Fire and Steam (30 page)

It was this latter enterprise that prompted the building of the Great Central. Watkin wanted a line that ran from Manchester to Paris and he already controlled three companies that would have provided much of the route. As well as the South Eastern, which linked the Channel ports with London, and the Metropolitan, which extended from the City far north into Buckinghamshire, he was chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire, a railway which as its name
implied went nowhere near London. Watkin even had interests in a French railway that would have provided the trains on the other side of the Channel. First, though, he had to get his main line railway to London. Although it is difficult to discern his precise intentions, as he seemed to change his mind frequently, the very fact that he drove the Metropolitan Railway fifty miles out of London, far beyond the sensible boundaries of a suburban railway, suggests he always intended to link up his various railway interests. To do so he proposed a scheme to build a ninety-three-mile line from Annesley in Nottinghamshire through Nottingham, Leicester and Rugby, criss-crossing the Midland Railway, to a junction with the Metropolitan north of Aylesbury.

There was opposition not only from the other railway companies whose traffic was threatened but, more worryingly for Watkin, from one of the most powerful interest groups of the time, the Marylebone Cricket Club. The fuss arose because the route would take the railway under a small part of Lord's, then as now the headquarters of the MCC. In those days cricket was not the poor relation of football, hitting the headlines only during an Ashes series, but was the major sport of its day, boasting a huge following as well as the most famous sportsman of the time, W. G. Grace, who, one newspaper suggested, should approach poor Watkin to dissuade him from desecrating the ground. No matter that the project only involved building a ‘cut and cover' tunnel under the east corner of the ground, well away from the playing field where the hallowed turf would be left untouched, nor that the work would be carried out in the close season, leaving the spectators none the wiser. All the old aristocratic antipathy towards the railway was revived and ‘the menace to Lord's was looked upon almost as a national calamity'.
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Watkin was pitted against the Establishment in all its bluster and, following a lengthy series of parliamentary hearings in 1891, he lost.

Perhaps feeling a trifle guilty, the cricket supporters began to relent, possibly realizing that they could not stand in the way of progress (though it would take another century before women were allowed into their pavilion). The Great Northern, one of the main petitioners against the initial bill, also softened its stance, having thrashed out a deal with Watkin over competition between the railways. Watkin, too, promised that an orphanage for children of the clergy that was in the way of the
proposed route would be moved at the railway's expense to Bushey in Hertfordshire, and he abandoned his ambitions for a grand station merging with the existing Metropolitan one at Baker Street, settling instead for a self-contained terminus at Marylebone. All this paved the way for success two years after the initial rejection.

Watkin was a man of many paradoxes who, for example, inspired the fiercest loyalty among his staff despite refusing to recognize the unions which represented them. Getting approval for the Great Central scheme was always going to be more difficult than in the days of Stephenson: late Victorian England was a very different place after half a century of development that had created large cities and brought a measure of affluence to millions of people, many of whom had houses in the way of any proposed railway. Watkin's success at the second attempt shows that he had a more emollient side, prepared to compromise and cajole rather than simply shout and bully.

As ever, the poor were largely left to their own devices as they lacked the lobbying power of the cricketers. The fact that the railway forced some 25,000 working people in that corner of north-west London from their homes hardly raised a stir; even though, under legislation passed in 1885, there was now a rehousing obligation on the railways, the chaotic nature of life in the slums and the absence of any checks on the activities of the railway company suggest that many people were simply evicted and left to find their own alternative accommodation.

In 1894, shortly after pushing the scheme through Parliament, Watkin suffered a stroke and was forced to retire, but he was able to watch as his railway to London, Britain's last main line, was built. In engineering terms, the railway was a beauty, with relatively gentle gradients and just one level crossing in its whole length. By now mechanical methods were being used to build railways and fewer navvies were required; while the cost of £6.2m (around £550m today) may have all but bankrupted the company, it seems pretty modest for such a grand enterprise. There was a huge new station at Nottingham, a lengthy viaduct over Leicester – which also resulted in the displacement of many poor people – and a near two-mile tunnel at Catesby in Northamptonshire. But the railway was perhaps too beautiful for its own profitability as its route covered large underpopulated swathes of the Midlands. The Manchester,
Sheffield & Lincolnshire became subsumed into the Great Central – and the ‘Money Sunk and Lost' became the ‘Gone Completely'. As a result shareholders never received any dividends for their investment. All the major towns through which the new line passed were already served by rival railways, the biggest exception being the Leicestershire market town of Lutterworth, but its 1,800 souls given easy access to the railway for the first time were hardly going to line the pockets of the Great Central's shareholders.

It was no wonder that the railway never flourished, though its managers tried their hardest by creating a luxury service. The Great Central even attempted to outdo the Midland in terms of offering better facilities for its passengers. Its mission statement was ‘Rapid travel in luxury' and its advertising promised all-corridor trains with a buffet car for use by both first- and third-class passengers. In addition to its main route linking London with Sheffield and Manchester, it liaised with several other railways to enable through carriages to be taken to destinations as widely spread as Huddersfield and Newcastle, and Bournemouth and Plymouth, always on a corridor train. The Great Central also improved journeys between London and Stratford-upon-Avon and over large areas of Lincolnshire, including Grimsby, which was the ‘quick route to Denmark' via a ferry to Esbjerg. But its lavish trains attracted insufficient custom from rivals like the Midland and the Great Northern and were rarely anywhere near full. Even so, it is difficult to characterize such a great railway as simply a mistake. If it had not been closed by Beeching in the 1960s it would fulfil a vital role as a diversionary and freight route even today.

Perhaps the Great Central was just ahead of its time, rather like Watkin's Channel Tunnel, which, as with his rival to the
Tour d'Eiffel,
was never to be – at least for another century. Jack Simmons dismisses Watkin's idea of a railway between Paris and Sheffield as ‘visionary and foolish, a flashy advertising slogan, no more',
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but Watkin did start building the tunnel, raising money through the evocatively named Submarine Railway Company. This time he came up against opposition from the military who seemed to think it would be possible for the French to invade Britain through the tunnel. While that was clearly a notion born more of paranoia than military logic, it ensured that the
project never got beyond the mile-long test bore that Watkins managed to build. Moreover, the figures for such a grand project, financed solely by private enterprise dependent on shareholders, were never likely to stack up, as demonstrated by the travails of today's Eurotunnel.

In one of those neat historical niceties, no main lines were actually built in the twentieth century: the Great Central was completed in 1899, and the two sections of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, while originally scheduled to be finished in the 1990s, did not open until 2003 and 2007.
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All the London termini were built in the reign of Victoria, with Marylebone, the last, and undoubtedly the most modest, as it was designed by builders rather than an architect. The poet John Betjeman, a railway buff and early campaigner for the preservation of its heritage, accurately likened the look of Marylebone to ‘a branch public library in a Manchester suburb',
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in sharp contrast with that trio of great termini – Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross – just a couple of miles east.

By the turn of the century, then, the railway network in Great Britain was essentially complete, with 18,665 miles of track. Right up to the First World War, however, the railway continued to grow, with the mileage reaching 19,979 in 1910, an increase of over 1,300 miles since the start of the century, but this was largely a process of infilling, connecting the odd town left off the system and shortening routes with cut-offs. Much of the growth was in London as its suburban network continued spreading right up to the First World War, by which time the capital and its surrounding suburbs had no fewer than 550 stations. The railways, including the London Underground system, which had virtually established its present-day form in the centre of the city by 1907,
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were an indispensable part of the capital's infrastructure.

But still the railway faced competition in urban areas – initially not from the motor bus and lorry, which came later, but from the tramway which, being electrically powered, proved a more comfortable and flexible form of transport than rickety old steam trains shuttling between urban stations. The first trams were horse-drawn along simple tracks in the road, an idea which spread quickly to many towns and cities after the success of the inaugural line opened in Birkenhead in 1860. However, their potential was limited, not least because of the high cost of the horses, ten or so being required for each tramcar since the poor beasts
needed considerable rest between journeys. Steam trams flourished briefly in several cities but electricity was clearly the optimum form of propulsion and throughout the 1890s tram systems popped up around the country, many owned and operated by local municipalities.

In the 1900s, the tram spread even more quickly and by the outbreak of the First World War all major cities and many smaller towns possessed networks. And they were well used. Even by 1907, more people travelled around by tram in Greater London than by train and the tramways made it hard for the rail companies to eke any profits out of the extensive urban networks which they had built up in many provincial cities. Commuting by rail had, nevertheless, become a habit for many and four out of five workers in central London used the train. By 1906, 410,000 passengers arrived daily into the centre of London by train, perhaps two thirds of them early enough to be considered as commuters going to work. The working classes on the likes of the Great Eastern were outnumbered by more affluent commuters, many of whom came from further away as they were able to afford not only the fares but the price of an attractive suburban home. They were the City merchants, bankers and stockbrokers, who had first-class season tickets to Epping or Chislehurst, where they could live in a villa with perhaps twenty acres, a dozen servants and, still, a carriage with horses rather than a motor car. These affluent settlements were still largely villages centred around the station, rather than forming part of an endless ribbon of development as they do today. In between the rich and the humble users of the working men's trains, there were the middle classes, professional people who came in from the outer ring of Victorian suburbs such as Clapham, Swiss Cottage or Newington Green.

With such well-heeled passengers, who would also use the railways for long-distance travel on business, the major train companies were doing their utmost to improve their services to meet the needs of this more prosperous, and consequently more demanding, market. They were spurred on by rivalry with each other, but despite their dominance their profitability waned as they struggled to pay for the improvements to their service.

The London & North Western, for example, which for most of its thirty-year period under the chairmanship of Sir Richard Moon (who
had replaced Mark Huish in 1861) had been the biggest joint stock company in the world, was now prepared to spend considerable sums to offer passengers what today would be known as a ‘more pleasant journey experience'. Moon had been a brilliant manager, developing the basic managerial concepts such as ‘executive responsibility' first set out by Huish, but his very ethos – of providing the best possible service at minimum cost – meant that the company's facilities were rather parsimonious. As we have seen, he was quite happy for his trains to trundle around the country at 40 mph and, until the Armagh disaster, had not even appreciated the necessity of having proper brakes. The London & North Western was a wonderful railway, efficient and punctual thanks to a great attention to detail – goods and passenger lines were separated wherever possible and there was investment in the basics, such as junction layouts – but it was desperately old-fashioned.

While Moon's policies had, for a long time, given the company a solid financial basis and its shareholders healthy dividends, the company realized that in the twentieth century things had to change on its 2,000-mile network. Euston, in particular, required a new layout to cater for an increasing number of trains and this came at the cost of demolishing acres of private housing and offices. The quadrupled track to Bletchley was extended through to Rugby and there was a range of other improvements around the network, including the remodelling of Crewe, where trains branched off for Manchester or Holyhead. All this came with fleets of new locomotives, modern corridor rolling stock and even a couple of new packet steamers for the Holyhead–Dublin service.

Other companies followed suit. Express trains painted and maintained in elegant liveries hurtled through the countryside, overtaking lengthy coal trains that often ran on entirely separate rails, as lines had been quadrupled to cater for slow and fast services. Carriages on express routes were comfortably upholstered and there was now widespread provision of dining facilities in which passengers sat in splendour to be attended at linen-covered tables by smartly dressed and attentive waiters. For the most part it was understated luxury, but there were occasional flourishes such as the stained glass in the clerestory roof lights on the Great Central's Marylebone–Sheffield expresses.