Full Steam Ahead: How the Railways Made Britain. Peter Ginn
heavy industry that spawned the railways and the railways that were then to drive the expansion of heavy industry. The two went hand-in-hand, mutually supportive and entirely co-dependent throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Ffestiniog railway in the heart of Wales is the world’s oldest surviving narrow gauge railway, dating back to 1832. It is thirteen and a half miles long and runs between Ffestiniog and Porthmadog, through some of the most dramatic and beautiful of Britain’s countryside. The railway was built in order to transport slate from the quarry to the docks, bypassing a long overland route by packhorse, cart and river boat. Small manageable wagons could thence be loaded right at the quarry mouth and moved smoothly, without any slate-damaging jolts and knocks down to the harbour quayside, within a couple of hours. It was a vast improvement over the old system. Even a narrow gauge wagon could carry a much bigger load than a packhorse, and it cut out entirely the need to then unload the slate from those horses and reload it into small, flat-bottomed riverboats. These then had to be sailed downstream with the tide along the somewhat energetic but shallow river Dwryrd, only to need unloading again before the slate was transferred to the sea-going vessels. Just one year earlier, the tax upon the coastal transport of slate had been lifted – and the overland routes and imports had been significantly unburdened by this financial control – so the moment was ripe for the Welsh slate quarries to increase their production and share of the market. The owners of the Ffestiniog quarry, Samuel Holland and Henry Archer – the first a quarryman and the latter a Dublin businessman – decided that this was the moment to invest. What they decided to construct was a railway line of a type that they were familiar with, a tried and tested technology that had enhanced and expanded the businesses of several of their quarrying neighbours. Because, despite its status as the oldest surviving narrow gauge line, the Ffestiniog railway was by no means the first, even in the mountains of Wales, and it was entirely lacking in locomotives.
THE EARLIEST RAILWAYS
Railways existed long before steam locomotives and even before static steam engines. Indeed, the first recorded mention of a railed way for wagons in Britain can be dated to the very start of the seventeenth century – in 1603, the same year that Elizabeth I died. Over the next two centuries, many remote sites from Northumberland to Snowdonia constructed flat or gently sloping track-ways with wooden guide rails, so that heavy loads could be moved easily around in a controlled manner using muscle power – either that of humans or horses. Mines and quarries were the major users of this transport system, as they were the businesses that had the heaviest and bulkiest of materials to move in volume. It was the weight of the loads that made a railed way so preferable to an open roadway. Rails provided a way of spreading the wagon’s heavy load across the ground, rather than it being concentrated upon the couple of inches where the wheel met the road surface. Where road vehicles quickly churned up the mud and became stuck, railed wagons glided across. Rails also helped control the direction in which a wagon moved and kept it within a series of set locations. Mines and quarries were busy places that often featured many narrow passageways and restricted spaces, so this element of control and organization was extremely valuable.
Still in operation to this day, the Ffestiniog railway’s origins lie in Welsh slate mining during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Presenters Peter Ginn, Alex Langlands and Ruth Goodman on one of the station platforms on the Ffestiniog railway.
As time went on, mine and quarry owners refined the systems that they used – improving wagon shapes, finding ways of making stable, well-drained trackways and, from around 1760, adding iron strips to the top of their wooden rails in order to prevent excessive wear. Fully iron rails arrived a generation later, cast in three- or four-foot long sections. It was this well-developed, muscle-powered railway that appeared upon the hills of Snowdonia in 1798, when the Ffestiniog’s neighbour, the Penrhyn quarry, built its railway. Railways then were the servants of industry; they were shaped by its needs and they existed in places wherever industry needed them – often far from centres of population. However, at this time the railways were still very much a junior partner in the complex networks of waterways, sea routes and roads that joined up the trade of the British Isles.
SLATE
When the Ffestiniog railway was first built, it was constructed so that the two rails were 23½ inches apart (this distance between the rails is what is referred to by the word ‘gauge’). Such a restricted gauge was chosen partly because a narrow gauge requires a much smaller path to be cut through tunnels and cuttings. It also uses less expensive, narrow bridges and fewer materials altogether. However, the narrow 23½-inch gauge was also chosen because this was the gauge of the rails that were already in use underground within the quarry.
The narrow gauge used for the Ffestiniog railway was inexpensive and designed to enable access to the darkest corners of mines and other inaccessible areas.
Some slate is quarried in an open-cast fashion, but the quarry at Ffestiniog is more akin to a conventional mine. The slate here is of a very high quality, allowing it to be split by hand into remarkably thin, consistent and structurally sound layers. In 1935, one Ffestiniog worker described how a single piece, only one inch thick, could be split into 26 layers, so that each slate would be a little less than a millimetre thick. Such thin layers were also fairly elastic and, crucially, they did not absorb water. This meant that slate from this deposit could be used to make superb roof tiles. They were very light due to their thinness, were able to cope with the slight warping of roof timbers and they did not become heavier when it rained. This meant that a roof covered in Welsh slate could be constructed from much lighter, thinner timbers than that of any other available material. The Ffestiniog slate shed water beautifully, too, meaning that roofs could be built with a far less steep pitch to them. Imagine the impact that all this had upon house building at the time. Indeed, you can see it around you to this day. The roofs of old cottages that were built to take thatch have a very steep pitch (around 70 per cent), even if the thatch itself is long gone. Think instead of the rows and rows of Victorian houses – the roofs are much shallower, rarely pitched at no more than a 45-degree angle, 30 degrees being much more common. The costs of building such a slate-roofed home with its smaller surface area and smaller, lighter timbers was substantially less than that of building a thatched home.
Ffestiniog slate was of the highest quality. It could be easily split and fashioned, was ideal for lightweight, supremely waterproof roofs and was also cheaper than most competing materials.
Due to an expanding population, the demand for cheap, yet properly watertight houses was high. The townscapes of Britain were utterly transformed as the slate industry blossomed. And it grew very largely because of the improved transport that the railways offered. While the output of the quarries had to be carried away by packhorse and small riverboat, there was little incentive to increase production – the quarry owners would simply not have been able to shift much more material. However, even without locomotive power, the railway could move exponentially more material, as well as moving it more quickly. Moreover, this new method of transport, whilst requiring an initially large capital outlay, was much cheaper to run. In many ways, the slate industry is simultaneously an example of an industry with a latent market waiting to be filled as well as one bursting with resources ready to be exploited. Transport was the bottleneck. The railway opened up the flow, and money and people poured in.
“THE SLATE HERE IS OF A VERY HIGH QUALITY, ALLOWING IT TO BE SPLIT BY HAND INTO THIN, CONSISTENT AND SOUND LAYERS.”
Victorian quarrymen were a hardy breed, who largely fashioned slate by hand, before the mechanistic advances of the mid- to late nineteenth century.
In 1808, the entire parish of Ffestiniog was home