North British Railway

“ Almost as the northeastern corner of England is the undisputed principality of a single system so does a single railway, the Great Western, stretch alone directly west from London and almost completely dominates its territory. To bring it into regional grouping with any of the other important British railway systems has been well-nigh impossible. After a number of futile attempts the professional and amateur railroaders who have been attempting the solution of the regional plan for Great Britain have given up the idea. ”

“ To meet the needs of the Fleet several railways ran 20 or even more trains per day conveying Admiralty coal. The arrival of the American army in Great Britain entailed the running of 1,684 special trains on the London & North-Western railway and 1,139 on the Great Western railway. When the Canadian contingents first arrived in England the London & South-Western railway was required to run 92 specials from Plymouth alone. ”

“ The paramount and ever-increasing importance attached by the vast majority of British traders to quick delivery (an importance so great that on some lines there are express goods trains capable of running from 40 to 60 miles an hour) will keep them to the greater efficiency of the railway as a carrier of goods; while, if a serious diversion of traffic were really threatened, the British railways would not be handicapped as those of France and Germany are in any resort to rates and charges which would allow of a fair competition with the waterways. ”

“ The railways themselves, radiating from the great centres of population, and especially from London, are only in a few instances much affected by configuration. The Pennine Chain has always separated the traffic from south to north into an east coast route through the Vale of York, and a west coast route by the Lancashire plain. The Midland railway, running through the high and rugged country between the two, was the last to be constructed. ”

“ There were railways long before there were locomotive engines; indeed, we shall not be far out if we say that there were railways in England a few centuries before steam-engines of any sort came into use.
It was up in the North, in the colliery districts by the Tyne, that the idea of tramways, along which trains of trucks, drawn by horses or mules, seem to have first come into use; and they can certainly be traced there as far back as the time of King Charles I (about the year 1630) . The first railway which Parliament allowed to be laid in the South of England was the "Surrey Iron Railway". ”

“ The remarkable success which has attended the concentration of large bodies of Volunteers gathered from all quarters of the Kingdom for military functions and reviews, on more than one occasion, has shown the extraordinary capabilities of the British railway system for military transport on a great scale. Rolling stock is abundant. The more important lines in England have a double line of rails; some have four or more rails. Gradients, moreover, as a rule are easy, an important point, since troop trains are very heavy. ”

“ Thereafter the chief problem of the British railway manager, like that of his fellow executive in the United States, became that of supplying proper transport to a nation that refused to “stay put,” but insisted upon growing, even to an unthinkable size. In the years of its railway development the population of Great Britain has increased from fifteen or sixteen millions to well over forty-two. In a single one of her cities more than seven million people are now resident. ”

“ While the history of the railway dates back far beyond the nineteenth century, yet the railway, as we know it to-day, is essentially a product of this century. It dates, in fact, from England in 1830, when the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, 31 miles long, was opened, and was operated from the beginning by steam locomotives. The Stockton & Darlington Railway, 37 miles, was opened in 1825, but this line was intended only for private coal traffic, while the other line was built for general passenger and freight service, and for the use and benefit of the public. ”

“ In working the goods traffic on a line such as the London and North-Western, the trains are so arranged as to run with full loads between the most important points, as from London to Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Scotland, and so on; but the traffic at the intermediate stations is collected by a service of local stopping trains, and conveyed to the large junctions, such as Rugby, Crewe, and Stafford, where the waggons are properly classified and marshalled for transit by the through trains. ”

“ The road is a model road and one of the best appointed in Great Britain. The tourist, the student and the sportsman are offered strong inducements to avail themselves of the tours arranged by the Caledonian company.
THE NORTHWESTERN RAILWAY.
One of the largest English railway systems is that of the London & Northwestern. The territory covered by this railway extends from London in the south to Carlisle in the north, and from Cambridge in the east to Holyhead in the west—an area of three hundred miles in breadth. ”

“ So far from exercising any monopoly, the railways here are subjected, even among themselves, to a fierce competition. Parliament has sanctioned a second railway to Dover; there are already two lines to Hastings; two are completed to Portsmouth, and a third is making; the Government has insisted upon the South-Western making a second line to Exeter; there are already three lines to Birmingham; there are three lines to Derby, three to Peterborough, three to York, two to Cambridge, two to Oxford, two to Norwich, two to Lincoln, two to Liverpool ”

“ Great Western railway 40 runs, the longest from Paddington to Plymouth (North Road) , 2253⁄4 m.; London & South-Western railway 4 runs, three of which were operated between Waterloo and Bournemouth (Central) , 108 m.; London & North-Western railway 74 runs, the longest being between Euston and Rhyl, 2091⁄4 m.; Midland railway 25 runs, the longest from St. Pancras to Shipley (a stop to change engines only, not advertised) 206 m.; North-Eastern railway 14 runs, all between Newcastle and Edinburgh, working through over N.B.R. north of Berwick, 1241⁄2 m. ”

“ Huge sums were wasted in the promotion and construction of British railways in early days, from which, in their excessive capital cost, they suffer now. In the mania period railways sprang into existence so quickly that, to use the words of Robert Stephenson, they “appeared like the realisation of fabled powers or the magician’s wand.” The Illustrated London News of the day said: “Railway speculation has become the sole object of the world—cupidity is aroused and roguery shields itself under its name, as a more safe and rapid way of gaining its ends. ”

“ The atmospheric system of working railways found favour for a time, and was tried on the West London Railway, on the South Devon system, and in other parts of Great Britain, also in France, but nowhere was it permanently successful. ”

“ In proportion to the rapid extension of railways the demand for locomotives became very great. As our machine tools were peculiarly adapted for turning out a large amount of first-class work, we directed our attention to this class of business. In the course of about ten years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, we executed considerable orders for locomotives for the London and Southampton, the Manchester and Leeds, and the Gloucester railway companies. ”

“ To be a railway shareholder was at that time, to the majority of people, proof positive of insanity, while engineers and directors were regarded as curious compounds of fools and rogues. Any time between 1833 and 1837, the coachmen on the Great North Road would point out to their box-seat passengers the works of the London and Birmingham in progress beside that highway, and distinctly visible all the way between Potter’s Bar and Hatfield and at various other points. ”

“ The business of the Railway Clearing-House is transacted by one manager and 110 clerks. The system comprehends 47 railway companies: in short, it extends to all railways north of the Thames—from Bristol, London, and Harwich, to Aberdeen; and it contains no less than 648 clearing-house stations, by the correspondence of which with the London clearing-office the accounts of the “through” traffic of all the companies is adjudged and settled. ”

“ We believe it may be affirmed, without fear of contradiction, that the working details of a railway are invariably well executed in proportion to their magnitude:—that, for instance, in the management of the London and North-Western Railway the arrival and departure of trains are better regulated at their large stations than at their small;—that their great manufactories are better and more economically conducted than their little ones;—that the arrangements of Messrs. ”

“ The results of the working of railways have been in many respects different from those anticipated by their projectors. One of the most unexpected has been the growth of an immense passenger-traffic. The Stockton p. viiand Darlington line was projected as a coal line only, and the Liverpool and Manchester as a merchandise line. Passengers were not taken into account as a source of revenue, for at the time of their projection, it was not believed that people would trust themselves to be drawn upon a railway by an “explosive machine,” as the locomotive was described to be. ”

“ Whatever the difficulties which have attended the development of British railways, the lines themselves have been spread throughout the three kingdoms to such an extent that there are now very few districts not within easy reach of a railway ”

“ On the London & North-Western there are more than sixty through down trains, taking no account of local trains, each day passing over the same line of tracks, among which are express trains which stop nowhere, way trains which stop everywhere, express-freight, way-freight, mineral trains and parcel trains. On the Midland road there are nearly twice as many similar trains on each track. On the Metropolitan railway the average interval is three and one-third minutes between trains. ”

“ Can steam power, then, be used to produce this rapid motion? One hundred thousand persons that have passed from Liverpool to Manchester in less than two hours since September last, can answer this question in the affirmative.
Another great advantage of the railway over the common road is the much greater safety that it offers. The above number of passengers have been conveyed with scarcely an accident. Is there a line of turnpike-road in the kingdom that can make the same boast, where an equal number of passengers have travelled? ”

“ Ireland, 2,000 miles; and 290 companies shared these miles of railroad between them. The total number of depots, or stations, as they are termed in England, including junctions and sidings, is about 10,000 for the whole kingdom; of these 6,000 are passenger-stations, giving approximately one station to about every two miles of railway, but not in reality, because there are no less than 150 stations in London and the suburbs alone. As a matter of course the great centre of the railway system of the United Kingdom is London. ”

“ He endeavoured to make railways commercially successful, and at the same time to combine elegance with strength and economy of design. His bridges on the Lancaster and Carlisle and the Caledonian railways, and those across the Thames at Richmond, Kew, and Kingston, show his success. Latterly he was appointed engineer to the London and South-Western Railway Company, and his plan for the line from Yeovil to Exeter was accepted in 1856. ”

“ There are abundant service expresses running in an even four hours between that city and both Manchester, 184 miles, and Liverpool, 193 miles. Competition is supposed to have forced this service. Competition is forever supposed to be forcing service. Yet on the non-competitive Great Western railway I rode, but a few months ago, from London to Bath, 104 miles, in an even two hours, while across the Channel, I had ridden, but a few weeks before that, over the war-struck Eastern railway of France ninety miles from Paris to Rheims in just sixty seconds less than an even two hours. ”

“ Great Britain will never go back to her old extravagances of the days of unbridled transport competition. True it is that [Pg 284] since the signing of the Armistice her railway service, both passenger and freight, has been radically increased, but to nowhere near the point that it had reached in 1913. Fine frills, like the running of fast non-stop expresses between London and the ocean landing at Fishguard, in South Wales, to cite a single instance out of many, have been abandoned; never to be taken up again in your day or mine. ”

“ And thus, when a train starts on a journey of it may be hundreds of miles, it is signaled on from station to station, and "lives along the line," until at length it reaches its destination, and the last signal of "train in" is given. By this means an immense number of trains can be worked with regularity and safety. On the Southeastern Railway, where the system has been brought to a state of high efficiency, it is no unusual thing during Easter week to send 570,000 passengers through the London Bridge Station alone; and on some days as many as 1200 trains a day. ”

“ These scattered bits of road here and there were, in after years, as the possibilities of railroad development began to dawn upon the minds of far-seeing men, united by connecting links and reorganized into roads of much greater length. In fact some of the most difficult features of the railroad problem of the present day grew out of the failure of projectors of railroads{435} in the early days to grasp the meaning of the system which they were instituting. France, Germany, Belgium and other European cities have had no serious railway problem. ”