Fire and Steam (20 page)

The decision was prompted by the difficulties endured by the Midland in bringing its trains through to the capital. In 1862, ten of its trains were delayed every day by having to wait for Great Northern traffic
and, worst of all, during the popular International Exhibition, the Midland had the ignominy of seeing some of its passenger trains routed into the Great Northern's goods terminal because of lack of capacity at King's Cross. The Midland's line to London opened in 1868, though the hotel in the station was not completed until 1873, and caused considerable upheaval. To run lines into London was becoming increasingly costly and necessitated the demolition of ever greater numbers of homes. Here the destructive force of the railway could be seen at its most powerful. Virtually every town connected to the network experienced a certain amount of demolition, though some, rather than face this prospect, pushed the station to the outer edge of the built-up area, a move which was welcomed by the hackney cab drivers but was met with dismay by passengers. London, however, could not be bypassed in the same way and saw by far the greatest level of upheaval. While the 1846 Royal Commission on Metropolis Railway Termini had decided that the railways should be kept out of the centre of the city, there was still plenty of housing in the way of the projected lines as they cut their way to the stations on the boundary determined by the Commission.

Both the Great Northern and the London & Birmingham had already caused destruction and mayhem in a swathe of north London between Camden Town, Euston and King's Cross but the Midland was to be particularly destructive. The company, with fantastic foresight, designed the line as a four-track railway, greatly worsening its impact. Agar Town, a poor area of rookeries and hovels, was virtually wiped out and the construction of the station at St Pancras alone resulted in 20,0 people losing their homes. Even the dead were not immune as part of the Old St Pancras churchyard had to be destroyed, uncovering thousands of decaying bodies which had to be moved, a task observed by Thomas Hardy, the novelist, who as a young man was employed by the architect to ensure the job was carried out properly.

There was an extra side effect of the creation of these lines across cities. The railways which cut through London and other big cities, especially Manchester
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but also Birmingham and Leeds, were invariably raised on long viaducts or embankments, or buried in cuttings, that split up neighbourhoods and, indeed, the whole city. The
railways might have looked fine atop their elegant arched structures but were greatly resented by the remaining local residents who were forced to live, quite literally, under their shadow and the poor usually ended up on ‘the wrong side' of the tracks: ‘Each of these new railway lines became itself the source of new divisions and demarcations . . . they became the new dialect lines of social distinction, having each of them a right and wrong side.'
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Nor was the destruction as beneficial as the railway companies tried to claim. While they argued that they were carrying out a public service by demolishing the slums, in truth that was promoters' gloss masking a far more complicated situation; for example, at Somers Town, just north of Agar Town, much of the housing destroyed by the Midland was in good condition, laid out on streets rather than alleys.

Moreover, while the destruction of large numbers of working people's homes was celebrated as a way of getting rid of slums, there was little consideration of the consequences for the people made homeless as a result. The implication that the destruction of these areas benefited public health was disingenuous since the companies had no obligation to provide rehousing and while the owners received compensation, their displaced tenants were simply left to their own devices. It was not until 1853 that the railways had to take any account of those thrown out of their homes, and even then they were merely required to draw up a ‘demolition statement' setting out the numbers. A few tenants were given trifling amounts of compensation but those who paid rent weekly rather than monthly received nothing. After much pressure by social reformers, a standing order passed in Parliament in 1874 was supposed to ensure that the poorest were rehoused by the railway companies – but this was largely ignored. The landlords would, in any case, frequently enable the railways to evade the obligation by evicting their tenants a few days before the properties were transferred. Later, further legislation placed tighter obligations on the companies but even these were largely circumvented. A conservative estimate of the numbers displaced in London alone is 120,000,
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but the real figure was undoubtedly higher due to the efforts by landlords and railway companies to get around the law and the lack of information about a very fluid and itinerant section of the population.

Ironically, the railways were eager to provide another form of accommodation – hotels – which were well appointed and frequently luxurious. Although trains were becoming faster, the companies made little effort to reduce journey times in line with this technological progress. Railway travel was so superior to any alternative that the companies did not really need to bother. On occasion they speeded up trains in order to compete with their rivals, such as the Great Western, which briefly ran trains from London to Birmingham fifteen minutes faster than the London & North Western despite the greater mileage, but soon abandoned that strategy as expensive and unreliable. There were still stops for refreshments and ‘comfort breaks' since there were no corridors or toilets on the trains, as well as for changing the engine or filling the tender tanks, though, later, lengthy troughs, typically 2,0 feet (600m) long, were placed between the tracks to allow locomotives to pick up water without stopping.

Long journeys remained an ordeal. A trip between London Euston and Edinburgh took over twelve hours by day and seventeen by the night mail. Aberdeen was virtually a full day's journey from London, and none of these trains offered any sort of sleeping accommodation. As early as 1838, the railways had begun to offer a rudimentary aid to people wanting to sleep on the mail trains by providing a cushion supported between the compartment's seats by poles which could be hired from the guard. It does not sound very comfortable but was probably better than sitting upright all night. Proper sleeping cars were not introduced until 1873 when the North British Railway started offering a service between London and Glasgow, but at first passengers had to bring their own bed linen.

Inevitably, given the discomfort of train travel, hotels sprang up at stations and junctions to cater for the exhausted traveller, and later for tourists. Until the law on companies was relaxed so that other enterprises enjoyed the same ability to raise capital from a multitude of shareholders, the railways were the only businesses with the capital resources to invest in such big enterprises and soon most of the larger railways had branched out into providing hotels. The first hotel to be built by a railway had been opened at Euston in 1839, the year after the station's completion. Other hotels serving railway passengers quickly
followed at junctions such as Derby, Normanton and Swindon, as the railway companies realized that providing accommodation was an opportunity to boost their income. The South Eastern broke new ground by opening the Pavilion Hotel in Folkestone, catering for travellers using the cross-Channel steamers, and soon similar hotels appeared at many major stations, notably the Great Western Royal Hotel at Paddington – the biggest in the country with 103 bedrooms – and the Great Northern at King's Cross, both opened in 1854. The classic railway hotel is at a terminus, straddling the platforms, and the first of these was the elegant Royal Station Hotel at Hull's Paragon station, opened in 1851, which formed two sides of the concourse in an L-shape.

Hotels became an established part of the larger railway companies' businesses and by the end of the century there were railway hotels in all ten largest English provincial cities except Bristol,
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and at nearly all the London termini. Four Scottish railway companies built hotels for golfers and several companies created ‘country hotels', aimed solely at tourists, the first of which was at Furness Abbey, near Barrow, built by the Furness Railway, principally a mineral line, in 1847. Many major hotels remained in railway ownership until the privatization of British Transport Hotels in the early 1980s.

The queen of these hotels was, of course, the Midland Grand at St Pancras, opened in 1873, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott to dominate the far more simple yet elegant lines of its neighbour, Lewis Cubitt's King's Cross. St Pancras is the most significant urban structure built by the railways. Both its engine shed, the inelegant name given to the enormous glass and iron shelter over the platforms designed by William Barlow, and the George Gilbert Scott hotel would be notable individually, but together they create a world-class terminus that is now enjoying a twenty-first-century renaissance as it has been transformed into an international station served by the Eurostar services to and from Paris and Brussels. The sheer scale is breathtaking in itself as the station is 150 metres wide and twice that distance long, but the Gothic design, with its exaggerated features such as the clock tower, numerous spires and the large statue of Britannia glaring over at King's Cross make it one of London's greatest landmarks. The sheer contrast between those
two stations, the Gothic St Pancras alongside the simple elegance of King's Cross, built less than two decades apart, demonstrates both the energy and wastefulness engendered by the emphasis on competition rather than cooperation, which dominated this key period in the history of the railways. Jack Simmons has explained precisely why the Victorians of this era could never have chosen a state-planned system of railway development: ‘The spirit [of the times] was competitive through and through: it was commerce against agriculture, North against South, London against the provinces, the middle classes against the aristocracy – and behind it sits Britain in competition with the rest of the world.'
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The Midland was to epitomize this by embarking on its own, highly successful path to maximize its profits and embarrass and annoy its rivals by abolishing second class and ensure that all trains could carry third-class passengers.

Memories were short and the urge to make money was built into the Victorian psyche. It was no surprise, therefore, that within a few years of the end of the mania, railway projects aplenty were being promoted. The revival of interest in railway investment was facilitated by a change in attitude by the landowners. The hostility of the early years had, with a few exceptions, disappeared. However, the landowners were still not averse to the idea of extorting as much as possible from the railway companies for the purchase of their land, even though they had begun to realize the advantages of having a railway connection on their doorstep. In the twenty years after the collapse of the mania, the railways would again double in size, from 6,000 to 12,000 route miles, and a combination of competitive drive and over-confidence would ensure that a significant proportion of these new lines consisted of unnecessary or uneconomic branches.

SEVEN

THE AGATHA CHRISTIE RAILWAY

By 1860, memories of the damage caused by the abrupt end of the mania were fading and interest in the railways began to be revived. The next two decades saw mostly steady economic growth, apart from a brief downturn in the mid-1860s, and the more benign financial climate encouraged a new wave of railway promotion and construction. There was technological progress, too, with the introduction of locomotives that burnt coal rather than the more expensive coke used previously, and the development of steel tyres
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for trains that were stronger than their iron predecessors. Signalling was becoming more sophisticated and safer, with innovations such as interlocking – ensuring signals were coordinated with the points they controlled – being introduced at busier junctions.

The sharp economic growth of the early 1860s stimulated another brief railway boom and although this was brought to an abrupt halt by a further collapse in 1866, people everywhere were clamouring to be connected to the railway. Previously, there had been the odd offshoot from the main railways as well as a host of short lines that were entirely separate from the main network, but now small towns and even villages were beginning to be connected to the national railway system. The advantages of connection were becoming so apparent that local traders would put their life savings into financially dubious schemes in a desperate bid to boost their business. The large landowners had mostly changed their view from an instinctive opposition born of conservatism and fear of change, to a qualified support, aware that there was much
in it for them, not least, in the short term a good price for the strips of land requisitioned by the railway developer. Self-interest, as ever, prevailed, but that was not the only catalyst for the spread of the railways: people wanted to be connected with the changing world of the mid-nineteenth century.

There were two ways to initiate a new branch line – top down or bottom up. Some of the larger companies made great efforts to create a network of branches leading into their main lines. The North Eastern, for example, realized that its local mineral industries would be a major source of income and installed private sidings for factories and even for large farms. In contrast, other companies concentrated on their main line network and were rather uninterested in developing branch lines, which they saw as loss-making irrelevancies; in those cases, the initiative had to come from local people, usually those at the far end of a projected route.

But before local people could get a completed railway, they got the navvies, who were rarely welcomed with open arms. Cecil Torr,
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writing during the First World War, recalls his grandfather complaining about the disruption caused in 1864 when the line from Newton Abbot to Moretonhampstead was being built by Thomas Brassey. There was fighting all night and ‘the villains stole all poor old X's fowls . . . there is not a fowl or egg to be got hereabouts'. The grandfather was not unsympathetic, though, and learnt that one ‘fine built tall likely a fellow as you ever saw, and nicknamed the Bulldog' worked Saturday and Monday, and received ‘5s 6d for the two days, slept in a barn and spent all his earnings at the public house'. But other changes to traditional ways of life must have been equally daunting. David St John Thomas describes the considerable general disturbance: ‘the closing of roads, the mess and noise of the steam excavator used even on the Sabbath, the luring away of farm labourers who could earn as much on the railway in three ten-hour days as all week on the land, the absence of pupils from schools, the tearing apart of favourite coppices and fields, the putting up of food prices and the occasional scarcities'.
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