Great Victorian Railway Journeys: How Modern Britain Was Built by Victorian Steam Power

239 Pages·2012·34.1 MB·English

by  Karen Farrington

GREAT
VICTORIAN
RAILWAY
JOURNEYS
KAREN FARRINGTON
© National Railway Museum/SSPL
The first edition of Bradshaw's Railway Companion of 1840, with a pocket watch made c.
1870 by J. Atkins & Son of Coventry for a guard on the Manchester, Sheffield and
Lincolnshire Railway
© Old House books & maps
Bradshaw’s map of Dublin
Contents
Cover
Title Page

FOREWORD: By Michael Portillo - The Victorian Railway
Revolution
INTRODUCTION: By Karen Farrington - The Genius of Bradshaw’s

JOURNEY 1: Excursions and Innovations - GREAT YARMOUTH to
LONDON
JOURNEY 2: From Academia to Industry - OXFORD to MILFORD
HAVEN
JOURNEY 3: A Royal Progress - WINDSOR to WEYMOUTH
JOURNEY 4: Border Country - BERWICK-UPON-TWEED to THE
ISLE OF MAN
JOURNEY 5: Bradshaw’s Ireland - DUBLIN to BELFAST

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher
© Old House books & maps
Bradshaw’s map of the Isle of Wight.
On an engine from the Downpatrick Heritage Steam Railway.
ince 2009, when I started making televised train journeys using
Bradshaw’s Handbook, I have tried to imagine what impact and impression the
arrival of the railways made on British society. Of course every generation since
has experienced technological change, which has, if anything, grown faster. As
we look back over twenty years, most of us can no longer understand how we
lived without mobile phones and the internet. Similarly, a Victorian by the 1850s
must have struggled to recall the days when he or she had had to travel by coach,
never able to exceed the speed of a horse. There had been a revolution in
communications, perhaps similar in scope to the one that we are experiencing
today.
But on top of that, Britain underwent a physical metamorphosis. Where
before, country lanes meandered, now embankments, tunnels and viaducts
scythed through the landscape. Stations sprouted up, resembling Italian palaces,
French châteaux or even Gothic cathedrals. Fearsome locomotives belching fire
and steam frightened the horses as they sliced through city centres, or engulfed
fields in flame as stray sparks set light to hay or stubble.
I remember being in awe and fear of steam locomotives. They were so big and
noisy. Their wheels towered above me (especially when I was a boy, of course)
and they were given to highly unpredictable behaviour, suddenly releasing
clouds of water vapour with a hiss that made me jump. How did the Victorian
middle classes in their finery, how did genteel ladies, cope with their sudden
proximity to these roaring fireboxes, with being brought face to face with the
industrial revolution?
How could they adapt to speed? At the Rainhill trials to choose a source of
traction for the Manchester to Liverpool railway, Stephenson’s Rocket reached
30 miles per hour, a velocity previously unseen and hard even to imagine. The
potency of the technology took some getting used to. At the inauguration of that
line in 1830, William Huskisson MP, former President of the Board of Trade, left
his carriage to greet the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. The Rocket,
running on the parallel track, struck him as he tried to scramble out of its path. A
train transported him to the vicarage at Eccles where he died of his injuries.
When Isambard Kingdom Brunel opened his epic Box tunnel on the Great
Western Railway, Dionysius Lardner, a professor of astronomy, was on hand to
warn that if the brakes failed the train would accelerate and the passengers
suffocate; and some at least believed him and alighted before the tunnel to
continue their journey by more traditional means.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century William Blake wrote of ‘dark
Satanic Mills’. The railways greatly accelerated the industrial revolution. George
Bradshaw was enthusiastic about the railways, and the Handbook describes with
admiration the dimensions of stations, tunnels and bridges. But the book’s
depictions of iron-smelting furnaces lighting up the night sky sometimes bring
the fires of Hell to mind. Bradshaw’s awareness of the social consequences of
the industrial revolution suggests that Victorians saw that progress had brought
both paradise and inferno.
Of Merthyr Tydfil the Handbook says:
Visitors should see the furnaces by night, when the red glare of the
flames produces an uncommonly striking effect. Indeed, the town is
best visited at that time, for by day it will be found dirty ... Cholera and
fever are of course at home here ... We do hope that proper measures
will be taken by those who draw enormous wealth from these [iron and
coal] works to improve the condition of the people.
Quakers like Bradshaw tended to believe strongly that the industrialist owed a
duty of care to his workers and their families.
To judge from the Great Western works at Swindon, railway magnates were
appropriately paternalistic, housing the employees in model dwellings and
supplying free rail travel for a family summer holiday in Devon or Cornwall.
Many thousands would depart on charter trains, turning Swindon for a week into
a virtual ghost town.
Train travel vastly broadened the horizons of working-class people. The mid-
nineteenth century saw an enormous growth in travel and in resorts. As the
railway navvies levelled the land, the railways levelled society. Those of modest
means, who before train travel might scarcely have travelled beyond a 15-mile
radius of home, could leave the smoke and grime of city life and enjoy the
‘salubrious’ (to use a favourite Bradshaw word) sea or mountain air. Town
dwellers could for the first time enjoy fresh sea fish and a range of perishable
farm products.
The railways threw up some interesting questions of etiquette, and drove
social change. The usual requirement that ladies be chaperoned was difficult to
enforce on trains. The new freedoms offered by rail travel contributed to
increasing equality between the sexes. Nonetheless, women sometimes
journeyed in fear, especially in compartments on trains that had no corridor.
Some ladies secreted pins in their mouths as a way to deal with male passengers
who in the darkness of a tunnel might attempt to steal a kiss!
Any worries that travelling by train was not ladylike were dismissed when
Queen Victoria herself took to the tracks in 1842. Although she was nervous of
travelling at high speed, she became a frequent railway passenger. The train
conveyed her to Windsor, Osborne House and Balmoral. In 1882 it carried her to
Nice, on the first of her nine visits to the Riviera. As though to emphasise how
thoroughly the railway had entered national life, after her death on the Isle of
Wight a train brought the Queen’s coffin home to Windsor.
Her lifetime covers most of the railway building that was done in this country.
Poignantly, the last link of the West Highland line between Fort William and
Mallaig (since made famous by the Harry Potter films) opened in 1901, the year
of the Queen’s death. So, if you take a train today, it is extremely likely that you
will travel on a route laid down in her day.
British national self-confidence reached its zenith in the Victorian era. The
empire was vast and, to Bradshaw’s mind, the greatest that the world had ever
seen. London was the biggest city on earth and Manchester could take cotton
from India, turn it into manufactured garments and sell them back in India below
the cost of local products. No hint of colonial guilt affected our patriotic pride.
That Britain was the first country to open an intercity railway, that geniuses
like Brunel and the Stephensons achieved engineering wonders, were evidence
of the superiority of British ingenuity, science and entrepreneurship.
As today I travel along Victorian track beds I try to imagine the awe and pride
that railways then inspired. Actually, if I look out the carriage window at the
stations and viaducts that Victorian engineers erected, imagining it is very easy.