Rides on Railways Part 1

Rides on Railways.

by Samuel Sidney.

PREFACE.

The following pages are an attempt to supply something amusing, instructive, and suggestive to travellers who, not caring particularly where they go, or how long they stay at any particular place, may wish to know something of the towns and districts through which they pa.s.s, on their way to Wales, the Lakes of c.u.mberland, or the Highlands of Scotland; or to those who, having a brief vacation, may wish to employ it among pleasant rural scenes, and in investigating the manufactures, the mines, and other sources of the commerce and influence of this small island and great country.

In performing this task, I have relied partly on personal observation, partly on notes and the memory of former journeys; and where needful have used the historical information to be found in cyclopaedias, and local guide-books.

This must account for, if it does not excuse, the unequal s.p.a.ce devoted to districts with equal claims to attention. But it would take years, if not a lifetime, to render the ma.n.u.script of so discursive a work complete and correct.

I feel that I have been guilty of many faults of commission and omission; but if the friends of those localities to which I have not done justice will take the trouble to forward to me any facts or figures of public general interest, they shall be carefully embodied in any future edition, should the book, as I hope it will, arrive at such an honour and profit.

S. S.

LONDON, AUGUST, 1851.

LONDON AND NORTH WESTERN RAILWAY.

According to Mr. Punch, one of the greatest authorities of the day on all such subjects, the nearest way to Euston Station is to take a cab; but those who are not in a hurry may take advantage of the omnibuses that start from Gracechurch Street and Charing Cross, traversing the princ.i.p.al thoroughfares and calling at the George and Blue Boar, Holborn, the Green Man and Still, Oxford Street, and the Booking Offices in Regent Circus.

Euston, including its dependency, Camden Station, is the greatest railway port in England, or indeed in the world. It is the princ.i.p.al gate through which flows and reflows the traffic of a line which has cost more than twenty-two millions sterling; which annually earns more than two millions and a-half for the conveyance of pa.s.sengers, and merchandise, and live stock; and which directly employs more than ten thousand servants, beside the tens of thousands to whom, in mills or mines, in ironworks, in steam-boats and coasters, it gives indirect employment. What London is to the world, Euston is to Great Britain: there is no part of the country to which railway communication has extended, with the exception of the Dover and Southampton lines, which may not be reached by railway conveyance from Euston station.

The Buckinghamshire lines from Bletchley open the way through Oxford to all the Western counties, only interrupted by the break of gauge. The Northampton and Peterborough, from Blisworth, proceeds to the Eastern coast of Norfolk and Lincoln. At Rugby commences one of several roads to the North, either by Leicester, Nottingham, and Lincoln, or by Derby and Sheffield; and at Rugby, too, we may either proceed to Stafford by the direct route of the Trent Valley, a line which is rendered cla.s.sical by the memory of Sir Robert Peel, who turned its first sod with a silver spade and honoured its opening by a celebrated speech; or we may select the old original line through Coventry, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton, pa.s.sing through a network of little railways leading to Warwick and Leamington, the result of unprofitable compet.i.tion. A continuation of the Trent Valley line intersects the Pottery district, where the cheapest Delft and the most exquisite specimens of China ware are produced with equal success; and thus we reach Liverpool and Manchester by the straightest possible line.

At Stafford we can turn off to Shrewsbury and Chester, or again following the original route arrive at Crewe, the great workshop and railway town of the London and North Western. Crewe affords an ample choice of routes--1st, to Leeds by Stockport (with a branch to Macclesfield) and Huddersfield, or from Leeds to York, or to Harrogate, and so on by the East Coast line through Durham, Newcastle, and Berwick, to Edinburgh; 2dly, direct to Manchester; 3rdly, to Warrington, Newton, Wigan, and the North, through the salt mining country; and, 4thly, to Chester. At Chester we may either push on to Ireland by way of the Holyhead Railway, crossing the famous Britannia Tubular Bridge, or to Birkenhead, the future rival of Liverpool.

At Liverpool steamers for America warranted to reach New York in ten days are at our command; or, leaving commerce, cotton, and wool, we may ride through Proud Preston and Lancaster to Kendal and Windermere and the Lake district; or, pressing forward through "Merry Carlisle," reach Gretna at a pace that defies the compet.i.tion of fathers and guardians, and enter Scotland on the direct road to Glasgow, and, if necessary, ride on to Aberdeen and Perth.

A short line from Camden Station opens a communication with the East and West India Docks and the coast of Ess.e.x, and another, three miles and a half in length, from Willesden Station, will shortly form a connexion with the South Western, and thereby with all the South and Western lines from Dover to Southampton.

The railway system, of which the lines above enumerated form so large a part, is barely twenty-five years old: in that s.p.a.ce of time we have not only supplied the home market but taught Europe and America to follow our example; even Egypt and India will soon have their railways, and we now look with no more surprise on the pa.s.sage of a locomotive with a few hundred pa.s.sengers or tons of goods than on a wheelbarrow or Patent Hansom Cab. Grouse from Aberdeen, fat cattle from Norfolk, piece goods from Manchester, hardwares from Sheffield, race horses from Newmarket, coals from Leicestershire, and schoolboys from Yorkshire, are despatched and received, for the distance of a few hundred miles, with the most perfect regularity, as a matter of course.

We take a ticket to dine with a friend in Chester or Liverpool, or to meet the hounds near Bletchley or Rugby, as calmly as we engage a cab to go a mile; we consider twenty miles an hour disgustingly slow, and grumble awfully at a delay of five minutes in a journey of a hundred miles. Millions have been spent in order to save an hour and a half between London and Liverpool; yet there are plenty of men not much past thirty who remember when all respectable plain practical common sense men looked upon the project for a railway between London and Birmingham as something very wild if not very wicked; and who remember too, that in winter the journey from London to Liverpool often occupied them twenty-two hours, costing 4 pounds inside and 2 pounds out, besides having to walk up the steepest hills in Derbyshire,--the same journey which is now completed in six hours at a cost of 2 pounds 5s., and in twelve hours for 16s. 9d., by the Parliamentary train in an enclosed carriage.

It may be perhaps a useful wholesome lesson to those who are in the habit of accepting as their just due--without thought, without thankfulness--the last best results of the industry and ingenuity of centuries, if, before entering the ma.s.sive portals of Euston Station, we dig up a few pa.s.sages of the early history of railways from dusty Blue Books and forgotten pamphlets.

In 1826, the project of a railway from Liverpool to Manchester came before a Committee of the House of Commons, and, after a long investigation, the principle was approved, but the bill thrown out in consequence of defects in the survey. The promoters rested their case entirely on a goods' traffic, to be conveyed at the rate of six or seven miles an hour. The engineer was George Stephenson, the father of the railway system, a man of genius, who, although he clearly foresaw the ultimate results of his project, had neither temper nor tact enough to conciliate the ignorant obstinacy of his opponents; in fact, he was a very bad witness and a very great man. It is curious, in reading the evidence, to observe the little confidence the counsel for the bill had in their engineer, and the contempt with which the counsel for the opposition treated him. The promoters of the railway expected few pa.s.sengers, hoped to lower the rates of the ca.n.a.ls, and had not made up their minds whether to employ locomotives or horses; George Stephenson looked forward confidently at that same period to conveying the greater portion of the goods and pa.s.senger traffic by a complete railway system; but he either would not or could not explain the grounds of his confidence, and therefore we find Mr. Harrison, the most eminent Parliamentary counsel of that day, speaking in the following insolent strain of a man whose genius he and his friends were unable to appreciate:--

"Every part of this scheme shows that this man (George Stephenson) has applied himself to a subject of which he has no knowledge, and to which he has no science to apply. . . . . When we set out with the original prospectus, we were to gallop at the rate of twelve miles an hour, with the aid of the devil in the form of a locomotive, sitting as postillion on the fore horse. But the speed of these locomotives has slackened. The learned Sergeant would like to go seven, but he will be content with six miles an hour. I will show that he cannot go six. Practically, or for any useful purposes, they may go at something more than four miles an hour. The wind will affect them: any gale of wind which would affect the traffic on the Mersey, would render it impossible to set off a locomotive engine, either by poking the fire, or keeping up the pressure of the steam until the boiler burst. A shower of rain r.e.t.a.r.ds a railway, and snow entirely stops it."

In reply, Mr. Adams modestly observed, "I should like my learned friend to have pointed out any part of the publication in favour of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which justified his statement that we professed that goods were to be carried at the rate of twelve miles an hour; we have proved that they can be carried at seven miles an hour, and it was never intended they should be conveyed at a higher rate."

In the following year the Liverpool and Manchester Bill was carried, and in 1830 the career of the civilizing locomotive commenced, but it took many more years to convince "Practical men" that the Railway would successfully compete with the Coach and Ca.n.a.l.

When, in 1831, the scheme of a Railway between London and Birmingham was made public, a very clever pamphlet appeared under the t.i.tle of "Beware the Bubbles," in which we find the following comical prognostications of the results of Railways:--

"After all, what advantage does the London and Birmingham Railway hold out?

Only one,--celerity of motion; and, after all, the ten miles an hour is absolutely slower than the coaches, some of which go as fast as eleven or twelve miles an hour; and, with the length of time that the engine and its c.u.mbrous train requires ere it can stop, and the other contingencies, there would be little difference in the time of a twelve miles an hour coach and a fifteen miles an hour engine, supposing twenty or thirty stoppages, to pick up little parcels, between London and Birmingham. The conveyance is not so safe as by coach."

After enumerating a series of theoretical dangers, he proceeds. "Another consideration, which would deter invalids, ladies, and children from making use of the Railway, would be want of accommodation along the line, unless the Directors of the Railway chose to build inns at their own expense. But those inns the Directors would have, in great part, to support, because they would be out of the way of any business except that arising from the Railway, and that would be trifling. Commercial travellers would never, by any chance, go by the Railroad. The occasional traveller, who went the same route for pleasure, would go by the coach-road also, because of the cheerful company and comfortable dinner.

"Not one of the n.o.bility, the gentry, or those who travel in their own carriages, would really like to be drawn at the tail of a train of waggons, in which some hundreds of bars of iron were jingling with a noise that would drown all the bells of the district, and in momentary apprehension of having his vehicle broken to pieces, and himself killed or crippled by the collision of those thirty-two ton ma.s.ses. Even if a man had no carriage of his own, what inducement could he have to take so ungainly a conveyance. Three hours is more than the maximum difference by which the ordinary speed of coaches could be exceeded; and it is not one traveller in a thousand to whom an arrival in London and Birmingham three hours sooner would be of the slightest consequence.

"Then as to goods. The only goods that require velocity in coming to London, are ribands from Coventry. Half the luggage room of a coach, on a Sat.u.r.day night, is quite adequate to the conveyance of them. The manufacturers of Coventry will never be such fools as to send their property on an errand by which it must travel further and fare worse. For heavy goods, the saving by ca.n.a.l would be as twelve to one, beside the perfect safety. In the ca.n.a.l boat there is no danger of fracture, even to the most delicate goods; whereas, if fine China goods were to be brought by the rapid waggons, the breakage would probably be twenty-five per cent.

"As to the profits of the undertaking let us be extravagantly liberal.

Suppose that the Railway was to get one-third of the goods, as well as one- third of the pa.s.sengers, see what they would make of it:--

One-third of the Goods . . . 96,540 pounds One-third of the Pa.s.sengers . 30,240 -------- 126,780 pounds -------- Annual expenses . . . . . 385,000 pounds Returns. . . . . . . . 126,780 -------- Annual deficiency . . . . 258,220 pounds -------- To meet an outlay of 7,500,000 pounds.

"But the probability is that ca.n.a.ls would reduce their rates one-half; and thus, competing wholesomely, extinguish the railway. The coach-masters would do the same thing--run for twelve months at half the present fares, and then not one man in his senses would risk his bones on the railway. The innkeepers would follow a course precisely similar, and give nice smoking dinners, foaming tankards and bottles of beeswing at so cheap a rate, and meet their customers with so good humoured faces, and do so many of those kind offices that legions would flock to the hospitable road. And while all this was going on, and the thousands of men which the authors of this ridiculous scheme had expected to send upon the parish were thriving, the solitary stranger who had n.o.body to tell him better would go swinging at the tail of the engine, b.u.mping first on the iron plates on this side and then on the iron plates on that side; and if he escaped being scalded to death by the bursting of his engine, or having all his bones broken by collision with another, he would be fain to rest for the night within some four bare walls and gnaw a mouldy crust which he brought in his pocket, or, as an alternative of luxury, wade some ten miles through the mire, and feast upon a rasher of rusty bacon and a tankard of the smallest ale at the nearest hedge alehouse."

All this now sounds inexpressibly droll, and yet this prophet of evil was not entirely wrong; nay, in some important particulars he was more right than the railway promoters, whom he so heartily detested. The railway did cost nearly seven millions instead of four millions as calculated by the projectors, and the cost of working before the amalgamation with the Grand Junction did amount to 380,000 pounds per annum: two figure facts which would have effectually crushed speculation could they have been proved in 1831; but then the per contra of traffic was equally astounding in its overflow, instead of one-third of the existing traffic, or 126,780 pounds a-year allowed by the pamphleteer, the London and Birmingham earned a gross revenue of nearly 900,000 pounds, while still leaving a traffic in heavy goods on the ca.n.a.ls sufficient to pay from 6 to 30 pounds per cent. to the proprietors, in spite of a reduction of rates of upwards of 50 pounds per cent. Indeed this traffic actually increased on the Grand Junction Ca.n.a.l, since the opening of the Birmingham Railway, from 750,000 pounds in 1836, to 1,160,000 pounds in 1847.

Perhaps on no point would the expectation of the most sanguine among the early projectors of railways been more satisfactorily exceeded than in regard to safety. Swiftness, and cheapness, and power, acute intelligent engineers foresaw; but that millions of pa.s.sengers should be whirled along at a speed varying from twenty to fifty miles an hour with more safety than they could have secured by walking a-foot, would have seemed an antic.i.p.ation of the very wildest character. Yet such is the case. In 1850, upwards of seventy millions of souls were conveyed by railway; when eleven pa.s.sengers were killed and fifty-four injured, or less than one to each million of pa.s.sengers conveyed.

Even at the risk of seeming trite, prosy, and common-place, it is right to remind the young generation who consider the purchase of a railway ticket gives them a right to grumble at a thousand imaginary defects and deficiencies in railway management, how great are the advantages in swiftness, economy, and safety, which they enjoy through the genius, enterprise, and stubborn perseverance of George Stephenson and his friends and pupils in 1825.

EUSTON STATION.

This station was an after-thought, the result of early experience in railway traffic. Originally the line was to have ended at Camden Town, but a favourable opportunity led to the purchase of fifteen acres, which has turned out most convenient for the public and the proprietors. It is only to be regretted that it was not possible to bring the station within a few yards of the New Road, so as to render the stream of omnibuses between Paddington and the City available, without compelling the pa.s.senger to perspire under his carpet-bag, railway-wrapper, umbrella, and hat-box, all the way from the platform to the edge of Euston Square.

The great gateway or propylaeum is very imposing, and rather out of place; but that is not the architect's fault. It cost thirty thousand pounds, and had he been permitted to carry out his original design, no doubt it would have introduced us to some cla.s.sic fane in character with the lofty t.i.tanic columns: for instance, a temple to Mercury the winged messenger and G.o.d of Mammon. But, as is very common in this country,--for familiar examples see the London University, the National Gallery, and the Nelson Column,--the spirit of the proprietors evaporated with the outworks; and the gateway leads to a square court-yard and a building the exterior of which may be described, in the language of guide books when referring to something which cannot be praised, as "a plain, unpretending, stucco structure," with a convenient wooden shed in front, barely to save pa.s.sengers from getting wet in rainy weather.

[EUSTON SQUARE, LONDON: ill1.jpg]

As Melrose should be seen by the fair moonlight, so Euston, to be viewed to advantage, should be visited by the gray light of a summer or spring morning, about a quarter to six o'clock, three-quarters of an hour before the starting of the parliamentary train, which every railway, under a wise legislative enactment, is compelled to run "once a-day from each extremity, with covered carriages, stopping at every station, travelling at a rate of not less than fifteen miles an hour, at a charge of one-penny per mile." We say wise, because the compet.i.tion of the Railway for goods, as well as pa.s.sengers, drove off the road not only all the coaches, on which, when light-loaded, foot-sore travellers got an occasional lift, but all the variety of vans and broad-wheeled waggons which afforded a slow but cheap conveyance between our princ.i.p.al towns.

At the hour mentioned, the Railway pa.s.senger-yard is vacant, silent, and as spotlessly clean as a Dutchman's kitchen; nothing is to be seen but a tall soldier-like policeman in green, on watch under the wooden shed, and a few sparrows industriously yet vainly trying to get breakfast from between the closely packed paving-stones. How different from the fat debauched-looking sparrows who throve upon the dirt and waste of the old coach yards!

It is so still, so open; the tall columns of the portico entrance look down on you so grimly; the front of the booking-offices, in their garment of clean stucco, look so primly respectable that you cannot help feeling ashamed of yourself,--feeling as uncomfortable as when you have called too early on an economically genteel couple, and been shown into a handsome drawing-room, on a frosty day, without a fire. You cannot think of entering into a gossip with the Railway guardian, for you remember that "sentinels on duty are not allowed to talk," except to nursery maids.

Presently, hurrying on foot, a few pa.s.sengers arrive; a servant-maid carrying a big box, with the a.s.sistance of a little girl; a neat punctual-looking man, probably a banker's clerk on furlough; and a couple of young fellows in s.h.a.ggy coats, smoking, who seem, by their red eyes and dirty hands, to have made sure of being up early by not going to bed. A rattle announces the first omnibus, with a pile of luggage outside and five inside pa.s.sengers, two commercial travellers, two who may be curates or schoolmasters, and a brown man with a large sea-chest. At the quarter, the scene thickens; there are few Hansoms, but some night cabs, a vast number of carts of all kinds, from the costermonger's donkey to the dashing butcher's Whitechapel. There is very little medium in parliamentary pa.s.sengers about luggage, either they have a cart-load or none at all. Children are very plentiful, and the mothers are accompanied with large escorts of female relations, who keep kissing and stuffing the children with real Gibraltar rock and gingerbread to the last moment. Every now and then a well-dressed man hurries past into the booking-office and takes his ticket with a sheepish air as if he was p.a.w.ning his watch. Sailors arrive with their chests and hammocks. The other day we had the pleasure of meeting a travelling tinker with the instruments of his craft neatly packed; two gentlemen, whose closely cropped hair and pale plump complexion betokened a recent residence in some gaol or philanthropic inst.i.tution; an economical baronet, of large fortune; a prize fighter, going down to arrange a little affair which was to come off the next day; a half- pay officer, with a genteel wife and twelve children, on his way to a cheap county in the north; a party of seven Irish, father, mother, and five grown- up sons and daughters, on their way to America, after a successful residence in London; a tall young woman and a little man, from Stamford, who had been up to London to buy stone bottles, and carried them back rattling in a box; a handsome dragoon, with a very pretty girl,--her eyes full of tears,--on his arm, to see him off; another female was waiting at the door for the same purpose, when the dragoon bolted, and took refuge in the interior of the station. In a word, a parliamentary train collects,--besides mechanics in search of work, sailors going to join a ship, and soldiers on furlough,--all whose necessities or tastes lead them to travel economically, among which last cla.s.s are to be found a good many Quakers. It is pleasing to observe the attention the poor women, with large families and piles of packages, receive from the officers of the company, a great contrast to the neglect which meets the poorly clad in stage-coach travelling, as may still be seen in those districts where the rail has not yet made way.

We cannot say that we exactly admire the taste of the three baronets whom a railway superintendent found in one third-cla.s.s carriage, but we must own that to those to whom economy is really an object, there is much worse travelling than by the Parliamentary. Having on one occasion gone down by first-cla.s.s, with an Oxford man who had just taken his M.A., an ensign of infantry in his first uniform, a clerk in Somerset House, and a Manchester man who had been visiting a Whig Lord,--and returned third-cla.s.s, with a tinker, a sailor just returned from Africa, a bird-catcher with his load, and a gentleman in velveteens, rather greasy, who seemed, probably on a private mission, to have visited the misdemeanour wards of all the prisons in England and Scotland; we preferred the return trip, that is to say, vulgar and amusing to dull and genteel. Among other pieces of information gleaned on this occasion, we learned that "for a cove as didn't mine a jolly lot of readin and writin, Readin was prime in winter; plenty of good vittles, and the cells warmed."

It must be remarked that the character of the Parliamentary varies very much according to the station from which it starts. The London trains being the worst, having a large proportion of what are vulgarly called "swells out of luck." In a rural district the gathering of smock-frocks and rosy-faced la.s.ses, the rumbling of carts, and the size, number, and shape of the trunks and parcels, afford a very agreeable and comical scene on a frosty, moonlight, winter's morning, about Christmas time, when visiting commences, or at Whitsuntide. No man who has a taste for studying the phases of life and character should fail to travel at least once by the Parliamentary.

The large cheap load having rumbled off from the south side of the station, about nine o'clock preparations are commenced for the aristocratic Express, which, on this line, is composed of first-cla.s.s carriages alone, in which, at half the price of the old mail coach fares, the princ.i.p.al stations on the line are reached at railway speed.