Making Tracks: A Whistle-stop Tour of Railway History

INTRODUCTION

RAILWAYS OCCUPY AN INTERESTING place in the public psyche. Endlessly complained about, discussed and used as an excuse for lateness in almost any circumstance, they are also loved, obsessed over and romanticized more than any other form of mass transport.

My own obsession, I am convinced, comes from my mother. Like many women today, although unlike a lot of women in the early 1960s, my mother continued working throughout her pregnancy. She would travel daily between our home in Wimbledon and her job as a cook in Sloane Square, bouncing on the springy cushions of the rattling, red-painted District line trains from the 1920s that were still doing sterling service at that time. After I was born, circumstances dictated that she had to return to work so she took me daily on the same journey right up until I started school. We would always (at my insistence) sit in the same seat, looking to the right so that I could gaze at the endless procession of main-line trains on the way to and from Waterloo. Trains that included fast, clattering expresses to Portsmouth; plodding, whining suburban sets that stopped at all stations to and from exciting day-trip destinations such as Chessington and Hampton Court; and, thrill of thrills, steam-hauled expresses bound for the Wessex coast. All painted the sober, attractive green that, quite frankly, is the colour trains should be.

I had no option other than to be completely hooked. Add to that a train-enthused father who would take me to the footbridge outside Wimbledon station to wave at the drivers (oh, the excitement of a wave back and sometimes a friendly toot) and you will understand that life conspired to make me a hopeless train freak.

This book is a brief history of railways and how different people came up with innovations and designs that cumulatively have led to the systems we have today. And how their individual genius combined in the one central genius – that of railways themselves.

BUILDING THE RAILWAYS

GAUGE MATTERS: OR ‘WHY ARE THEIR TRAINS BIGGER THAN OURS?’

IN ITS SIMPLEST FORM, a railway track consists of a pair of rails, held parallel by a series of structures known in the UK as sleepers and in the US as ties. This track is generally laid on a bed of ballast although in some cases it is fixed directly on to a concrete base. This latter method is known as slab track; it needs less maintenance and is used principally in areas that have very high usage or that are tricky to reach, such as tunnels. The track is sometimes referred to as ‘the permanent way’.

A railway gauge is, straightforwardly, the measurement of the space between the rails. The table below shows some of the more commonly used gauges in the world.

LOADING GAUGE

The track gauge alone is not the sole factor contributing to the overall size of the trains running along it. The loading gauge is the measure that defines the maximum size trains can be in order to operate safely, taking into account bridges, tunnels, stations and other trackside structures. The British loading gauge, with some limited exceptions, is one of the tightest relative to track gauge – the British network, being the oldest in the world, is still suffering from the legacy of early mistakes and lack of central planning.

British rail users often return from continental Europe or the US raving about the wonders of double-deck trains and lamenting the lack of them at home. It is the loading gauge that is responsible; the continental, or Berne gauge, is much more generous than the UK’s.

EARLY DAYS

The world’s first modern, double-tracked, steam-hauled railway was the Liverpool and Manchester, opened in 1830. Prior to that, the Stockton and Darlington had opened in 1825, also using steam technology for some of the time. However, this had proved unreliable so horses were often used instead, harking back to an earlier age of wagonways in which wooden and later iron rails had been laid to enable horses to pull heavy loads out of mines. These would then be sent along to shipment points with much greater ease than if they had been transported across bare ground or deep mud.

The concept of using specific tracks or grooves wasn’t new even then – the Ancient Greeks and Romans had dug out channels to help carts and wagons along their way without sliding. From the Middle Ages up to around the middle/end of the eighteenth century, both Germany and Britain had wagonways in their mining regions and the earliest rails (as opposed to grooves) appeared in Germany in the mid-sixteenth century.

Obviously it’s impossible to keep vehicles on rails without some sort of controlling device. Early rails used flanges (raised ridges or rims) to ensure that wagons didn’t veer off. These flanges were later transferred to the inner edges of the wheels themselves and it is this method that has survived to the present. The idea of using rails for transportation, therefore, wasn’t new by the early nineteenth century, but advances in technology meant that railways were about to experience an explosion in popularity. Hitherto, horse – or indeed human – power was the main form of traction (although some employed cables or gravity) but it was the development of steam that really got things going.

The steam engine began as a stationary machine that was used to drive water pumps, but it wasn’t long before enterprising engineers found a way to connect it to wheels and therefore become self-propelling. As with railways themselves, the idea of using steam power wasn’t new, but it was in the early nineteenth century that the technology really took off.

RICHARD TREVITHICK

Steam-powered road vehicles had been attempted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but it took Richard Trevithick, a mining engineer from Cornwall, to come up with the idea of running locomotives on rails. Previous engines had been far too heavy for the road surfaces of the period so rails were the answer. After much trial and error, in 1804 Trevithick demonstrated a locomotive at Pen-y-Darren, an ironworks in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. This machine got up to the dizzying speed of 8 km/h (5 mph). Later Trevithick demonstrated his locomotive, prophetically enough, near the site of the current Euston station in London, running it on a circular track and calling it ‘Catch Me Who Can’.

Trevithick soon left England, however, and continued to develop steam engines (albeit stationary ones) in the mines of Peru, leaving the way clear for that first genius of the railways, George Stephenson.

GEORGE STEPHENSON

George Stephenson was born in 1781 at Wylam, Northumberland, not far from Newcastle. He became a pit boy at a local mine but began to educate himself in engineering skills with the help of a local schoolmaster. He moved to become an enginewright and found a job at Killingworth coalmine, looking after the stationary steam engines there. These engines were used to haul wagons up from the mines using cables and Stephenson soon came to realize that a more effective use of the power would be to run steam engines as moving locomotives. He set about designing his first creation and in 1814 it was unveiled as the locomotive Blücher. It has to be said that Stephenson’s genius did not lie in his own inventions – he had incorporated a lot of Trevithick’s ideas into his locomotive design – but more in his ability to adapt existing technologies in ways that made them hugely more efficient.

THE STOCKTON AND DARLINGTON RAILWAY

Stephenson continued to build engines – not always with success – and in the early 1820s he was approached by a group of businessmen from Darlington. They had had the idea of a railway line linking their collieries to the town of Stockton, at the mouth of the river Tees. Impressed by Stephenson’s engineering to date, they asked him to become the surveyor and engineer of the route.

After overcoming fox-hunting landowners reluctant to see this new technology defiling their land, as well as calculating ways to cross rivers and a major swamp, Stephenson opened the Stockton and Darlington railway in just three years, on 27 September 1825. There was, however, a major issue. George Stephenson may have been a genius, but his early steam locomotives were prone to failures. He and his son Robert had produced an engine for the opening of the line – Locomotion No. 1 – but the mine owners were not convinced by its potential and continued to use horses for many of the trains until a new locomotive, designed by Timothy Hackworth from Stephenson’s works, proved a greater success.

Locomotion No. 1

One Stephenson innovation on the Stockton and Darlington above all has proved an enduring success – his choice of rails set 1,435 mm (4 ft 8½ in) apart. This is the standard gauge adopted by most major railways throughout the world.

THE LIVERPOOL AND MANCHESTER RAILWAY

George Stephenson’s next major project was to prove a turning point in the history of railways – the Liverpool and Manchester. This was a much bigger scheme than the Stockton and Darlington, linking as it did two major powerhouses of nineteenth-century British industry. And whereas the Stockton and Darlington was conceived as a predominantly freight railway (although it did end up carrying passengers), the Liverpool and Manchester was planned as a route that would carry both freight and passengers.

As with the Stockton and Darlington Railway, this new route had its problems. Objections were raised by local canal owners (who could see their business disappearing to the new railway) and the terrain was tough. The river Sankey had to be crossed by a nine-arch viaduct and the high ground at Olive Mount in Liverpool had to have a 3.2 km (2 mile) cutting driven through it. The greatest obstacle, however, was Chat Moss – a huge area of peat bog that wouldn’t take normal railway construction methods. Stephenson’s solution was innovative – he floated the railway across the bog on a bed of tree branches and heather, bound with tar and covered with rubble. The Chat Moss line is still in use today – a testament to the genius of George Stephenson – and has recently been electrified.

Steam traction was still a controversial