Full Steam Ahead: How the Railways Made Britain. Peter Ginn
Victorian ironworking in a foundry. This painting is the work of the French painter, Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), and was produced in 1893.
George Stephenson had patented his own improved rails, but after he had seen Birkinshaw’s in action, he wrote to the promoters of the Stockton and Darlington railway: ‘To tell you the truth, although it would put £500 in my pockets to specify my own patent rails, I cannot do so after the experiences I have had.’ Always open to new ideas and more interested in the success of the railway than in personal get-rich-quick schemes, Stephenson used Birkinshaw’s rails and advised everyone else to do the same over the decades to come.
Production of those rails began with John Birkinshaw’s employers, the Bedlington foundry, but it was to be the Dowlais firm that capitalized upon his invention to the greatest profit and benefit.
Back in 1783, Peter Onion (the brother-in-law of one of Dowlais’ owners) had come up with and patented a method of ‘puddling’ pig iron to turn it into wrought iron. Refinements were of course to follow, but this was the first time that it became possible to produce wrought iron in quantity. The old medieval small-scale bloomeries had produced wrought iron in small batches directly from the kiln. The new large-scale blast furnaces that are sometimes credited with kicking off the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century produced much larger quantities, but it was pig iron that they output, not wrought iron. Pig iron was superb for casting, but if you needed wrought iron you were still dependent on the old bloomeries, until puddling came along. A combination of new industrial process, a good location and good business management made this firm in South Wales the centre of the international iron industry. Life in Merthyr Tydfil was changing fast. As a forward-looking business, Dowlais soon invested in one of Boulton and Watt’s steam engines to drive the bellows on their blast furnace (the first one in Wales), and a second soon followed to power the new rolling mill that took the puddled wrought iron and rolled it out into bars. They were ready to expand their operations. As news trickled out of the success of Birkinshaw’s wrought iron rails, the Dowlais company could see the great potential that this new product had for them. Having cracked the problems of producing large quantities of wrought iron and got to grips with steam engines, they were perfectly placed to add one more rolling mill that could turn a useful material into a brand new finished product. They were keen to tender for any new railway business. According to Dowlais’ records, they managed to sell rails to the Stockton and Darlington railway in 1829, although presumably most were actually made by the Bedlington Iron Foundry where Birkinshaw worked. They certainly supplied a large number the following year to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. However, what made the real money were the offshore sales. By 1831, Dowlais were selling to the United States, providing all the rails for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Five years later, they had won contracts for the entire length of the Berlin and Leipzig line and that between St Petersburg and Pauloffsky. The Grand Duke Constantine of Russia himself came in person to witness the construction process. Twenty thousand tons of wrought iron rails left Dowlais that year along the newly built Taff Vale Railway down to Cardiff docks. Ten years later that tonnage had more than quadrupled, now produced by 18 great blast furnaces. It was a vast enterprise, employing around one and half thousand adult men, nearly eight hundred adult women, about twelve hundred teenagers and another five hundred younger children. Meanwhile, as the people laboured, the ores to sustain these levels of production poured in from Whitehaven, Barrow, Cornwall, Northampton, the Forest of Dean and Spain, in addition to the native ores of Wales. Most of that ore, in a great industrial cycle, was brought in by rail.
An extensive network of wrought iron rails was a pre-condition for creating the early railways. Fortunately, new technology was at hand to enable the mass production of iron that was required.
“PIG IRON WAS SUPERB FOR CASTING, BUT IF YOU NEEDED WROUGHT IRON YOU WERE STILL DEPENDENT ON THE OLD BLOOMERIES.”
Coal ships moored at Cardiff docks in the late nineteenth century. The railways provided the missing link that enabled the coal to be transported directly to the water and the world.
Presenters Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, aboard and in front of a beautifully restored old steam engine.
The triumph of wrought iron rails lasted for a mere 35 years before they were ousted by steel. Just as a technical leap in iron production allowed wrought iron to move from small-scale to large-scale manufacture, the ‘Bessemer process’ made steel into a mass-market material. Steel rails promised to last four times longer and consequently cut the costs of track maintenance. Henry Bessemer patented his process in 1856 and Dowlais was the first firm to take out a licence to use it. However, it took them nine more years of experimentation and investment before the first steel rails rolled their way out of the factory on wagons of the Taff Valley Railway. Theirs were not in fact the first to be laid. That honour fell to a small section of railway line at Derby station, produced from the results of an abortive experiment with scrap metal and the Bessemer process by Robert Forester Mushet at the Ebbw Vale Ironworks. However, once again Dowlais was soon producing a huge volume of rails and the massive exports that went with this output.
Whether you analyse slate, coal or iron – or indeed a host of other industries – you cannot fail to see the symbiotic nature of their relationship with railways. Without the heavy industry, there would have been no track and no locomotives; but without first the track and later the locomotives, there would have been precious little industry. The two developed hand in hand, each taking the other up to the next level. Every advance for one sparked an advance for the other, throughout the nineteenth century.
As I sit on a train gliding through the countryside, moving more quickly than the cars I can see on a nearby motorway, I wonder to myself how the passenger experience has changed over the years. Trains are an established part of our lives. Whatever we may think about them as they go by, they are not new to us. However, when the railways were first built, the impact of trains on the surrounding countryside was immense.
The train I am travelling in is a thoroughly modern ‘Pendolino’, and there is an unbroken, if somewhat complex, lineage between this train and the very first passenger trains. The Pendolino is closely related to the highly advanced but infamous public failure, the APT (Advanced Passenger Train). The APT was an attempt to improve the speeds achieved by the Intercity 125 trains that still run today. This quest for improving train speeds has led to many of the innovations on the railway and has directly impacted on the passengers over the decades.
The speed of the APT was increased through the deployment of a controversial tilting mechanism, but after a series of problems and a loss of financial and political support, the APT project was soon abandoned. The patents for the tilting mechanism were sold to the railway division of FIAT in Italy, who were working on their own set of tilting trains. These patents were used to improve the designs and eventually the Italian Pendolino was born.
The Pendolino trains have received their fair share of criticism, much of it relating to the passenger experience. The seats are crammed in and there is little room to spread out. If you are lucky enough to get a seat that is near one of the few windows on board, the view is limited and there is nowhere comfortable to rest your arm. Many of these restrictions on passengers are derived from high-speed rail safety regulations, which particularly apply when trains cross one another in a tunnel. I wonder what the views of a Victorian traveller aboard a Pendolino might have been, if their only other experience of rail travel had been aboard one of Britain’s first passenger trains?
The first recorded steam-powered device was the aeolipile, created in the first century AD, but it was in Britain during the eighteenth century that true advancements in steam power were made. Beginning with Thomas Savery’s