Great Victorian Railway Journeys: How Modern Britain was Built by Victorian Steam Power

Great Victorian Railway Journeys: How Modern Britain was Built by Victorian Steam Power
Karen Farrington

The perfect companion to Bradshaw’s guide book. Showcasing in colour all that is great about Bradshaw’s guide.Great British Railway Journeys has been a hugely successful TV programme, which is now into its third series on BBC2. Much as Michael Palin built up a dedicated fan base for travel around the globe, so Michael Portillo has done likewise for lovers of trains in his explorations the length and breadth of the United Kingdom from the window of a train seat.Both charming and insightful, Michael again uses Bradshaw’s guides, and now undertakes five unique journeys that were constructed by the Victorians from 1830-1900. Across 25 episodes he delves into this fascinating and colourful period of our history, and show how the modern British landscape was created from this Victorian legacy. From Windsor to Weymouth, Great Yarmouth to London, Oxford to Milford Haven, Berwick to Barrow, and finally Dublin to Belfast – Michael will go back in time to showcase areas of outstanding Victorian engineering and design across Queen Victoria’s dominions. Key parts of the programme and tie-in book will showcase how the world's very first fixed-track train in Merthyr Tydfil operated; how the world's first electric train service ran in Southend to its famous pier; and he also celebrates the wide variety of lines that opened up trade and mobility to the Victorian classes.Travelling on a variety of existing, and in some cases restored, Victorian train lines, he meets their passionate supporters who lovingly work on them, and also looks at the modern landscape to tell the story of how each area was shaped by their Victorian forebears. Lavishly produced, this will once again be a 'must have' purchase for all train lovers, as well as those who simply want to find out their heritage and what is now available to view and travel upon in the 21st century to transport them back in time.

GREAT

VICTORIAN

RAILWAY

JOURNEYS

KAREN FARRINGTON

© National Railway Museum/SSPL

The first edition of Bradshaw's Railway Companion of 1840, with a pocket watch made c. 1870 by J. Atkins & Son of Coventry for a guard on the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway

© Old House books & maps

Bradshaw’s map of Dublin

Contents

Cover (#u6ed08c15-6998-53df-9070-38cd994f29f8)

Title Page (#ucc1278c4-aa45-501d-88a8-ff478071e079)

FOREWORD: By Michael Portillo - The Victorian Railway Revolution

INTRODUCTION: By Karen Farrington - The Genius of Bradshaw’s

JOURNEY 1: Excursions and Innovations - GREAT YARMOUTH to LONDON

JOURNEY 2: From Academia to Industry - OXFORD to MILFORD HAVEN

JOURNEY 3: A Royal Progress - WINDSOR to WEYMOUTH

JOURNEY 4: Border Country - BERWICK-UPON-TWEED to THE ISLE OF MAN

JOURNEY 5: Bradshaw’s Ireland - DUBLIN to BELFAST

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

© Old House books & maps

Bradshaw’s map of the Isle of Wight.

On an engine from the Downpatrick Heritage Steam Railway.

ince 2009, when I started making televised train journeys using Bradshaw’s Handbook, I have tried to imagine what impact and impression the arrival of the railways made on British society. Of course every generation since has experienced technological change, which has, if anything, grown faster. As we look back over twenty years, most of us can no longer understand how we lived without mobile phones and the internet. Similarly, a Victorian by the 1850s must have struggled to recall the days when he or she had had to travel by coach, never able to exceed the speed of a horse. There had been a revolution in communications, perhaps similar in scope to the one that we are experiencing today.

But on top of that, Britain underwent a physical metamorphosis. Where before, country lanes meandered, now embankments, tunnels and viaducts scythed through the landscape. Stations sprouted up, resembling Italian palaces, French châteaux or even Gothic cathedrals. Fearsome locomotives belching fire and steam frightened the horses as they sliced through city centres, or engulfed fields in flame as stray sparks set light to hay or stubble.

I remember being in awe and fear of steam locomotives. They were so big and noisy. Their wheels towered above me (especially when I was a boy, of course) and they were given to highly unpredictable behaviour, suddenly releasing clouds of water vapour with a hiss that made me jump. How did the Victorian middle classes in their finery, how did genteel ladies, cope with their sudden proximity to these roaring fireboxes, with being brought face to face with the industrial revolution?

How could they adapt to speed? At the Rainhill trials to choose a source of traction for the Manchester to Liverpool railway, Stephenson’s Rocket reached 30 miles per hour, a velocity previously unseen and hard even to imagine. The potency of the technology took some getting used to. At the inauguration of that line in 1830, William Huskisson MP, former President of the Board of Trade, left his carriage to greet the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. The Rocket, running on the parallel track, struck him as he tried to scramble out of its path. A train transported him to the vicarage at Eccles where he died of his injuries.

When Isambard Kingdom Brunel opened his epic Box tunnel on the Great Western Railway, Dionysius Lardner, a professor of astronomy, was on hand to warn that if the brakes failed the train would accelerate and the passengers suffocate; and some at least believed him and alighted before the tunnel to continue their journey by more traditional means.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century William Blake wrote of ‘dark Satanic Mills’. The railways greatly accelerated the industrial revolution. George Bradshaw was enthusiastic about the railways, and the Handbook describes with admiration the dimensions of stations, tunnels and bridges. But the book’s depictions of iron-smelting furnaces lighting up the night sky sometimes bring the fires of Hell to mind. Bradshaw’s awareness of the social consequences of the industrial revolution suggests that Victorians saw that progress had brought both paradise and inferno.

Of Merthyr Tydfil the Handbook says:

Visitors should see the furnaces by night, when the red glare of the flames produces an uncommonly striking effect. Indeed, the town is best visited at that time, for by day it will be found dirty ... Cholera and fever are of course at home here ... We do hope that proper measures will be taken by those who draw enormous wealth from these [iron and coal] works to improve the condition of the people.

Quakers like Bradshaw tended to believe strongly that the industrialist owed a duty of care to his workers and their families.

To judge from the Great Western works at Swindon, railway magnates were appropriately paternalistic, housing the employees in model dwellings and supplying free rail travel for a family summer holiday in Devon or Cornwall. Many thousands would depart on charter trains, turning Swindon for a week into a virtual ghost town.

Train travel vastly broadened the horizons of working-class people. The mid-nineteenth century saw an enormous growth in travel and in resorts. As the railway navvies levelled the land, the railways levelled society. Those of modest means, who before train travel might scarcely have travelled beyond a 15-mile radius of home, could leave the smoke and grime of city life and enjoy the ‘salubrious’ (to use a favourite Bradshaw word) sea or mountain air. Town dwellers could for the first time enjoy fresh sea fish and a range of perishable farm products.

The railways threw up some interesting questions of etiquette, and drove social change. The usual requirement that ladies be chaperoned was difficult to enforce on trains. The new freedoms offered by rail travel contributed to increasing equality between the sexes. Nonetheless, women sometimes journeyed in fear, especially in compartments on trains that had no corridor. Some ladies secreted pins in their mouths as a way to deal with male passengers who in the darkness of a tunnel might attempt to steal a kiss!

Any worries that travelling by train was not ladylike were dismissed when Queen Victoria herself took to the tracks in 1842. Although she was nervous of travelling at high speed, she became a frequent railway passenger. The train conveyed her to Windsor, Osborne House and Balmoral. In 1882 it carried her to Nice, on the first of her nine visits to the Riviera. As though to emphasise how thoroughly the railway had entered national life, after her death on the Isle of Wight a train brought the Queen’s coffin home to Windsor.

Her lifetime covers most of the railway building that was done in this country. Poignantly, the last link of the West Highland line between Fort William and Mallaig (since made famous by the Harry Potter films) opened in 1901, the year of the Queen’s death. So, if you take a train today, it is extremely likely that you will travel on a route laid down in her day.

British national self-confidence reached its zenith in the Victorian era. The empire was vast and, to Bradshaw’s mind, the greatest that the world had ever seen. London was the biggest city on earth and Manchester could take cotton from India, turn it into manufactured garments and sell them back in India below the cost of local products. No hint of colonial guilt affected our patriotic pride.

That Britain was the first country to open an inter-city railway, that geniuses like Brunel and the Stephensons achieved engineering wonders, were evidence of the superiority of British ingenuity, science and entrepreneurship.

As today I travel along Victorian track beds I try to imagine the awe and pride that railways then inspired. Actually, if I look out the carriage window at the stations and viaducts that Victorian engineers erected, imagining it is very easy.

Michael Portillo

2012

© Old House books & maps

Bradshaw’s map of Oxford.

hen Queen Victoria came to the throne trains had already been running for a dozen years, with modest services along variously sized tracks that amounted to less than 300 miles in length. By then farmers no longer believed trains would set fire to crops or frighten horses to madness, although the sight of a steam engine, rare and awesome, was still sufficiently thrilling to move waving children to the track side.