Fire and Steam (24 page)

The railways catered for Londoners' other pleasures, even those of the very rich. Golf courses had proliferated in the suburbs and outer districts and had deliberately been built next to railway stations – or in the case of Sandy Lodge (now Moor Park) on the Metropolitan railway, where the station was specially built to accommodate the golfers. The Great Eastern ran a golfers' special on Sundays to Hunstanton, some 112 miles from London, timed to give the sportsmen an afternoon round. Hunters, too, were catered for, with their horses, hounds and servants if necessary, and special hunters' tickets at cheap rates were offered by several railways including the Great Western and the Metropolitan.

Even the dead benefited from the railway network. London's population doubled in the first half of the nineteenth century and the lack of cemetery space meant that graves were frequently reopened, leaving disinterred bones scattered across churchyards. As burying people within the capital's boundaries become more and more impractical because of overcrowding and the high cost of land, trains carrying bodies for burial outside London became commonplace. The cholera epidemic of 1848–9 gave the spur to this initiative, which led to the creation of a special terminal for the departed, Waterloo Necropolis, next to the main station. When a developer, Sir Richard Broun, came up with the idea of buying a large tract of land at Brookwood, in Surrey, twenty-five miles from the centre of London, to create a massive 2,000-acre cemetery, he obviously needed good transport links with the capital and the railway was the only possible solution. Broun's company, London Necropolis, went into partnership with the London & South Western, whose passengers certainly did not want to travel in carriages used by the dead, and therefore special new rolling stock had to be bought.

The trains not only had to be divided into three classes, both for corpses and the grieving friends and relatives, but also had to serve two different stations at Brookwood, one for Anglicans and the other for non-conformist denominations who are buried on the chillier north side of the cemetery. The logistics of dividing up the dead into six categories must have taxed the company and one just hopes that the first-class deceased appreciated the ‘greater degree of decoration' that justified the higher fare paid by their loved ones. The first funeral train pulled out of Waterloo Necropolis in November 1854 and the service quickly built up to a train per day, carrying up to forty-eight bodies in the ‘stiffs express', as it was known by railway workers. Rival services emerged, notably from King's Cross to the Great Northern Cemetery at New Southgate, but the Waterloo service remained the most heavily used.

While by the 1860s the railways were on the way to becoming ubiquitous, even for the dead, maintaining profitability was still a struggle for many companies as they expanded too rapidly. The minimania stimulated by the greater availability of capital and the renewed interest in railway promotion of the 1860s were bound to suffer a similar fate to that of the predecessor. This time the fall in 1866 was even harder,
bringing down many railway contractors, including Sir Samuel Peto, and three major railway companies. The roots of the collapse were in the unregulated banking industry, compounded by the way that contractors had kept many railway companies afloat by funding the lines they built. Overend Gurney was the finance house which had staked most on the new railway bubble of the early 1860s, but the projects it funded were proving more marginal and less profitable, for example, the expensive efforts by the London & Chatham and Peto to build a terminus in the City of London and the construction of obscure railways in distant countries, such as Spain and Canada. Peto and others borrowed against these projects, and when they were unable to pay the bank went down, taking with it the whole financial system. The panic following Overend Gurney's collapse led to creditors besieging other banking houses, prompting a near riot in the austere surroundings of Lombard Street, and the Bank of England had to suspend the Bank Act of 1844 to allow other banks to issue paper money instead of gold to creditors.

Up to that date it was the worst banking collapse in British history, later superseded only by the 1929 crash, and its cause could definitely be laid at the door of the railways. Charles Dickens was unequivocal in his criticism of the railway companies, and of the government which had allowed their unfettered growth, describing the events that led to the financial disaster as caused by ‘a muddle of railways, in all directions possible, and impossible, with no general public scheme, no general public supervision, enormous waste of money, no fixable responsibility'.
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The three main railways which collapsed had all been on a financial knife-edge in any case: the London & Chatham was a poor railway, always in financial difficulties; the Great Eastern was struggling with the financial burden of having built Liverpool Street station; and the London, Brighton & South Coast, once very prosperous, had overstretched itself by opening a series of branch lines to protect its territory from neighbouring rivals.

Although the companies went bust, the railways themselves kept running, under the control of receivers, but the industry's leaders were so concerned about their viability that they petitioned the government for nationalization. The leader of the delegation which knocked on Benjamin Disraeli's door at Number 10 Downing Street in March 1867
was none other than Sir Daniel Gooch, Brunel's great locomotive engineer who had recently been promoted to the chairmanship of the Great Western Railway, which was also in dire straits. What made such an arch-Tory go begging to the government was a real fear that the whole railway system would go under and would have to cease operations. The Great Western itself had only just survived the financial crash, and despite huge takings from the fare box was still struggling to pay loans taken out at the high interest rate of 9 per cent. Gooch was accompanied by two rivals, Edward Watkin of the South Eastern and Samuel Laing of the London, Brighton & South Coast, and they put forward the idea of a £1m loan, backed by the government, to rescue the Great Western, presumably with the notion that the other railways would be bailed out too. In truth this represented nationalization by the back door and Disraeli would have none of it since such an idea ran counter to the Victorian
Zeitgeist
. Disraeli simply replied that it was not the government's duty to interfere with the affairs of a private company in that way.

Despite the concerns of Gooch and his fellow grandees, the railways survived this upheaval and, remarkably, started to expand again quite soon. But the financial collapse of 1866 had done untold damage to their reputation and, worse, this was to be compounded by a series of disasters that put the spotlight on their safety record.

EIGHT

DANGER AND EXPLOITATION ON THE TRACKS

Although the railways were now accessible to a much larger proportion of the population by the 1870s, thanks to the spread of the network and cheaper tickets, there was still an important public relations battle to be won. The railways were accepted and well used, but not loved or even, for the most part, trusted. Some of their nicknames say it all: the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire was the ‘Mucky, Slow & Lazy' while the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton was the ‘Old Worse & Worse'.

The big companies were singled out for frequent criticism in the newspapers and consequently their image was very poor. The task facing the railways in winning over the public was a complex one. When they tried to improve the comfort of their passengers, offering such amenities as steam-heated carriages and picnic baskets, and better service by speeding up trains and providing better timetables, their profitability went down. They provided the best train services in the world, faster than those of any other country, and competition, together with the provision of the parliamentary trains, kept the fares down, but the financial crash of 1866 had dented confidence in the railways. Share ownership was more widespread now and many widows and the genteel poor depended on dividends to eke out a respectable living. The financial collapse had ruined many of these middle-class investors and quite understandably they pointed the finger at the railways.

If it had just been financial incompetence and the sense that the rail companies were rapacious Leviathans exploiting their passengers, the railways might have won over the public through the improvements in the service they were making. Their Achilles heel, however, was safety, with the number and seriousness of accidents inevitably increasing as more trains crowded on to the system at ever greater speeds. One of the most famous men of the age, Charles Dickens, was caught up in a rail accident and became a major advocate for improved safety. Surprisingly, up to this point, safety had been less of an issue than might have been expected, given the disastrous start with the death of Huskisson and the widespread fears about this new fast form of transport. Initially, there was virtually no oversight of safety considerations and it was not until two Acts, passed in 1840 and 1842, that a body of inspectors was created (invariably men from the Royal Engineers) with responsibility for both checking new lines and investigating accidents.

The early trains were light and travelled slowly, which meant that accidents tended to be relatively minor. The first serious crash was in 1841 on the Great Western at Sonning, near Reading, when a train ran into a land slip. Many passengers, most of whom were workmen building the Houses of Parliament and returning to the West Country for Christmas, were thrown out of the open wagons and eight people lost their lives. The subsequent story of rail safety was characterized by gradual improvement as lessons were learnt from these accidents; this first one was no exception, resulting in all wagons being enclosed by a roof, a welcome measure for many poor passengers travelling in third class who had to brave the elements.

The potential risk of a major catastrophe on the railways was highlighted by an accident in France the following year when a train at Versailles burst into flames following a collision. Fifty-two people were killed, many of them incinerated as they had been locked into their carriages to prevent them jumping out between stations. Unsurprisingly, the accident mostly put an end to that practice and on this side of the Channel it was nearly half a century before there was a disaster with a higher death toll (at Armagh, described in the next chapter).

Accidents became more frequent, however, not simply because there were more trains, but because the number of services increased at a faster
rate than the growth in mileage of the system, and this higher intensity of use of the tracks exposed passengers to greater risk. It is no coincidence that many of the major accidents in railway history have taken place in and around London, by far the busiest part of the network. With more trains using the track, the system of time interval signalling was inevitably put under pressure, leading to more collisions. At Lewisham in June 1857 one train went into the back of another, killing eleven people on a busy Sunday night when both were full of day-trippers. It is a recurring theme that many of the worst rail disasters have taken place when people were travelling on excursions or on other special services like troop trains, partly because they were by definition very full but also because they were not in the usual timetable and railway workers, on occasion, forgot about the unscheduled trains.

A similar rear-end collision four years later, in the Clayton tunnel on the Brighton line, was more significant in prompting the public and politicians to put pressure on the railway companies to improve their safety standards. The tunnel is 1.5 mile long and the dangers of a collision had been recognized by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, which had installed a crude type of semaphore system with a signalman at each end. The two could communicate with each other through a telegraph system and indicate when a train was through the tunnel. This was an early form of ‘block' working, the system by which the track is divided into sections that can only ever be occupied by one train, thereby preventing collisions. Telegraphs, a way of communicating along electric wires that was a precursor of the telephone, had first been introduced on the railway as early as 1836 with a trial on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. A telegraph system was installed on the Great Western between Paddington and Slough in 1843 and its usefulness was demonstrated a couple of years later when it enabled a murderer, who had jumped on a Paddington-bound train at Slough, to be apprehended, a full sixty-five years before the more infamous Dr Crippen.
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Soon the telegraph became symbiotic with the railways, both for their own purposes and as the spine of the Post Office's public system.

However, on that fateful day on the Brighton line, Sunday, 25 August 1861, the telegraph did not help and even added to the confusion. Three trains left Brighton in quick succession, two of them excursions filled
with day-trippers heading for London, and the two signalmen became confused about which was which. The signalman at the south end thought he had received a clear signal from his colleague, and sent in a train which smashed into the earlier one, killing twenty-three people, many burnt alive as hot coals from the engine started a fire when the second locomotive toppled over, and injuring 176. By coincidence, within a week another sixteen people were killed and 300 injured in an accident at Kentish Town on what is now the North London line. An excursion service from Kew, ironically organized to raise money for a railway benevolent fund to help compensate staff injured in accidents, collided with a ballast train as result of a mistake by a signalman, sending several carriages tumbling down an embankment.

Despite these disasters, there was great reluctance among railway managers to accept any outside interference in their methods of operation and the Clayton tunnel accident did not bring about the obvious improvements to the signalling system that were clearly necessary. Over the previous two decades, there had been several other accidents caused by the time-interval signalling system and the Board of Trade Inspectorate was constantly urging the railway companies to abandon it. However, the companies drew the rather perverse conclusion from Clayton that introducing a space-interval system – i.e. one where sections of occupied track would be protected by a danger signal – would not only slow up traffic but increase the risk as drivers would become lazy and less alert.
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Specifically, the managers argued that the signal in the Clayton accident had not worked properly and that the space-interval block had failed to prevent the crash. But this was rather like arguing that because a faulty watch does not show the right time, timepieces as a whole are a bad idea! Nevertheless, the railway companies' view prevailed for several years since the inspectors had only an advisory role and could not enforce changes. Nor, in truth, would they have wanted to. The inspectors valued their independence and they did not want to become an arm of government. This, after all, was still at the height of a laissez-faire attitude and no government wanted to become wholly responsible for enforcing safety on the railway. The rather loose arrangements over safety regulation suited all the parties until the roll call of accidents simply became too great.