Full Steam Ahead: How the Railways Made Britain. Peter Ginn
been possible if he had remained illiterate, and still one that probably raised a few eyebrows in the class-conscious days of the early nineteenth century. Immersed in steam technology, intimately familiar with railed ways, ambitious and intelligent, George was hearing regular reports of the experiments taking place with locomotives, the hot topic of the day in colliery circles. It was almost inevitable that he would become a builder of steam engines. His first working example Blucher was ready in 1814. He had modelled it upon one built by Matthew Murray that was working nearby, but he must also have seen Puffing Billy, which entered service that year upon the Wylam colliery railway, just outside his childhood home.
In 1819, George moved on from engine building to the construction of entire railways. His first was an eight-mile section of track for Hetton colliery that ran entirely upon mechanical power – a world first – with gravity providing downhill motion and locomotives working on the level and slight upward inclines. There was no holding Stephenson back now. Ten years later, the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway took place. This seminal event is often cited as the dawn of modern railways. It was one of George Stephenson’s engineering projects. In a whirlwind of activity, he persuaded investors to put up money, surveyed the route, designed cuttings and embankments, organized and supervised the labour, designed and built the engines, set up a new dedicated engine building company to do so (the first ever) and ran a PR campaign. As far as George was concerned, the days when railways were only of interest to those involved in mining and quarrying were over. His vision was for railways that moved everything and everyone.
‘Railways will come to supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country, when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the Great Highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway than to walk on foot. I know that there are great and almost insurmountable difficulties that will have to be encountered; but what I have said will come to pass as sure as we live.’
(George Stephenson, 1825)
Well before the Stockton and Darlington opened, Stephenson was already working on the Liverpool and Manchester railway – a line that would focus on moving people rather than coal.
From the moment that the Rocket reached its top speed of 36 miles per hour at the Rainhill Trials in 1829, George, and increasingly his son Robert, were at the very heart of an explosion in British railways. As enthusiasm boiled over and line after line was developed and promoted across the whole country, everyone wanted the father and son team of the Stephensons on board.
THE HUSKISSON INCIDENT
‘You probably have by this time heard and read accounts of the opening of the railroad, and the fearful accident which occurred at it, for the papers are full of nothing else.... The engine had stopped to take in a supply of water, and several of the gentlemen in the directors’ carriage had jumped out to look about them. Lord W.-, Count Batthyany, Count Matuscenitz, and Mr Huskisson among the rest were standing talking in the middle of the road, when an engine on the other line, which was parading up and down merely to show its speed, was seen coming down upon them like lightning. The most active of those in peril sprang back into their seats: Lord W.- saved his life only by rushing behind the Duke’s carriage, and Count Matuscenitz had but just leaped into it, with the engine all but touching his heels as he did so; while poor Mr Huskisson, less active from the effects of age and ill health, bewildered, too, by the frantic cries of ‘Stop the engine! Clear the track!’ that resounded on all sides, completely lost his head, looked helplessly to the right and left, and was instantly prostrated by the fatal machine, which dashed like a thunderbolt upon him’.
(Fanny Kemble, 1830)
This tragic accident occurred during the opening ceremony of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the line built by George Stephenson and the line that the Rocket was built to run on. Hugh crowds had gathered to watch and a host of important people invited. Mr Huskisson was one of those VIPs. He was the MP for Liverpool, a man generally liked and admired. Should such an accident happen now to so prominent a person in the context of a new technology, it is hard to imagine that technology having any future at all. However, it is testament to the cheapness of life – even elite life – in the early nineteenth century, and to the enormous wave of excitement surrounding the new technology, that the whole incident passed with barely a blip. Certainly, the subsequent fortunes of the Liverpool and Manchester railway and other railway schemes were completely unaffected by the incident.
“ROCKET STEAMED AHEAD ALMOST FROM THE FIRST AND GEORGE STEPHENSON BECAME AN OVERNIGHT INTERNATIONAL CELEBRITY.”
Rocket steamed ahead almost from the first and George Stephenson became an overnight international celebrity.
IRON INDUSTRY
It was not only locomotives that were developing quickly. Just as railways were closely tied to the needs and fortunes of the mining industries, so too were they entwined with the iron industry. Good quality iron, in quantity at affordable prices, was essential for anyone building locomotives or iron railways. The railways had been servants of the iron industry, moving coal and ore in the days of horsepower, and they continued in that role in the days of steam. However, they also sparked an international demand for the products of that industry, most directly and immediately a demand for rails.
The biggest name in this connection is Dowlais, an iron foundry that was already at the leading edge of innovation. In 1815, it was the largest producer of wrought iron in the world. Cast iron taken direct from the blast furnace is brittle, but wrought iron (iron that has been worked, driving out the excess carbon content and incorporating elements of slag within its crystalline structure), can bend and flex. The Dowlais Iron Company did not invent the wrought iron rails, but they did have the facilities, expertise and commercial muscle to produce them in quantity – vast quantity. They were able to take this British invention and sell it worldwide.
The rails were the result of the work of John Birkinshaw who worked, not for Dowlais, but for the Bedlington ironworks in Northumberland. When this company became involved in a local scheme for a railed wagon-way, Birkinshaw turned his attention to the problem of the rails themselves. Short lengths, three or four feet-long of solid cast iron, had taken over from the earlier system of wooden rails with an iron strip tacked on top, but problems with rails were endemic. They just kept breaking – particularly under the weight of locomotives. Lengths of wrought iron produced by blacksmiths were being tried, but many people were sceptical, as wrought iron is notorious for its propensity to rust. Hearing of such experiments, Birkinshaw wrote to the agent of the Earl of Carlisle up at Tindal Fell, who owned both cast and wrought iron sections of track. The agent was unequivocal in his assessment: wrought iron was better. Tindal Fell had been using it for eight years and had not had to replace any wrought iron rails, whilst the cast iron sections had to be replaced ‘almost daily’. Nor did the wrought iron rails rust. The agent speculated that rust was kept at bay by the constant use and by ‘condensation of the upper surface of the metal by the heavy weights rolled over it, which produces a hard compact coat, like that produced by cold hammering steel and copper plates.’ John Birkinshaw set about designing a method of producing such rails in long lengths and in large volume. He worked out how to shape the iron using a pair of shaped rollers and a ‘powerful steam engine with great velocity’. A red-hot iron bar was fed between the rollers and fifteen foot long lengths of rail emerged on the other side.
Presenter Peter Ginn stands on the footplate of an old steam train, dressed in period costume.
Dowlais ironworks, Cardiff, at night. This painting is by the artist Lionel Walden and dates from the late 1890s.