Fire and Steam (16 page)

This press burgeoned thanks to the interest of a new type of railway investor. No longer were the majority of those putting their money into the railways attracted by local promoters holding meetings in public houses to explain their schemes in the hope of exploiting residents' selfinterest. This rather quaint method was still the principal way in which promoters initiated schemes, but once they had issued their shares, the certificates were traded in an unprecedented way and the stock market was revolutionized by this huge influx of new railway securities as the volume of dealing soared.

The range of investors
¹¹
was also spreading down the social scale in a way that would have delighted Mrs Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister who extended share ownership through the privatization programme of the 1980s. Given that the number of people rich enough to invest was comparatively small, there must have been few members of the upper and middle classes who did not speculate on the railways, many of whom were to lose their money. The clergy, for example, traditionally poor and frugal, were particularly keen, with 257 ‘Rev' and ‘Very Rev' names on the share registers. In fact, all the professions were represented, from ‘the physician who perilled the savings of a life and the well-being of a family' to the ‘chemist who forsook his laboratory for a new form of the philosopher's stone'.
¹²
At the other end of the scale, there were the big players, including 900 lawyers and 364 bankers who invested more than £2,000 each (as a broad rule of
thumb, these figures can be multiplied by 70 to give some notion of today's values, though this is a very inexact science). One banker subscribed £240,000 while the largest investment risked by a solicitor was £154,000. If one wonders why Parliament was so ready to authorize dubious schemes, the fact that no fewer than 157 MPs (nearly a quarter of the 658 members) declared a financial interest in the railways (one of whom invested £291,000) suggests there was just a hint of self-interest in their decisions over the future of various bills. Indeed, one of the larger railway companies boasted of being able to command a hundred votes in the House of Commons. The Lords were much sought after as figureheads to give respectability to businesses, much as they are today, and one fortunate fellow was a director of no fewer than twenty-three railway companies.

Railway shares became far more sought after than the government securities that had been the staple fare of the big brokers and traders. The relationship between shareholder and promoter became more distant and consequently more fraught with risk. The investor had little to go on other than the often sparse information in the prospectus. Yet the momentum of the boom – just like the South Sea Bubble of the early eighteenth century or the dotcom madness of the late twentieth – swept along people who were in too much of a hurry to consider what they were doing. Dealings in railway securities became the lifeblood of both the London stock exchange and the host of smaller exchanges that had emerged in provincial towns, which frequently sold stock at a premium compared to the price in the capital. Investors in Leeds, according to one contemporary account, were particularly prone to having the wool pulled over their eyes: ‘In no town were men more easily duped by the falsehoods which it paid to promulgate. In lines known to be worthless, . . . if a rumour were judiciously spread . . . the Stock Exchange was in a ferment and prices rose enormously, to the loss of the holder when the contradiction came.'
¹³
Shares in one company which sold in London at £21 were traded in Leeds at £25 10s, according to the same account.

This is the point in the story where it becomes impossible to be comprehensive or to mention any but a small minority of the schemes that were under consideration or being built. Just listing a few of those authorized in 1845 shows the way that the rather sparse network was
being filled in and, at times, duplicated. Possibly most important, there was at last to be a connection via Berwick between the English and Scottish railway systems, and no fewer than 423 miles of railway north of the border were sanctioned. Wales, too, which had seen little of the earlier railway expansions, was to get 311 miles,
¹⁴
including the long Chepstow to Milford Haven line in the south. A route enabling Manchester to be reached without passing through Birmingham – the Trent Valley line – was approved,
¹⁵
as was a new line from London (on broad gauge) to Wolverhampton via Oxford – the Oxford, Worcester & Wolverhampton railway. The start of the Berks & Hants line, which would eventually provide a route from London to Exeter avoiding Bristol, was authorized, as was the beginning of the Bristol & Exeter as far as Yeovil. The Southampton & Dorchester was another major scheme encompassing sixty miles, and Weymouth was also to be reached for the first time by railway.

And so it went on, with 1846 seeing the density of the network increasing in many parts of the country and whole swathes of suburban networks beginning to emerge in south London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh, among others. The Cornwall railway was approved to go to Penzance, completed in 1852, and reached Falmouth in 1863. Ireland, an integral part of Great Britain at the time, but still with few railways in 1850, had more than 1,300 miles alone authorized in two years.

Building a railway seemed such a simple task then, no more difficult than opening a grocery store or throwing up a row of houses. It was rather like building a narrow road, and while it was important to ensure that gradients were minimized, technically there was not much else to trouble the promoters: stations, apart from those serving major towns, were simple, often little more than a raised wooden platform; signalling was by time interval; and maintenance was minimal, and carried out by poorly paid staff. The average cost of building a railway in the 1840s has been calculated
¹⁶
at just £31,000 per mile – say around £2m in today's money.

Take, as a small example, the seven-mile-long Gravesend & Rochester Railway,
¹⁷
initiated by the Thames & Medway Canal Company in early 1844, which started operating within a year of the idea first being
mooted. After a contractor had put forward the idea of turning the canal towpath into a railway, the company decided to do the work itself and commissioned John Rastrick, who had built various lines including the Stratford & Moreton Railway, to be the engineer. While running the line along the towpath was straightforward, the canal entered a two-mile tunnel at Strood and the proposed solution was to put the line on timber supports across the water, leaving just enough space for navigation. This Heath Robinson-like solution was accepted by the Board of Trade, even though the trains passed so near the wall of the tunnel that grilles had to be placed over the carriage windows to prevent passengers seeking a breath of fresh air from being beheaded.

Work had progressed so fast that the company reckoned it could start running trains as early as September but extra safety requirements required by the Board delayed the opening until February 1845. With three locomotives, the company ran six trains a day in each direction, at a fare of 8d (3.3p) and 1 shilling (5p) for second and first class respectively, including a steamer trip between Rochester and Chatham. But the fares proved too expensive and they were reduced a month later, with the result that passengers flocked to the railway, which then expanded its service from six to twenty trains per day. Even the importance of integrated transport seems to have been recognized as half the trains had horse omnibus connections on to Maidstone.
¹⁸

While such small schemes were being put forward and built around the country during this frenetic period of activity, there were also, at the other end of the scale, massive enterprises that would take many years to complete. One of the largest was the construction of the Woodhead tunnel on the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne & Manchester Railway, giving a second route through the Pennines to rival the Manchester–Leeds route. The tunnel was three miles long, took six years to build, and was one of the worst projects in terms of loss of life – at least thirty-two navvies were killed in accidents during its construction, possibly more, and there were 140 serious injuries.

On the other hand, there was a whole host of schemes that were, quite rightly, rejected because they were put forward on the most spurious grounds and their prospectuses were so blatantly misleading or dishonest that the parliamentarians could not fail to do their duty and
throw them out. Adrian Vaughan cites the ‘Somersetshire Midland' from Frome to Shepton Mallet, Glastonbury and Highbridge which, according to the prospectus, had ‘the peculiar advantage . . . that the greater portion of it will be perfectly level'. Vaughan acidly points out that ‘perhaps one third could have been level, but the rest would have been very steep as it climbed on to and through the Mendips'.
¹⁹
Worse, a competing company appeared, proposing the Bridgwater, Frome & Central Somerset Railway on a route which was said to possess ‘every facility for railway construction', whatever that meant. Neither of these survived the parliamentary process, or were ever built.

This deliberate ignoring of topography was particularly noticeable in the brief fashion for putting forward ‘direct' railways, as if simply giving a railway that appellation automatically shortened the route. The concept seemed to be based on the fallacy that it was best to avoid any intervening towns even if they were a good source of potential traffic. In September 1845, for example, investors were invited to put up money for the ‘Direct Great Western' which would go from Reading ‘as near as possible [in] a straight line to Land's End', ignoring the fact that no one lived at the westernmost point of Britain or particularly wanted to go there. Plans for a ‘Harwich, Oxford and Bristol Direct' and a ‘Cheltenham, Oxford, Brighton Direct' seemed equally far-fetched and unrealistic as they linked relatively modest towns already served by the railway.

While many fanciful schemes were proposed, there were remarkably few completely unviable railways built during this period. There were certainly some which seemed destined never to attract much traffic, such as the connection from Blisworth on the West Coast line to Peterborough via Northampton, which inevitably succumbed under Beeching. However, the marginal or utterly misconceived railways would mostly come later in the century when the potentially profitable routes had been fully exploited and entrepreneurs were still desperate to wring a few extra pounds out of gullible investors. In fact, most of the schemes built in the period were sensible and one in particular stands out – the Great Northern – providing a second line linking London with the north and finally relieving the bottleneck between Euston and Rugby which, until then, carried all traffic heading north out of London. There had been schemes for a railway running north from
London to the east of the existing line ever since the completion of the Stockton & Darlington, even predating what is now the West Coast route, created by the amalgamation of the Grand Junction and the London & Birmingham.
²⁰
The East Coast was a natural route for a railway to Scotland, effectively following the long-established Great North Road, but all those early plans had come to naught. The plans were revived by Edmund Denison, a Yorkshire MP and QC, who used his legal skills to put the case for the Great Northern in Parliament and who was to dominate the management of the railway in its early years.

The Great Northern was the subject of the biggest battle fought in Parliament over a single railway – and with good reason. It was the longest single line approved by Parliament, comprising 188 miles between London and York, as well as a large loop into Lincolnshire and a few smaller branches. It was obvious that such a key trunk route would be a major part of the nation's infrastructure for generations to come. The Great Northern was also the last of the major companies to be created and therefore was opposed as a latecoming upstart by the existing railways, notably the Midland, which were enjoying a monopoly of traffic.

Even before the start of the railway mania, the larger companies had become significant players who controlled much of the existing railway and were often able to dominate their smaller neighbours. In 1844, a mere eleven companies controlled half the mileage while the rest was split between no fewer than ninety-two other concerns – an average of a mere twelve miles each – and as we will see in the next chapter, the trend towards domination by the bigger ones strengthened. Despite the emergence of many new companies, thereby increasing the overall number, a process of consolidation was inevitable. Since the larger railways were able to raise capital for expansion more easily, they had, quite literally, an established track record,
²¹
and would build on this dominant position. They not only had the best-situated railways, linking major towns where passenger traffic was always going to be greatest, but their infrastructure was in better condition and their engineering standards higher.

At the outset of this spurt in growth of railway mileage – that would see 4,128 miles added to the network in the eight years following the
start of the mania – the biggest was the Great Western with 230 miles, precisely the same length as the two principal railways operating on the West Coast route, the London & Birmingham and the Grand Junction (amalgamated as the London & North Western in 1846). The Midland, created in 1844 by the amalgamation of the three railways – the North Midland, Midland Counties and Birmingham & Derby Junction – which converged at Derby, putting paid to the crazy competition there, was the second largest. Amalgamations had been resisted by Parliament – or how else to explain the existence in 1844 of more than one hundred railways for a mileage of 2,235 – but the logic behind the creation of the Midland, the first significant rationalization of the railway network, was irrefutable. The merger provided the central section of a railway that stretched from London to York using the London & Birmingham until Rugby, and at the northern end from Normanton, the York & North Midland, a railway which enjoyed friendly relations with the Midland since it had the same chairman, George Hudson.