Fire and Steam (21 page)

The construction of the branch lines brought the railway to places that hitherto had been unaffected by the nineteenth century's transport revolution. Take the quaint-sounding Ware, Hadham & Buntingford
Railway, opened in 1863. It ran from a junction with the Broxbourne and Hertford to Buntingford fourteen miles away over pleasant Hertfordshire countryside that was gently hilly but presented no problems to the engineers. As with many such lines, querulous landowners had prevented the optimal route being built which would have connected with the main line at Ware, and further resistance stopped the construction of an extension to link with the Cambridge line, which would have transformed the branch into a useful diversionary loop. The only remaining purpose of the railway was, therefore, to serve the 3,000 people living in Buntingford and the villages along the route, and its initial mainstay was freight, principally agricultural produce, although later it would become a commuter line with through trains into London. Inevitably, given the line was a risky financial proposition from the start, the company that built it quickly became incorporated into its bigger neighbour, the Great Eastern, with the shareholders losing much of their investment. The line, like so many built in this period, was closed following the Beeching Report, with passenger services ceasing in 1964 and freight the following year.

There were, quite literally, hundreds of similar lines spreading around Britain. Even the Isle of Wight, an island just fifteen by ten miles, acquired thirty-two miles of railway by 1875
⁴
and eventually fifty-five by the end of the century, built by no fewer than eight different companies. There were even branches off branches where a train from the junction with the main line might disgorge its passengers at a remote station, only for them to have to change on to an even more remote service. For example, Yelverton, eight miles from Plymouth on the Launceston line, was the starting point of a branch to Princetown, the highest point of the railway in the West Country, reached by a windy line over a deserted stretch of Dartmoor. It could hardly have been a busy line, serving only a sparsely populated area with just three halts and a station at a hamlet called Dousland (the abandoned trackbed can still be seen from the road). The only regular source of revenue was from prisoners and their escorts heading for the bleak prison on the moor, a traffic that lasted until the closure of the line in the 1960s. It was not only the prisoners that were on the wild side; according to one chronicler, ‘the train staff were a rugged group who never came nearer
to civilisation than momentarily at Yelverton, one of a number of stations where the locomotive changed ends of its train by running into a siding and allowing the coaches (often a solitary coach) to slide past it by gravity,
⁵
a technique known as fly shunting.

The arrival of a branch line was an event of great significance to be celebrated with a grand opening, like those that marked the inauguration of the first railways. Everyone was given a holiday and the first train would generally start off from the last station on the line, often with a locomotive hauling the railway company's entire stock of carriages, filled with every local person of any note. At each country station on the line, the train would be welcomed by a crowd of local people thronging the area and at the town where the branch joined the main line, there would be a procession and a huge banquet lunch for the notables while the hoi polloi were entertained with a fair and country dancing, followed by a ‘cold collation', with beer for the men and tea for the women and children. In Launceston, the day was so marred by heavy rainfall that wet days are still referred to locally as ‘railway weather' and when the South Devon Railway was extended to Torquay and Paignton, ‘a riot developed about the sharing out of an immense pudding weighing 1½ tons which had been prepared for the occasion'.
⁶
At every opening, the local promoters would ‘unfailingly [be] praised for the endeavours . . . unfailingly the bishop or vicar hoped that the Sabbath would not be disturbed . . . and unfailingly a director diplomatically replied that only those Sunday trains that Post Office and public absolutely demanded would be run'.
⁷
Indeed, as mentioned in
Chapter 2
, running rail services on a Sunday remained an issue of controversy well into the twentieth century (although nowadays it is mostly engineering works that make Sunday a day to avoid taking the trains!).

As the railway spread into the rural interstices of the country, it had the same long-lasting effect as those early lines did on their local communities (see
Chapter 4
), but the changes affected a far higher proportion of the population. The arrival of the iron road was a life-transforming experience, because for the next two generations the railway line rather than the road would be the gateway to the rest of the world. Most immediately, the price of coal nearly always fell by a third with the opening of a new line as horses and carts were an inefficient
form of transport for such a basic commodity. Gradually, the railway would start to bring in everything from agricultural machinery to pots and pans: ‘Calves, day old chicks, pigs and other reinforcements for the local livestock normally came by passenger train along with the mails, newspapers, and local soldiers on leave. The pair of rails disappearing over the horizon stood for progress, disaster, the major changes in life: the route to Covent Garden and Ypres, the way one's fiancé paid his first visit to one's parents, one's children returned for deathbed leavetaking . . . etc'.
⁸

Commodities not previously available would start being delivered by the train, including mail order goods bought through newspaper advertisements. However, while the railway gave local shops easier access to a wider range of stock, it also offered their potential customers a faster trip to the nearest town's High Street. Farmers found new markets for their produce, often at a better price: in 1881, Derbyshire farmers could obtain a shilling for a gallon of milk compared with 8d to turn it into butter or cheese. While they had to pay for carriage on the train, it was still worthwhile just to avoid the labour-intensive and slow processing of the milk into other dairy products. On the other hand, this new efficient market process could result in local shortages while businesses adapted to the new situation. In the 1860s, as the railways of Devon and Cornwall proliferated, so much milk was exported from the region that it became scarce and disrupted the local dairy business.

As we have seen, fares were required by Parliament to be a penny a mile for at least one train, but this was often scheduled at the least convenient hour to make the service as unattractive as possible, so that even poor people were forced on to the more popular trains, which would charge a penny farthing per mile. Second class would cost perhaps 1½d, and first class 2d to 3d, though the local squires tended to have their own family carriage which they would hitch on to the train. The most common frequency was three to six trains per day, usually mixed passenger and goods. Invariably the trains would stop at all stations and sometimes shunt a few wagons off and on while the passengers were rattled around in the spartan second-hand carriages, which was often all the branch line companies could afford. While we
may nostalgically think of those Agatha Christie films with a sole passenger arriving at a tiny station manned by a friendly porter/ticket inspector/signalman/station-master, who then ferries his charge to the local mansion in a horse cart, the reality was that passengers were a minor source of revenue for many of these lines, which were only viable if there were a regular traffic of minerals, especially coal, agricultural produce or manufactured goods. On successful branches, takings from goods exceeded passenger revenue by a factor of three or more, the opposite ratio to that on most main lines where profitability was dependent on passenger revenue.

The spread of the branch line was so universal that by 1880 hardly any town of significance was more than walking distance from a station and by the outbreak of the First World War, there was barely a hamlet that was twenty miles away. There was even the odd private branch and station. The ambitious plan to reach Wick and Thurso in the northern Highlands was a slow enterprise and by 1865 had reached no further than Golspie, two miles short of the aptly-named Dunrobin, seat of the Duke of Sutherland. He was so anxious to have the railway connection that he not only financed the completion of the approved section, but built an additional seventeen miles further to Helmsdale himself. When the line was opened, Dunrobin became a private station for the castle and housed the Duke's own carriage, which was hauled by his own private locomotive. To be fair to the Duke, he did eventually give the line to the Highland Railway in 1884, ten years after the route to Wick and Thurso had been completed. He wrote off the £300,000 cost and, had it not been for his generosity, it is doubtful the line would ever have been built. By any rational economics it was a Victorian folly, but proved to be remarkably useful in the First World War (see
Chapter 11
) and survives to this day. There were other private stations, many of them not listed in the usual railway directories.
⁹

The Duke's efforts were part of a trend in both Scotland and Wales, whose large rural areas began to be criss-crossed with railways during this period. The development of Scotland's rail network was a complex and intricate story involving no fewer than 200 different companies – who, interestingly, built parts of their network south of the border, an invasion that their English counterparts never matched. The first major
lines were established in the early 1840s, centred around Glasgow and Edinburgh, which were linked in 1842. In 1848 the system was connected with the English network via Carlisle and Carstairs, and also through Berwick on the East Coast, but until 1855 the Highlands had not been reached by the railway, the nearest being the Elgin–Lossiemouth line which opened in 1852. Aberdeen had been reached in 1850 and plans for a Great North of Scotland Railway, running from Aberdeen to Inverness, had been authorized and completed by 1858, giving a very circuitous route south from the Highland capital, a journey that was later shortened by the construction of the line between Inverness and Perth, which became part of the Highland Railway. The Dingwall & Skye Railway reached Stromeferry, for Skye, in 1870, and, as mentioned above, the two little northern Highland towns, Wick and Thurso, were connected to the railway in 1874. Some of these Highland lines ran through areas that were so remote that passenger numbers were minimal. In that famous scene from John Buchan's classic,
The Thirty-Nine Steps,
the hero, Richard Hannay, running from German agents, finds himself at Galloway station which ‘proved to be ideal' for hiding since it was in the middle of the moors with ‘a waiting room, an office, the stationmaster's cottage and a tiny yard of gooseberries and sweet-william [but] there seemed to be no road from it anywhere'.
¹⁰

Glasgow was the obvious centre of the Scottish rail network, the equivalent of London north of the border, and found itself with a series of main line stations, no fewer than four by the 1870s, of which two survive. That was a reflection of the highly competitive situation in Scotland where there was even less consolidation than in England. Indeed, until the creation of the Scottish Region of British Railways a century later, Scotland did not have an integrated national railway system at all; instead, five major companies,
¹¹
quite a number for such a small population, competed directly on routes where alternative journeys were possible. The difficulties and extra costs resulting from such a disjointed system were well illustrated in Perth, which had three different companies running into its station, each with its own locomotives and carriage sidings, a crazy waste for a relatively small town, which caused constant operational difficulties. Of the five railways, the most significant was the
North British, whose greatest achievement was providing the impetus for the construction of the spectacular bridge over the Firth of Forth, completed in 1890 and carried out in conjunction with two of the other large Scottish railways (see
Chapter 9
).

The Welsh story is interesting in that the Principality acquired far more railways than its population could ever support, both because of the failure of Parliament to assess the market properly, and also, more sinisterly, as a result of sheer corruption. The railways came late to most of the Principality and by 1850 Wales still only possessed two main line routes, both along its coastlines. The Chester to Holyhead line, completed in 1848, ran along the main communication route established by Edward I, who in the thirteenth century guarded it with a series of castles in towns such as Flint and Conway. These towns were now linked by the railway, which became the principal route for the Irish Mail, connecting with steamers to Ireland. In the south there was a railway from Gloucester to Swansea and Cardiff but there were no lines in between apart from a short branch from the Shrewsbury & Chester to Oswestry. Then, over the next couple of decades, a plethora of lines sprang up, covering central Wales with an unsustainably dense network of railways. Many of the rural lines were promoted by small local landowners eager to get access to larger markets for their produce while the construction of others was stimulated by rivalry between the Great Western and the North Western, with both companies trying to prevent their rival from making incursions into their territory.

In the more industrialized south Wales, a large network of railways built up in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire to service the coal, iron and steel industries. Incredibly, this became the densest network of lines anywhere in the UK (and possibly the world) outside London. Again, competition rather than consolidation was the prevailing ethos, and by 1900 seven companies ran into Merthyr Tydfil while Swansea boasted six passenger termini. Between 1863 and 1867, Brecon was connected to the rail network via four branch lines but no main line railway linked it to the outside world (the quickest route would have been along the Usk valley where it could have connected with the Newport–Hereford main line at Abergavenny). This strange state of affairs was partly a result of a campaign by a canal company, the Monmouthshire Railway
&Canal Company, to block the rail route along the valley, one of the few instances in railway history where canal interests prevailed.
¹²
During this period several narrow gauge railways emerged in Wales, notably the Ffestiniog (see
Chapter 10
).