway was long-distance travel, rather than serving the villages – which had yet to become suburbs – on the outskirts of London. The first station was Harrow, eleven miles out of London, and it was many years before the development of any closer to the centre of the capital. These early railways made little effort to serve even quite sizeable towns that were near the line as the promoters were interested in rapid connections between the main conurbations. Thus on the Grand Junction line, Walsall, Wolverhampton and Northwich were simply ignored even though they were all under five miles from the railway.