Fire and Steam (28 page)

It was the most significant accident in British railway history as ‘in those shattered coaches of the ill-fated excursion train, the old happy-go-lucky days of railway working came to their ultimate end and the modern phase of railway working as we know it began'.
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The public response to Armagh was remarkably rapid, especially in the light of the failure to act in the aftermath of other, equally preventable, accidents. There was an outcry following the accident, heightened by the death of so many children. As a result the government found the ability to move far more quickly and forcefully than ever before and rushed through – within weeks of the accident – the Regulation Act.

The Armagh accident had highlighted two fundamental inadequacies of the safety regime on the railway network: the braking system and the continued use of the time-interval method of keeping trains apart rather than any form of signalling. The three pillars of the new safety regime introduced by the Regulation Act of 1889 were, therefore, ‘lock, block and brake'. The first refers to interlocking, a crucial aspect of rail safety which ensures that the indications on the signals correspond to the way that the points on the rails are set. Signals were controlled mechanically by levers in signal boxes connected to cables, pulleys and rods, and it was relatively easy to devise methods of interlocking to prevent trains being sent in directions other than those shown by the signals.

‘Block' refers to the method of dividing up the track into sections – or blocks – which the signalling system ensures can be occupied by only one train at a time. This innovation was made much easier when track circuits, an electrical device that shows when a train is in a particular section, started to be introduced in 1901. Like many developments on the railways, track circuits took a long time to be implemented throughout the network, and even at nationalization in 1948 many sections of track still did not have this form of protection.

The third element of the legislation required the fitting of continuous automatic brakes, but did not specify what type, and every company seemed to prefer its own version. As mentioned before, there were arguments in favour of both vacuum and air brakes but, as Jack Simmons puts it, ‘what was indefensible was the failure to agree, in a small country where so much through working of vehicles took place between one company's lines and another'.
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It would not be until nationalization after the Second World War that a standard braking system would be adopted and then, oddly, the vacuum method was preferred over air, which was used in most other railways in the world. Since then, the situation has reversed and all trains in the UK now use air brakes (with the exception of a few heritage railways).

While the legislation passed after the Armagh accident may have ensured that the companies took safety seriously, in fairness it really only speeded up improvements which the railways had been putting in place anyway. The rate of accidents tailed off immediately and in 1901, for the first time since the 1840s, and then again in 1908, no passenger was killed in a railway accident during a calendar year.

If Armagh was the accident that had the greatest long-term impact, the one which made the deepest and longest impression on the public was the Tay Bridge disaster a decade before. This not only highlighted the risks of taking short cuts in engineering, but also ensured that the much more ambitious project of crossing the Firth of Forth was carried out successfully. The Tay Bridge was not bridge to collapse, a dubious honour which went to the three-span structure designed by Robert Stephenson to cross the river Dee in Cheshire that plunged into the river in early 1847, killing five people, but it was by far the most
spectacular in railway history.

The scheme to build a bridge across the Tay was attractive to the North British Railway as it would not only provide direct access to Dundee from Fife, rather than having to detour via Perth, but it also allowed the company to compete for traffic against its old rival, the Caledonian. It was an ambitious enterprise. Two miles long, the bridge was then the longest construction in the world and it took several years for the manager of the North British, Thomas Bouch, to convince his employers that the project was worth while. However, with its passengers facing the unpleasant choice of a ferry ride or a sixty-mile detour, the company eventually agreed and the bill to build a bridge costing £300,000 (say, £22m in today's money) was passed in 1870. Bouch designed the bridge and oversaw the work, which started two years later. The single-track bridge, which consisted of a steel box on stone piers, was completed in 1878, having cost the lives of twenty of the 600 men who built it.

In the summer of 1879, Bouch was knighted by Queen Victoria, whose annual journey to Balmoral was shortened by the new bridge, but within months he was to be vilified for having caused the worst-ever disaster resulting from a structural failure on these shores, an unhappy record that remains to this day. The bridge, which had eighty-five spans, rose slightly from the banks to ensure there was space for shipping and it was this high section that was to collapse on the stormy night of 28 December 1879, killing all seventy-five people travelling on the train which plunged into the murky water below. The weather was so foul that when a signalman found that communications with the other side had been lost he attempted to walk across the bridge to check on the train, but was beaten back by the weather. On descending to the shore he realized that the whole centre section, known as the ‘high girders', had vanished.

The precise cause was never ascertained although Bouch appeared to have greatly underestimated the structural requirements needed to resist the Force 10 gales that blow regularly in the Firth of Tay area. The train may have derailed, dislodging one of the ‘high girders', all thirteen of which collapsed into the Tay, but in a recent assessment of the disaster, researchers concluded that the fault lay principally with Bouch's design.
In a way the Tay Bridge disaster was timely. Bouch had been commissioned to design the even more ambitious Forth crossing which, while only having to cross a mile and a quarter of water, was much grander in scale and conception. Bouch had even laid the foundation stone for a suspension bridge, but not surprisingly work ceased immediately after the Tay disaster while the design was reassessed and the discredited engineer was promptly removed from the project.

The Forth Bridge,
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which was to become the most famous single structure on Britain's railways – portrayed on everything from £1 coins to biscuit tins and advertisements for ladies' stockings – had long been discussed as a vital connection between Edinburgh and Fife but such a huge enterprise was beyond the means of a single railway company. Therefore, in 1873, four companies which stood to profit from a quicker route through Scotland – the North British, the North Eastern, the Great Northern and the Midland – joined together to form the Forth Bridge Railway Company which, after aborting its first effort following the Tay Bridge disaster, obtained a new Bill in 1881 authorizing the construction of the bridge. It was the Midland, eager to boost traffic on its newly completed Scottish route using the Settle & Carlisle line, that was the most enthusiastic supporter of the project, tossing a cool £1m, a third of the required capital, into the kitty, and work started in 1883.

The elegance of the bridge, using a novel cantilever design with spans far longer than anything previously attempted, is testimony to the engineering skills of its designer, Benjamin Baker. In truth, the bridge was probably overspecified to withstand the winds, but that was understandable given the Tay disaster and does not detract from the sheer beauty of the structure, which is perhaps best illustrated by haunting photographs of the cantilever sections standing separately in the mists of the Firth during construction, looking like the skeletons of three vast ships growing out of the water. The bridge is supported by three huge towers standing on bases sunk into the water. However, the cantilevered design enabled the enormous structure to be self-supporting while being erected, avoiding the expensive and risky need to build temporary columns in the water. The dangers during construction were so obvious that boats were on permanent duty below to pick up men who fell off the structure, but many of the workforce (a
total of 4,600 at its peak) took ridiculous risks like jumping from one girder to another while drunk. The eventual death toll of fifty-seven, which included seventeen men who worked in compressed-air chambers to build the support columns, seems relatively low given the constant level of danger.

The Forth Bridge, which cut thirty-one miles out of the journey between Edinburgh and Dundee, was opened by the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, an eager supporter of things new; six months later he cut the ribbon on the City & South London railway, the world's first deep-level underground line. At the party following the opening of the Forth Bridge, Edward and his guests celebrated by gorging on a pie containing 300 skylarks, a favoured delicacy of the time.

With the new Tay Bridge – built to higher standards with twin rather than single tracks – also now open, the East and West Coast companies could indulge in a new race – this time from London to Aberdeen – and the competition was conducted with even fiercer rivalry than the one seven years previously. The contest broke out in the summer of 1895, coinciding with the start of the grouse season, which brought the lucrative traffic of the hunting brigade up to Scotland for the Glorious Twelfth, along with the court hangers-on who moved up to Scotland with the Queen for the summer. ‘They were the most valuable passenger traffic on the English railways . . . They travelled with perhaps their wives – certainly a female companion – plenty of servants, dogs, guns and luggage. Above all, they paid their lavish way in golden sovereigns and out of their own pockets.'
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They were known irreverently by railway workers as ‘The Grouse Traffic'.

The rival companies had broadly kept to their agreement of timetabling the East Coast trains at fifteen minutes quicker than those on the West Coast until on 1 June 1895 the West Coast companies brought forward by ten minutes the arrival of the overnight 8 p.m. train from Euston. The move was designed to allow extra time for the wealthy passengers with their mounds of luggage to change to the local Deeside train that served their hunting lodges. However, it meant the Euston train reached Aberdeen by 7.40 a.m., just five minutes behind the East Coast service, which then responded by cutting a quarter an hour off its train's scheduled time. A tit-for-tat battle ensued, with the
West Coast cutting more than an hour off its timing, aiming to reach Aberdeen by 6.35 a.m. For seventeen days each group of companies sought to better their rivals' time. The effort which went into the contest was considerable, requiring fresh engines to be prepared far earlier than normal and signalmen to be alerted. The companies were ruthless in their pressure to save time. The West Coast companies effectively abandoned their timetables, rushing passengers on at intermediate stops and departing straightaway, irrespective of the scheduled time – a breach of standard railway practice, which is never to leave early so that punctual passengers are not inconvenienced. At Crewe one evening, in the rush to get the train away, a hapless porter who had made the mistake of helping an old lady on to the train found himself taking an unexpected trip to Glasgow. On the East Coast, the North Eastern and the North British insisted at first on adhering to their timetables but later discarded them in the rush to beat off their rivals.

The race caught the public imagination and every evening at both Euston and King's Cross, as well as at intermediate stops on the route, crowds gathered to cheer the racers on their journey and the newspapers provided information on the previous day's runs in great detail, as if reporting the Derby or the Grand National. Indeed, the press even complained that the races had encouraged gambling on the outcome. The finishing post was not really Aberdeen but Kinnaber Junction, thirty-eight miles south, where the two routes met. Amazingly, the signalman there, who was a Caledonian man and therefore part of the West Coast partnership, allowed through the East Coast train just a minute ahead of its rival, a decision very much in keeping with the spirit of the railway which, despite the intense rivalry between companies, was felt by the workforce to be one family. By the end the timings were incredible. On 20 August, the East Coast train burst through to Aberdeen in just eight hours forty minutes, arriving in the granite city at the unearthly time of 4.40 a.m.

In response, the West Coast cheated. It stripped a train down for racing and did the journey – which had until recently been timetabled at nearly twelve hours – in just eight hours thirty-two minutes, at an average speed of 63 mph. That marked the end of the race as the companies became aware that the massive resources being ploughed
into the contest were not only being wasted but were actually becoming counter-productive: fewer people were travelling on these trains, perhaps out of fear of an accident, but also because the ride at such speed was at times very uncomfortable. Moreover, what was the point of arriving at Aberdeen in the small hours to be thrown out of one's sleeper car only to have to wait two hours for breakfast and three hours for the connection? It would take eighty years and the introduction of high-speed trains for the timings achieved in that infamous fortnight to be beaten regularly. Even today, over a century later and with state-of-the-art trains, the fastest day services take just over seven hours, a mere hour and a half less than in those heady days of August 1895.

Superficially, these races appear to have been mere braggadocio on the part of the railway companies, but in the long term they helped to transform Britain's railways. They jolted the companies out of a torpor and helped them to concentrate on improving the service they were providing. It was ‘a fine and spectacular advertisement for British railways'
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which gave Britain the world record for speed.