C
Caledonian Railway
The largest Scottish company to be merged into the London, Midland, Scottish on 1 January 1923, the Caledonian Railway adopted the Royal Arms of Scotland as its crest and its locomotives were smartly presented in a blue livery. It was founded in 1845 to extend the West Coast mainline from Carlisle to Glasgow and Edinburgh, dividing at Carstairs, and at the time it was expected to be the only Anglo-Scottish line. The engineer was Joseph Locke. Initially, grand termini were planned in both cities, as well as a cross-country line, but these plans were thwarted.
The company reached Glasgow over the metals of the Grankirk & Glasgow (later renamed the Glasgow & Coatbridge) and the Wishaw & Coltness railways to Buchanan Street station, whose wooden trainsheds remained until London & North Eastern Railway days. Eventually three Glasgow termini were used, including, from 1849, the South Side station accessed via the Clydesdale Junction and the Glasgow Barrhead & Neilston Direct, and also shared Bridge Street with the Glasgow & South Western. South Side was closed when Central and St Enoch were opened in the 1870s, but Bridge Street continued to be used until 1906, after Central had been extended, eventually having seventeen platforms on two levels.
The line was extended north to Aberdeen using the Scottish Central, Scottish Midland Junction and Aberdeen Railways, and in 1856 the last two merged to form the Scottish North Eastern Railway, before all three were absorbed by the Caledonian in 1865-66. From 1880, the Caledonian served the Western Highlands over the Callander & Oban Railway, and then up to 1900, built a network of lines along the Clyde to compete with the Glasgow & South Western and North British Railways, giving the company a suburban and tourist network as well as serving steamer services, and the growing shipyards and the mines of Lanarkshire, for which many new lines and private sidings were built. The Caledonian’s main routes were the finest in Scotland. The company moved into steamer services, including tourist steamers on Loch Lomond, with the main steamer-railway terminus being at Wemyss Bay. The further expansion of the Glasgow suburban network was cut short by the appearance of horse and, later, electric trams, with the Paisley & District line completed, but never opened for passenger trains.
Meanwhile, in Edinburgh, the unsatisfactory Lothian Road station was replaced by Princes Street, which later had the Caledonian Hotel added providing an impressive frontage. A network of suburban services was also created in the capital. Further north, the company built its own station at Stirling and took the lead in remodelling the joint stations at Perth and Aberdeen, and opened new tourist lines from Crieff to Lochearnhead and from Connel to Ballachulish.
The company provided railway links for all of the docks within its wide operating area, as well as owning those at Grangemouth, which it acquired with the Forth & Clyde Canal in 1867.
Intense competition arose with the Glasgow & South Western and, especially after the opening of the East Coast mainline, the North British, initially for traffic between Edinburgh and London, but after the Tay and Forth bridges were completed, this rivalry extended to Aberdeen. The hotel business extended from Glasgow and Edinburgh to include the famous hotel at Gleneagles. The company became famous for good design and high standards, with a strong awareness of the importance of public image. When merged into the London Midland & Scottish Railway in 1923, it contributed 1,057 route miles.
Callander & Oban Railway
Originally intended to be provided by the ill-fated Glasgow & North Western Railway, the idea of a line south from Oban to serve the growing resort and feed passengers to the steamer services to the islands, was revived during the 1860s. The cheapest route was 71 miles to Callander, connecting with the Caledonian Railway. Engineered by Blyth & Westland of Edinburgh, the line was amongst the first to use bowstring girder bridges on the section up Strathyre. Funding ran out leaving the line to terminate at Tyndrum with a stage coach connection to Oban, and it was only after extra capital was raised that the line to Oban was completed in 1880, using John Strain as engineer. The line suffered from steep gradients and the Caledonian had to design locomotives with small wheels and low axle weights to work the line, while a system of trip wires had to be used to operate signals if rocks fell on to the line. Three branches were built, the shortest to Killin opened in 1886; the longest opened in 1903 to Ballachulish; and then there was one to Comrie and Crief opened in 1905. The line to Comrie closed in 1964, the other branches in 1965, and the section of the line between Dublane and Crianlarich closed the following year, leaving the remainder of the line to be reached from the West Highland line.
Cambrian Railway
The Cambrian Railway was by far the largest of the constituent companies absorbed into the Great Western in 1923. Despite its title, a significant part of its overall route mileage of 295 miles lay over the border in England, including Oswestry, its headquarters and main works. Home territory for the Cambrian was the unlikely and sparsely-populated area of mid-Wales, so underdeveloped that its first locomotives for one of its predecessors, the Llanidloes & Newtown Railway opened in 1859, were delivered by horse teams.
The Cambrian Railway was formed in 1864 from four small companies, the Llanidloes & Newtown Railway, Oswestry & Newton Railway, Newtown & Machynlleth Railway and the Oswestry, Ellesmere and Whitchurch Railway, as a defensive measure to keep the English railway companies away from mid-Wales. The new company was joined the following year by the Aberystwyth & Welsh Coast Railway, almost doubling its track mileage. A further major expansion came in 1888, when it took over the working of the Mid Wales Railway, which operated between Moat Lane and Talyllyn Junction, but had running powers through to Brecon. The largest town on the Cambrian network was Wrexham, served by the Wrexham & Ellesmere Railway which became part of the Cambrian in 1895. The Cambrian also absorbed or worked several other railways, including the 6.5 mile Van Railway, completed in 1871, the Mawddwy Railway, also of around 6.5 miles running through the Upper Dovey Valley, and the 19.5 mile Tanat Valley Light Railway, dating from 1904. There were also two narrow gauge lines, the 1ft 11½-in Vale of Rheidol Railway, opened in 1902, and the 2ft 6in gauge Welshpool & Llanfair Railway opened the following year.
Serving such a difficult area, the Cambrian, despite the nationalist leanings of its founders, soon became heavily dependent upon several of the major English companies for through traffic, and inevitably these included the Great Western at Oswestry as well as the Midland at Three Cocks Junction and, its closest associate, the London & North Western at Whitchurch and Welshpool. The two main lines for the Cambrian, both of which handled considerable holiday traffic, were the 96 miles between Whitchurch and Aberystwyth and the 54 miles from Dovey Junction to Pwllheli.
Given the unpromising traffic of its territory, the Cambrian remained impoverished for its existence, with much single track. It went bankrupt twice, and was often accused of being badly run. Nevertheless, in 1913, it carried three million passengers and a million tons of goods traffic. It suffered a major accident at Abermule in January 1921, when an express hit a stopping train head-on killing seventeen people and injuring many more, giving rise to much debate over the safety of single line railways.
The GWR was disappointed that the Cambrian became a constituent company, no doubt to the delight of the latter railway’s shareholders who received a guaranteed income for the first time.
Camp Coaches
During the 1930s, old railway carriages had relatively little metal in them and were seldom valuable as items for scrap. They could be sold off, and the Great Western amongst others did indeed offer old carriages for sale and delivered them free of charge to stations on its network. The best an old carriage could expect was to be used as a summer cottage, but many simply became storage sheds or hen houses.
It was in 1933 that the London & North Eastern Railway hit upon the idea of converting surplus railway carriages to camping coaches, basically self-catering holiday accommodation, and located in disused sidings at stations that were in either tranquil surroundings or close to resorts. The Great Western was much taken with this idea, having a long running rivalry with the LNER over which company served the better holiday destinations, and eventually all of the Big Four offered camping coaches. In 1934, the first GWR ‘Camp Coaches’ appeared.
The coaches were old compartment six-wheel carriages, usually with about five compartments. In typical Great Western fashion, a booklet was commissioned, written and published, to introduce the public to the idea. Each camp coach would have one compartment fitted out as a kitchen, another two knocked into one as a living room with table, and the remaining two as sleeping cabins.
In the publicity material and the booklet, much was made of the fact that the company provided everything for its campers. The coaches all came with cutlery and crockery, saucepans, a cooking stove, tablecloths, towels, broom, blankets and sheets. A hurricane lamp was provided, with oil lamps for the sleeping cabins and another type of lamp for the living room, while the ‘cooking stove’ was a primus with an oven, while there was a jug for carrying paraffin and a bucket, as well as deck chairs so that the campers could sit outside. This may seem primitive to us today, but this was reasonable comfort for the day. These were non-corridor carriages so the sleeping cabins could only be reached by stepping outside. Charges were reasonable at £3 per week for up to six people, and employees of the Great Western could hire the coaches at a discount outside the main holiday season.
For the first season, there were just nineteen coaches, with locations including Penryn, Fowey, Blue Anchor and Princetown (handy for Dartmoor Prison), but this was soon extended and by 1939 there were sixty-five scattered throughout Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and rural Wales. Each season, demand exceeded the number of places available.
These ventures ended with the outbreak of war. Many of the camp coaches were used as emergency wartime accommodation, some of them being moved to new locations, but almost all seem to have suffered neglect and even misuse during the war years.
Canals
The canal age marked a significant advance in inland transport, especially for bulk loads such as coal, and it is a measure of the tremendous advance brought to inland transport by the railways that wherever a railway and a canal ran in parallel, it was the faster and cheaper railway that won. It was not surprising that the canal companies were amongst the most determined opponents of the railways when proposals for a new line were laid before Parliament. This opposition lasted until around 1845, when the start of the railway mania released so much money into the railway industry that many canal owners allowed themselves to be bought out. Some canal companies were persuaded to become railway companies, such as the Thames & Medway, a predecessor of the South Eastern Railway, while others leased themselves to railway companies. Many found that their route was as ideal for railway operation as it had been for canals, although sometimes problems with the water table could arise. In some cases, conversion was so rapid, as in Aberdeen, that boat owners found themselves stranded as water was drained away ready for the start of railway construction.
The railways did not always close the canals. The London & North Western, for example, used the Birmingham Canal to feed traffic to exchange depots, and in return paid a guaranteed dividend to shareholders. Others found that canal ownership was a quick and non-parliamentary means of penetrating the territory of a rival line. Eventually almost a third of the canal network fell into railway ownership, and while it is true that many were closed, converted or neglected, this was not always the case, and some continued to trade profitably into the twentieth century. Canals which had extensive development along their banks often did well. Like the railways, most canals were nationalised by the post-Second World War Labour government, eventually after the British Transport Commission control was passed to the British Waterways Board.
The Lancaster Canal actually leased a railway, which was illegal without parliamentary sanction.
Canals were very much slower than the railways, and while at first could offer to carry much larger loads, before long even this advantage was lost. The most impressive of the British canals was the Manchester Ship Canal, an integrated dock and canal system designed to end the city’s dependence on the port of Liverpool, and which even had its own deep sea shipping company, Manchester Liners, operating transatlantic services. This was an exception on a scale more familiar in Europe or North America. There was no such thing as a standard gauge for canals, and they varied between those limited to the traditional, and many would say typical, 35-ton narrow boat to those capable of accommodating large barges of 300-tons. This meant that through traffic over long distances became difficult. The need to supply water was another cost and a complication, while they were vulnerable in drought or in very cold weather.
Although nationalisation and massive modernisation was advocated by a Royal Commission in 1911, railway opposition and the First World War delayed this. After the war, canal fortunes became far worse, not so much because of continued competition from the railways but from the massive growth in road transport, which also affected the railways with lower costs and doorstep to destination operation.
Cannon Street
Cannon Street was opened in 1866 as the City terminus for the South Eastern Railway, which had previously decanted its passengers at London Bridge, on the wrong side of the Thames. Earlier plans had been to provide two other stations on the extension line running to Charing Cross, but when the London, Chatham & Dover Railway was authorised to provide an extension to Ludgate Hill, the SER realised that it also needed a terminus on the north bank of the River Thames. It was even felt that there could be local traffic between Cannon Street and Charing Cross from those anxious to avoid the heavy congestion on the streets of London – these were the days before the construction of the Circle and Metropolitan District Lines and the prediction was to prove correct before these underground lines were built.
The extension to Cannon Street was authorised by an Act of 1861, with a bridge across the Thames and a triangular junction on viaducts with the line between London Bridge and Charing Cross. At first, and for many years, all trains running to and from Charing Cross called at Cannon Street. The triangular junction led on to an engine shed and turntable, so cramped that locomotives had to run over the turntable to enter or leave the shed, and coaling stages.
There were five tracks, four running roads and an engine road, on the bridge, which had pedestrian walkways on either side, with the one on the east reserved for railway personnel, while that on the west was available to the public on payment of a ½d toll (0.2p). The station itself abutted immediately onto the bridge, with nine roads, and was a handsome building offering stunning views over the Thames, and with a hotel fronting the street. The roof was a single span of 190ft over 100ft above the rails and glazed over two-thirds of its surface, surmounted by a 22ft wide lantern running almost the whole 680ft length. There were seven platform faces, varying in length between 480 and 721ft, with the two longest faces incorporating a cab roadway, with another set of platform faces separated by three tracks to include a spare for rolling stock. The two longest platforms extended beyond the roof and on to the bridge.
The hotel, the City Terminus, was operated by an independent company and opened in May 1867, but was later acquired by the SER, and later renamed The Cannon Street Hotel. It managed, for reasons that remain obscure and can be nothing more than a coincidence, to become the venue for the creation of the Communist Party of Great Britain in July 1920. Falling business led to its closure in 1931, and while the public rooms were retained for meetings and functions, the remainder was converted to offices and let as Southern House.
When first opened on 1 September 1866, Cannon Street fulfilled its promise of being served by all trains proceeding to and from Charing Cross, including boat trains, and with these and a shuttle service between the two stations, there was a five minute frequency service between the West End and the City, taking seven minutes, and costing 6d (2½p) first class, 4d second class and 2d third class, compared with 3d for the horse bus. The local traffic was considerable, with 3.5 million of the 8 million passengers using Cannon Street in 1867 travelling solely between the City and the West End. This all came to an end with the opening of the District Railway between Westminster and Blackfriars in May, 1870, and which reached Mansion House in July, 1871, while the completion of the Circle Line on 6 October 1884 saw a station opened under the forecourt of Cannon Street.
One kind of specialised traffic had already disappeared before this. The seven minute run had proved a great draw to certain ladies who found that it combined with the comfort of a first class compartment to provide the ideal environment for the entertainment of their clients. Once a stop was introduced at Waterloo from 1 January 1869, the number of drawn blinds on trains running into and out of Charing Cross dropped dramatically.
Cannon Street was the exclusive preserve of the SER except during late 1867 and until the end of July, 1868, when the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway operated two up morning and two down evening trains to and from Brighton.
Growing traffic, with a train being handled every minute at peak periods, meant that the approach bridge had to be widened to ten tracks, including a siding on each side. This was completed on 13 February 1892. Inside the station, the cab road was shortened to provide another platform, while three platforms were extended further on to the first pier of the bridge. On the south bank, the locomotive facilities were extended.
The First World War saw the continental boat trains removed to Victoria, an arrangement that continued until the late 1930s, while severe reductions in services to save fuel also saw the practice of running Charing Cross trains into and out of the station finally come to an end on 31 December 1916. This must have been a welcome cut in journey times for passengers travelling to and from the West End terminus, and certainly could not have continued during the post-war years as traffic levels continued to rise. The next year saw the station closed on Sundays, and after 1 May 1918, it also closed on Saturdays after 15.00, and between 11.00 and 16.00 on weekdays. While these changes reflected the nature of the passenger traffic at Cannon Street, it also enabled the station to be used as a crew interchange point for the goods trains operating between the Midlands and North of England and the Channel ports, via Farrington and Ludgate Hill, and provided a marked improvement in productivity on these services.
Plans to electrify the suburban services were overtaken by the grouping, even though the South Eastern & Chatham Railway had first obtained powers for this as early as 1903.
Post grouping, the Southern Railway remodelled the track, with electrification ending the need for light engine movements and the old layout designed to facilitate the operation of trains to and from Charing Cross being redundant. An extension of the system of non-conflicting parallel movements pioneered by the SECR in 1922 also increased the number of trains that could be handled at peak periods. The changes required Cannon Street to be closed from 15.00 on Saturday, 5 June 1926, until 04.00 on Monday, 28 June. The bay platform was abolished and the eight remaining platforms rearranged, providing lengths of between 567 and 752 ft, with numbers 1 to 5 electrified. Under the new timetable introduced with electrification on 19 July 1926, there were eight electric trains an hour off-peak and seventeen during the peak, with a total of just thirty-six steam trains daily, mainly for Chatham and stations beyond. Two further platforms were fitted with third rail in July 1939 when the services to Gillingham and Maidstone were electrified. The station re-opened on Sundays in summer, 1930, and a few trains returned between Charing Cross and Cannon Street in 1933, some of which continued to be operated until 1956. Continental boat trains returned during summer, 1936, to relieve pressure on Victoria, and this continued up to the outbreak of the Second World War.
Once again, wartime saw restrictions on the station’s operating hours, closing between 10.00 and 16.00 and after 19.30 daily, and from 15.00 on Saturday until Monday morning with effect from 16 October 1939. Even rush hour services were severely curtailed in wartime, so that by 1944, there were just twenty-four peak hour departures, only one of which was for the Kent coast. Before this, on the night of 10/11 May 1941, the station was bombed and caught fire, with railwaymen braving molten glass dripping from the roof to rescue locomotives and carriages, but one of the former, St Lawrence, was caught by a bomb on the bridge.
Post-war, Southern House was patched up, but the station had to operate as a shell of its former self, as it was judged too badly damaged to ever carry the weight of a single span roof. Weekend services resumed after nationalisation, but after a period of ten years were dropped again.
Canterbury & Whitstable Railway
Authorised in 1825 with the backing of Canterbury residents and businesses anxious to improve the delivery of coal from the port of Whitstable, just six miles away, the line had the distinction of being the first in the world to use steam propulsion for both passengers and freight. The first engineer was William James, but he underestimated the costs and was replaced by George Stephenson. It opened in 1830. Despite the short distance, it had gradients of up to 1 in 28, and had a half-mile tunnel. Initially, stationary engines worked the trains, although a one mile stretch on the level was worked by the steam locomotive Invicta, until it failed in 1839 and traction was left to the stationary engines and horses.
Leased to the South Eastern Railway in 1844, two years before it reached Canterbury, which purchased the line in 1853, having first re-introduced steam locomotives throughout. It required locomotives with special low-cut chimneys to cope with the restricted headroom in the tunnel. It survived Southern Railway ownership, but after a period as a freight-only line, closed completely in 1952.
Cardiff
Oddly, the lords of the manor for Cardiff were the Marquises of Bute, whose business interests included the Cardiff docks. Originally a small town, smaller than Merthyr Tydfil, Newport or Swansea, Cardiff enjoyed considerable expansion at the outset of the industrial revolution when the Glamorganshire Canal, opened in 1794, brought first iron ore and then coal from Merthyr Tydfil and the Taff Vale for shipment. The old docks were soon overwhelmed by the new traffic, and a new dock was built by the 2nd Marquess and opened in 1839, by which time the traffic had overtaken the capacity of the canal and relief came with the opening of the Taff Vale Railway from Merthyr in 1841. From this time onwards, Cardiff enjoyed rapid growth so that by 1881, it was the largest city in Wales. Meanwhile, a second new dock, the East Bute Dock, had been opened in 1859, and authorisation given to build a third, which was completed in 1887.
The railways played a considerable part in the development of Cardiff both as a port and as a city. The Rhymney Railway reached Cardiff in 1858, and with the Taff Vale was responsible for most of the coal and ore traffic, and to ease congestion on its lines and at Cardiff docks, the TVR also served the new dock at Penarth two miles away when it opened between 1859 and 1865. Meanwhile, the broad gauge South Wales Railway had entered the town in 1850, but this played little part in the coal and ore traffic until after its conversion to standard gauge in 1872, allowing through running of wagons between the ‘valley’ lines and the main line.
Cardiff’s success and the resultant congestion was almost the port’s undoing as, mentioned earlier, in 1882 the mine owners were behind the establishment of the Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway intended to remove their business from Cardiff, while in 1884 others started to build a new dock at Barry served by the Barry Railway, which opened in 1889. Fortunately, with coal output doubling between 1889 and 1913, sufficient traffic existed to ensure that all of these railways and docks were busy.
Nevertheless, after the coal miners’ strike and the related General Strike in 1926, coal production declined sharply, falling from 50 million tons to 35 million tons between 1922 and 1938. The post-war boom had been short-lived and the years of recession also affected demand, but many export markets for Welsh coal were lost during the strike and never regained. Being heavily dependent on the port and its coal and ore traffic, the recession affected Cardiff especially badly. By this time, the Great Western Railway was the monopoly provider of railway services in and around Cardiff, and was accused of neglecting the area, and although there was little evidence to substantiate these claims, faced with sharply declining traffic and some duplication of routes, the GWR itself had to close some twenty-five miles of line to passenger traffic in the valleys.
Cardiff Railway
Cardiff had originally depended on a canal to bring coal to the docks for transhipment, but this proved inadequate as the demand for coal rose and the situation was not resolved until the Taff Vale Railway opened from Merthyr Tydfil in 1841. The TVR was later joined by the Rhymney Railway in 1858, while the docks at Cardiff continued to expand. Additional port facilities were opened two miles away at Penarth during 1859-1865, with a railway connection leased to the TVR. While the Great Western Railway had reached Cardiff as early as 1850, its broad gauge was ill-suited to the conditions in the valleys, where standard gauge ruled completely and so it carried little coal traffic until after the coal and iron masters succeeded in securing a conversion to standard gauge in 1872.
Nevertheless, the docks and the TVR and Rhymney lines to Cardiff had themselves become so congested by 1882 that the mine owners secured powers to build the Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway, determined to move their traffic away from Cardiff. In 1884, other coal mining interests obtained authority to build a new port at Barry, eight miles from Cardiff, with its own Barry Railway operating down the Rhondda. The new port and railway opened in 1889, and with the support of the mine owners started to take traffic away from Cardiff, although the port survived as coal output doubled between 1889 and 1913, so that there was sufficient business to keep all of the port facilities busy. It was not until 1897 that the Cardiff Docks obtained parliamentary approval to change its name to the Cardiff Railway and build new lines northwards to connect with the Taff Vale at Treforest and at Pontypridd, creating a further 11.5 route miles in addition to the existing 120 track miles within the Bute Docks (named after the local landowner, the Marquis of Bute). The Cardiff Railway had its own locomotives and two steam railcars for passenger traffic. Nevertheless, given the heavy concentration of competing and connecting lines and interport rivalry, the company soon found itself in protracted disputes with other railways and costly litigation. This must have been a factor in the poor financial performance of the Cardiff Railway, with its shareholders getting a dividend of just 1 per cent in 1921 compared with 9 per cent at the Rhymney.
A proposal to merge with the Taff Vale in the years before the First World War was vetoed by Parliament, which a little more than a decade later was to force these two companies and others to combine into the new GWR. Nevertheless, even before the grouping the three companies came under a single general manager.
Carmarthenshire Railway
A predecessor of the Llanelly & Mynydd Mawr Railway, the Carmarthenshire was notable for being the first combined railway and dock undertaking. It was formed in 1802 as an early iron railway with edge rails mounted on stone blocks, and using horse traction. A busy line, it was not profitable and went into liquidation in 1844. It was purchased by the LMMR in 1875, and a new line was laid over the old track bed and steam locomotives introduced.
Cavan & Leitrim Light Railway
Incorporated in 1883 as the Cavan Leitrim & Roscommon Light Railway, a 3ft gauge line linking Dromod with Ballinamore and Belturbet, opened in 1887, with a branch from Ballinamore to Arigna opened the following year. It was renamed the Cavan & Leitrim Light Railway in 1895. In 1925, under Irish grouping, it passed into the Great Southern Railways, and in 1945 it was nationalised. It closed in 1959.
Central London Railway/Central Line
Authorised in 1892 and opened in 1900, the Central London Railway linked Shepherd’s Bush with the Bank, a distance of 5¾ miles, running under London’s West End to the City. Initially, trains were drawn by electric locomotives, but there were complaints from those buildings along the line about vibration and in 1903, the locomotives and trailer carriages were replaced by the more practical self-propelled trains, the first multiple unit trains in the United Kingdom. Unusually, the stations were slightly higher than the running tube, so that braking was assisted by trains climbing a short slope to the platforms, and acceleration helped by the corresponding downward slope.
Until 1907, a flat fare of 2d (less than 1p) was charged.
In 1908, the western end of the line was extended by a loop to Wood Lane, close to the exhibition centre at White City, and then extended eastwards to Liverpool Street in 1912. The line was badly affected by competition from motor buses after 1910, and in 1913, it was acquired by the Underground Group. A further westward extension followed in 1920, running over Great Western tracks to Ealing Broadway.
Along with the rest of the Underground companies, the CLR became part of the newly-formed London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, and in 1937, it was renamed the Central Line. In the meantime, the line was modernised between 1935 and 1940 under the New Works Programme, designed to stimulate employment, and the original central third rail power supply was replaced by the LT standard third and fourth rail. The line was further extended eastwards to Leyton and then ran over London & North Eastern tracks to Hainault and Epping, with four miles of new tube tunnel, and this eventually opened between 1947 and 1949. A further extension to Ongar was electrified in 1957, but closed in 1994. To the west, what was by this time the Western Region of British Railways took the line to West Ruislip in 1948. West Ruislip to Epping was a distance of more than 34 miles, while overall, the Central peak route mileage in 1957 was 51½ miles.
Channel Tunnel
Although the Channel Tunnel was officially opened in 1994, the concept dated from early in the nineteenth century when the French mining engineer, Albert Mathieu-Favier, proposed two tunnels meeting in an artificial island to be constructed on the Varne Bank in mid-Channel. This was meant to be a road tunnel and the island would allow horses to be changed. Later, during the 1830s, the idea was taken up by Thome de Gramond, who spent the next twenty years investigating the rock strata under the Channel. The British and French governments agreed in 1875 that private companies could have a concession to build and operate a tunnel. Later that decade, one French and two British companies started trial boring on both sides of the Channel, and using compressed-air boring machines they successfully completed a mile-long tunnel that dropped around 160 feet into the chalk beneath the sea. The work stopped because the British Army saw a potential threat to national security.
The concept was not taken seriously again until 1929, when a Royal Commission considered proposals for a broad gauge line from London to Paris, which was strange since it would have been incompatible with the gauges in use on either side. Nevertheless, it was not until 1955 that it was finally accepted that a tunnel presented little threat to national security.
Charing Cross
No London railway station is as well situated for the traveller as Charing Cross, at the end of The Strand and with Trafalgar Square just around the corner. It is really the only railway station actually in the West End, since Victoria and Marylebone are located on the fringes. The substantial fore-court and the impressive façade of the Charing Cross Hotel all serve to disguise the fact that the station is smaller than many in medium-sized provincial cities.
Plans for a railway terminus in this part of London were mooted as long ago as 1846, when the South Eastern Railway promoted a bill for an extension from Bricklayers Arms to Hungerford Bridge, but it was unsuccessful. The SER finally managed to obtain the approval of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway for a line from London Bridge to the West End, and in 1857 settled on the Hungerford Market as the ideal site, with the prospect of a link to the London & South Western Railway at Waterloo. As with Cannon Street, the idea was that the two stations would pair well with a lucrative traffic between the City and the West End, and this was indeed the case until the Metropolitan District and then the Circle lines came into existence.
The Charing Cross Railway Company Act 1859 authorised the construction of a line one mile and sixty-eight chains in length, mainly on viaduct except for Hungerford Bridge which took it across the Thames and into the terminus. The new company was separate from the SER in theory, but obviously linked to it, with the SER providing £300,000 of the initial £800,000 capital, and later raising this investment to £650,000 as land purchase costs proved to be far heavier than anticipated. Much of the money was spent south of the river, with the governors of St Thomas Hospital exacting the heavy price of £296,000, and then, despite the poverty of the area at the time, the many slum landlords also managed to follow this example. The CCRC wisely decided to build three running tracks instead of two on the viaduct, and to build Hungerford Bridge with four tracks instead of two. The SER had to pay for the reconstruction of Borough Market as well as a 404ft iron viaduct over it, and oversee the removal of more than 7,000 corpses from the College Burial Ground of St Mary, Lambeth, and their removal and re-interment at Brookwood. The viaduct had 190 brick arches including fourteen crossing streets, seventeen iron bridges and two iron viaducts, including that at Borough Market. Later, in June, 1878, a new junction was opened to provide a link, Metropolitan Junction, with the LCDR line to Blackfriars.
The line also resulted in the removal and scrapping of Brunel’s original Hungerford Bridge, but nothing was wasted as the bridge and iron work was used for the construction of Clifton Suspension Bridge at Bristol. As at Cannon Street, the bridge included a pedestrian walkway, in this case on the eastern side, for which a toll of a ½d (0.2p) was charged until 1878, when the Metropolitan Board of Works paid the SER £98,000 for pedestrians to enjoy free access.
Charing Cross opened on 11 January 1864, initially with just a limited service of trains to Greenwich and mid-Kent, but on 1 April, trains from the north of the county started to use the new station, and on 1 May, main line services followed. The train shed had a single arch, a pattern repeated at Cannon Street, with a span of 164ft, length of 510ft and was 98ft above the track. The station was not immediately popular. For every one of those who appreciated the location overlooking the Thames, there was another who found Charing Cross and Cannon Street monstrous. There was an additional edge to the opposition to Charing Cross, as there were those, including some town planners, who favoured closing the station so that a new road bridge could be built over the Thames to take traffic directly into Trafalgar Square.
The six platforms were all built in wood, ranged in length up to 690ft and extended on to the bridge. Platforms 1 and 2, the most westerly and reserved for mainline departures, incorporated a cab road with an exit through the front of the station under the hotel, and a ramp to bring cabs up from Villiers Street. At first, there were no engine sidings, but two were eventually provided, known as ‘gussets’, at the end of platforms 1 and 6.
The Charing Cross Hotel was designed by the architect E M Barry, with 250 bedrooms and almost wrapped itself around the station by extending down Villiers Street, and later had an annex across the street reached by a covered footbridge.
Powers were obtained in 1864 in The North Western & Charing Cross Railway Act to provide an underground line running just below the surface for goods and passenger trains from Charing Cross to Euston. The LNWR and SER both gave guarantees to raise 5 per cent of the capital, but this was not enough to encourage investors and the scheme was abandoned in the financial crisis of 1866 that pushed the LCDR into Chancery. The Euston link surfaced again in 1885, with the two railway companies prepared to provide a third of the capital each, but floundered again. Had either line been built, they could have undermined financial backing for the Hampstead tube, but on the other hand, could also have provided the basis for a modern day regional express across the centre of London.
Hungerford Bridge was widened in 1887 on the western or upstream side to provide another three tracks, and later, in 1901, a fourth track was laid between Waterloo and Metropolitan Junction, with scissors crossings east of Waterloo Junction. Meanwhile, the SER started buying the freehold of property on either side of the station in readiness for much needed expansion. In 1900, powers were obtained to widen Hungerford Bridge on the east side and also to enlarge the terminus. Having got this far, the SER was then discouraged from any further move by the plans to replace the station and bridge with a road bridge.
During the afternoon of 5 December 1905, workmen were busy on roof maintenance work. At 15.45, there was a sudden noise: shortly afterwards, at 15.57, there was a deafening roar as 70ft of the roof at the outer end of the station collapsed into the station, while pushing outwards the western wall onto the Avenue Theatre in Craven Street. Inside the station, three men were killed as rubble, iron work and glass crashed on to the 15.50 express to Hastings, while at the Avenue Theatre, three men out of a hundred who, by unhappy coincidence, were also working on renovations to that building, were crushed under the rubble.
The South Eastern & Chatham closed Charing Cross at once, and traffic on Hungerford Bridge was stopped.
Investigation soon showed that a weakness in a wrought-iron tie rod next to the windscreen at the southern end of the roof was the main cause. The weakness was due to a fault that doubtless had occurred at the time of manufacture, and had grown worse over the years as it expanded and contracted as weather conditions changed. The SECR decided to take no chances, rebuilding the roof and walls at a reduced height and dispensing with the single span. Meanwhile, trains were diverted to Cannon Street and Charing Cross could not re-open to traffic until 19 March 1906, when a partial service was restored. The closure did have one beneficiary, as it enabled the Charing Cross Euston & Hampstead Railway, precursor of today’s Northern Line, to dig down through the forecourt.
The opportunity was also taken to enhance many of the facilities at Charing Cross, with new booking offices and waiting rooms, including the then customary ladies’ waiting room. These works were not completed until 1913. By this time the suburban services were beginning to feel the competition from the trams, while the underground network had already long removed the once heavy volume of traffic between Charing Cross and Cannon Street.
The First World War saw the SECR become very much Britain’s frontline railway, with the heaviest responsibility for the movement of men and materials to the coast. Charing Cross also had the role of being Westminster’s local station, and a special train, code-named Imperial A was held ready at all times for VIP journeys to the coast, being used for 283 journeys during the war years. This was a short-formed but luxurious operation, usually consisting of just a Pullman car and a brake composite. In addition, there was a military staff officers’ train that operated daily from Charing Cross to Folkestone, leaving at 12.20. Less happily, but an incredible achievement nevertheless, after the start of the Battle of Messines at dawn on 7 June 1917, the first wounded arrived at Charing Cross at 14.15 on the same day.
As early as late October 1914, a lookout was posted on Hungerford Bridge watching for Zeppelin raids, and if an air raid seemed possible, no trains were to be allowed on to the bridge. All boat trains were diverted to Victoria for the duration of the war, but there were many fewer of these as Dover was closed to civilian traffic on the outbreak of war, and the following year closure was extended to include Folkestone.
When the Southern inherited Charing Cross, it also took on the old controversy over the question of a road or rail crossing of the Thames. One reason for the Southern considering the various plans for the Hungerford Bridge and Charing Cross was that the bridge itself was beginning to show signs of weakness, and restrictions had to be imposed on the weight of trains and locomotives using it. Electrification, because of the lighter weights of electric multiple units and the more even spread of weight throughout the train, gradually made the restrictions superfluous. All that was necessary was to swap around the main line and suburban services, with the former using the newer and stronger 1887 bridge, while the latter took over the original bridge. The changeover was made during the weekend of 22-24 August 1925, ready for the start of electric services to Addiscombe, Beckenham Junction, Bromley North, Hayes and Orpington on 28 February 1926, with services to Dartford following on 6 June. The success of the scheme can be judged by the fact that daily traffic increased from 48,800 in 1925 to 71,200 in 1930. For electrification, the platform numbers were reversed with the lines into platforms 1 to 3 electrified, number 1 now being at the eastern or Villiers Street side of the station. A carriage road between the lines serving platforms 4 and 5 was removed and this enabled platform 4 to be widened, while all of the platforms were lengthened, so that lengths varied between 610 and 750ft.
The Second World War found Charing Cross left on the sidelines as with the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk, there was no longer any need for senior officers to make hasty trips to France. During 8 October 1940, a daylight raid inflicted serious damage on a train standing in the station, but the worst raid of all was during the night of 16/17 April 1941, with the hotel and station both badly damaged by fire and other fires started on Hungerford Bridge. Three trains in the terminus were set alight along with a fourth on the bridge, while further disruption was caused when a land-mine was discovered near the signal cabin with its parachute caught on the bridge girders. The mine was eventually defused and removed, but not before a fire under platform 4 had come within four yards of it. Charing Cross was closed throughout 17 April. Another closure followed a further raid on the night of 10/11 May. On 18 June 1944, a flying bomb blew out a span of the original bridge near the south bank, but trains managed to continue using the station by using the newer section of the bridge, although full service could not be resumed until 4 December.
Charing Cross, Euston & Hampstead Railway
Known more usually as the ‘Hampstead Line’ or the ‘Hampstead & Highgate’, the Charing Cross Euston & Hampstead Railway was authorised in 1893, and after many variations opened in 1907 as part of the Underground Electric Railway tube lines. At the time, it was known as ‘The Last Link’. It was to run from Charing Cross to Hampstead via Euston, with a branch to the Midland Railway’s suburban station at Kentish Town but before opening it was extended to Golders Green, then nothing more than a muddy country cross roads, and Highgate. In 1914, it was extended southwards to the Metropolitan Railway’s Charing Cross station on the bank of the Thames to provide a loop that avoided the need to reverse trains.
Legislation in 1912 and 1913 permitted further extensions, and between 1923 and 1924, it was extended from Golders Green to Edgware, including a London County Council housing estate being built at Burnt Oak, and after this through trains were operated over the City & South London Railway south of Camden Town. To the south, the line was extended to Kennington to connect with the southern extension of the CSLR to Morden in 1926. The line, by this time known as the Edgware Highgate & Morden Line passed to the London Passenger Transport Board in 1933, and in 1937 became the Northern Line.
The platforms at Hampstead remain the deepest on the London tube network at 192 ft below ground level, while the tunnel between East Finchley and Morden via the CLSR line at 17¼ miles was for many years the longest railway tunnel in the world.
Chartered Institute of Transport
Created in 1919, the same year that the Ministry of Transport was formed, the first president was the first minister, Sir Eric Geddes, and he was followed by Lord Ashfield. Initially simply the Institute of Transport, it received its Royal Charter in 1926. At first it offered either full membership, MInstT, or associate membership, AMInstT, but later fellows were added and the grades became FCIT, MCIT, AMCIT. It provided education and examinations in transport subjects, as well as meeting and lectures, and its branch network spread throughout the British Commonwealth and the Irish Republic. Its Journal for many years published papers, but became a review of developments in transport during the 1980s.
Membership of the Institute has never been spread evenly throughout transport, and the railways were always the strongest supporters, followed by road transport and then shipping. The decline of the railways was accompanied by a decline in membership, and it merged with the Institute of Logistics to form the Institute of Transport and Logistics.
Cheshire Lines Committee
Despite the name, most of the 143 route miles of this railway were in Lancashire, as well as the largest of its seventy stations, including Liverpool Central and Manchester Central, connected by punctual expresses taking just forty minutes, while most of its revenue came from the same county. In 1865-66, the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, (see Great Central), the Great Northern and the Midland Railways formed a committee with the intention of breaking the London & North Western Railway’s monopoly in Manchester. Companies were formed to build lines in the Manchester and Stockport areas that linked to the MSLR, while the company also gained access to Liverpool docks, and reached Birkenhead docks over the Wirral Railway. A line was built to Chester Northgate to connect with the GCR lines to Bidston and North Wales. Highly profitable, it was estimated that at one time the CLC took almost a fifth of the trade of the port of Liverpool. Locomotives were provided by the member companies, and after grouping in 1923 mainly by the LNER, but the CLC had its own rolling stock, including four Sentinel railcars.
Chester & Holyhead Railway
Authorised in 1844, the Chester & Holyhead Railway was supported by the London & Birmingham Railway, which provided £1 million towards its capital and half the directors, while Robert Stephenson was the engineer for the 84 route miles intended for traffic to Dublin. The line opened as far as Bangor in 1848, running along the coast, with a tubular bridge at Conway and another, but much larger over the Menai Strait, the Britannia Bridge, and opened to Holyhead in 1850. By this time, the CHR had taken over and opened the Mold Railway from Chester in 1849. In 1852, it leased the Bangor and Carnarvon Railway. A branch was opened to Llandudno in 1858, the year before the company was acquired by the London & North Western Railway. The inner harbour at Holyhead was built by the CHR, developing it as a packet port, from which the LNWR operated services to Ireland. Branches were later opened to Bethesda, Bettws-y-Coed, Blaenau Festiniog, Denbigh, Dyserth and Holywell, and on Anglesey, while between 1852 and 1867 the line from Carnarvon was extended to meet the Cambrian Railway near Pwllheli, with a branch to Llanberis.
In addition to developing the Irish traffic and opening up the resorts of the North Wales coast to holidaymakers, the company also stimulated commuter traffic with a daily Llandudno-Manchester service launched during the 1880s and from 1908 this included a club carriage. The following year, the summer express from Euston to Rhyl was the LNWR’s longest non-stop run, and was later named The Welshman by the London, Midland & Scottish.
Churchill, Viscount
Taking over the Great Western in 1908, Churchill has been described as ‘one of the greatest railway chairmen of the twentieth century’. When he arrived the railway was entering its most prosperous period, but then had to face the difficulties imposed by the First World War, and while these were as nothing compared with those encountered during the Second World War, state intervention meant that the railway could not be run as it needed to be, while there were manpower shortages and even locomotives and rolling stock were requisitioned to help with the war effort. Postwar came the challenge of the grouping, the miners’ strike of 1926 and the related national strike, and the years of the great depression.
Not everything was as wonderful at the GWR in 1908 as it might have seemed to outsiders. Churchill arrived to find a fierce internal battle between the general manager James Inglis and the highly respected chief mechanical engineer George Churchward. This was not simply a question of a senior officer of the company seeking to resist interference with his area of responsibility; it was nothing less than a question of who ran the company. Churchill sided with Inglis, himself formerly in charge of the GWR’s engineering, and eventually persuaded his fellow directors to do the same. Sadly, the death of Inglis in 1911, and the demands of the First World War, meant that not much was done by Inglis’s successor, and it was not until Felix Pole took over in 1921 that the way ahead seemed assured.
Inglis and Pole were the two greatest out of the five general managers serving under Churchill’s chairmanship, which also covered the industrial unrest of the 1920s before retiring from the board in 1934.
Churchward, George Jackson, 1837-1933
Trained by John Wright on the South Devon Railway and William Dean of the Great Western Railway, in 1882 he became assistant to the carriage works manager at Swindon, producing an improved vacuum-brake and also improved axle bearings to reduce overhauls. He became carriage works manager in 1885, and a decade later was appointed locomotive works manager, also becoming Dean’s principal assistant in 1897, and his successor as chief mechanical engineer in 1902.
To ensure that locomotive efficiency was properly tested and understood, in 1904 he built Europe’s first locomotive testing plant at Swindon. A believer in standardisation, he introduced nine standard locomotive classes between 1903 and 1911, making maximum use of standardised components and using the latest in US and European design features. His elegant locomotives had free-steaming tapered boilers and longtravel valve gear. He adapted divided drive and other features from three imported French locomotives for his four-cylinder express locomotives, and was an advocate of superheating to increase power and improve efficiency. So influential was he that not only did his successors at the GWR continue his philosophy, but it also influenced the post-grouping CMEs on other railways. He introduced 70-ft main line carriages that gave a significant advance in comfort.
Churchward built Britain’s first Pacific locomotive, 4-6-2 Great Bear, but is reputed never to have liked the locomotive as built, although it was a matter of some pride to the GWR’s management, and it was later converted to a standard 4-6-0 Castleclass. He was criticized for the high capital cost of his locomotives, but defended this by maintaining that they were amongst the cheapest to maintain.
Circle Line – see Underground
City & South London Railway
Opened in 1890, this was the world’s first deep-level electric railway, running from King William Street in the City of London 1¼ miles to Stockwell. It was built using the Greathead Shield, which enabled tunnels to be bored through soft soil. Originally, it was planned to use cable haulage, but before opening it was decided to use electric engines using the third and fourth rail system for current. Because of the depth of the line, each station had two hydraulicallyoperated lifts.
The line was an instant success, carrying 15,000 passengers daily, but it was overwhelmed by the traffic. The King William Street terminus was too small and congested, the two-car trains were inadequate and even so, the locomotives were under-powered and the current supply unreliable, while the 10ft 2-in diameter of the tunnels was too restrictive. Despite these problems, the CSLR was extended north and south, reaching Moorgate and Clapham Common in 1900 and then Angel in 1901, before reaching Euston in 1907. It was acquired by the Underground Group in 1913 and then linked to the Hampstead Line, predecessor of the Northern Line. Between 1922 and 1924, it was completely reconstructed with standard diameter tunnels and standard Underground equipment, although a few single island platform stations, the only ones on the deep level tube network, survived. This enabled through running of Northern Line trains, which became the only tube line to have two routes through the centre of London, with the CSLR line becoming the ‘City Branch’. In 1926, it was given its final southern extension to Morden, where the London County Council built a large housing estate.
Clarence & Hartlepool Junction Railway
Named after the Duke of Clarence, later King William IV, as a compliment, the Clarence Railway was the first promoted specifically to compete with an existing railway, the Stockton & Darlington, which was being extended to Middlesbrough. Authorised in 1828, it was intended to serve a new port on the north bank and branched out of the S&D at Simpasture. The line opened in 1833-34, three years after the S&D’s extension, and undercut the earlier railway’s freight charges. While it attracted its share of the rapidly growing coal traffic, it struggled to pay its way, and was nearly closed in 1842, but was leased in 1844, and in 1853 the lessees merged with the Hartlepool West Harbour & Dock Company, purchasing the railway outright and changing its name. It was acquired by the North Eastern Railway in 1865.
Cleobury Mortimer & Ditton Priors Light Railway
Built under a light railway order of 1901, this was a light railway that retained its independence until taken over by the Great Western Railway in 1922. It ran for twelve miles from Cleobury Mortimer, to the west of Kidderminster in Shropshire, to serve quarries at Ditton Priors, but it also carried agricultural traffic. It opened to goods traffic in July 1908, and to passengers the following November, with halts at Cleobury Town, Stottesdon and Burwarton. Over its short length, there were no less than thirteen level crossings and many gradients. In common with many light railways, there were no signals and it was usually worked on the basis of ‘a single engine in steam’.
There were only a few four-wheeled passenger carriages, and the GWR withdrew the passenger service on 26 September 1938, although the line remained open for goods traffic.
Club trains
Apart from the Royal trains, grandest of the trains on Britain’s railways were the ‘club’ trains, and as the term implies, not everyone could travel in such comfort. Club trains had their origin in passenger demand. During the 1890s, first class season ticket holders commuting from Blackpool to Manchester approached the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway seeking a special carriage for their exclusive use in return both for a guarantee that a minimum number of annual season tickets be purchased and for payment of a supplementary fare. This was to be a genuine club, not to be compared with the so-called airline ‘club class’. Members had to be elected by a committee – initially the founding members – and the members once elected had to abide by the club rules. In 1895, the L&Y introduced the first club car operating from Blackpool in the morning and home again in the evening. The members had their own reserved seats and were served cups of tea from a small galley. Amongst the rules was one that stipulated that the windows of the club car had to be kept closed while the train was in motion. This venture was so successful that by 1902, a second club car had been added to the main Blackpool-Manchester commuter express, and eventually a third class club car was also provided. The club carriages were carefully marshalled in the train so that on arrival at Manchester they would stop close to the exit barriers.
The London & North Western Railway was the next to adopt the concept, introducing club cars on the main morning and evening trains on services between Llandudno and other coastal towns in North Wales, and between Liverpool and Manchester, all before the outbreak of the First World War, by which time a further club car was in service between Windermere and Manchester. The North Eastern Railway was next, with a club car on the service from Bridlington into Hull.
Grouping did not disturb the concept, despite the doubtful economics of a specially-built or adapted carriage that made just one return journey daily, but no doubt on occasion such rolling stock found other uses, as when railway company directors ventured out to view their empire. Certainly, in 1935 the London, Midland Scottish commissioned a specially-built club car, but this, and all the other club cars, fell victim to the drastic reductions in service and catering introduced as an austerity measure during the Second World War, and unlike the Pullman services, club cars were not reinstated after the war, although apparently a few were used for trains on ‘rail cruises’ in the 1950s. Despite this, the Blackpool to Manchester commuter trains continued to be loosely described as ‘club trains’ for several decades after the war had ended, so that the title survived into a more egalitarian age.
Cockermouth, Keswick & Penrith Railway
Opened in 1864 and 1865, the Cockermouth Keswick & Penrith Railway was worked by the London & North Western Railway and the North Eastern Railway, before becoming part of the London, Midland & Scottish Railway in 1923.
Collett, Charles, 1871-1952
Originally trained as a marine engineer, Charles Collett joined the Great Western Railway at Swindon as a draughtsman in 1893 when he was twenty-two years of age. He became assistant works manager in 1900 and works manager in 1912, and became deputy to Churchward in 1920.
Collett took over as chief mechanical engineer in 1922, and his arrival coincided with that of Felix Pole as general manager. A protégée of Churchward, one can only assume that Collett was far easier for others to work with, and he was also an inspired CME. It was Collett who designed the Castle and King-class 4-6-0 locomotives that for many were the finest examples of Great Western locomotives. Both these classes continued to follow Churchward’s principles of locomotive design, since the Castle was a development of the earlier Star-class. Collett also introduced further standard types, notably the Hall and Grange-class mixed traffic locomotives, again these were based on earlier locomotives, in these examples the progenitor being the Saint-class express locomotives. When they entered service, the members of the King-class were Britain’s heaviest and most powerful 4-6-0 locomotives, and their operation only made possible by a relaxation in permitted axle-loadings on the company’s main lines, but even so, they were not permitted to operate west of Plymouth.
Less obvious but perhaps even more important, Collett continued and developed Churchward’s work on the standardisation of locomotive boilers and fittings which must have reduced costs considerably and also shortened repair times. One of his achievements was to extend this work to the locomotives absorbed from the many smaller companies that passed into Great Western control. High degree precision construction and repair work became the standard at Swindon, Wolverhampton and Caerphilly works, greatly extending the intervals between workshop visits, while the stationary testing plant was modernised, as was the company’s dynamometer car. As a result, Collett set the accepted British standards for locomotive testing and research.
Safety was much improved by Collett’s extension of the GWR’s automatic train control system to all of the company’s main routes, and in 1927 he became a member of the Pringle Committee that studied the use of such systems in Britain. Some have criticised Collett’s later locomotive designs as being too conservative, perhaps owing too much to his mentor Churchward, but he was the first to consider complete dieselisation of the fleet, electrification being a less attractive option for the GWR as little of its route mileage experienced the heavy traffic flows and high frequency services that made this option so worthwhile for the Southern Railway. It was also the case that Collett worked on a railway that no longer enjoyed the prosperity of earlier years: In addition to the desperate international economic situation, all of the railway companies were already suffering from the impact of road and even air competition. He retired in 1941.
Colne Valley & Halstead Railway
Opened between 1860 and 1863, the Colne Valley & Halstead Railway linked Chappel Cone & Wakes Cone to Halstead and Haverhill, becoming part of the London & North Eastern Railway in 1923. A short section at Castle Hedingham is now preserved as the Colne Valley Railway.
Commuting
A fact of life for so many today, commuting in fact pre-dates the railways as during the era of the stagecoach, regular travellers would catch the ‘short stages’ from dormitory towns such as Esher into London. In the UK, the term itself did not become normal usage until well after the Second World War, being of American origin. In the USA, the term ‘commute’ was used to recognise the change between being a resident and a worker, or the payment for journeys in advance. Before the term became widely accepted in the UK, the term was ‘seasonticket holder’, although in the north the term ‘contract’ was more widely used. A season ticket came to provide unlimited travel between two points, often including the use of intermediate stations, for a period of a week, a month, a quarter or a year, and regular travellers came to expect substantial discounts, even in excess of 60 per cent of the standard single or return fares on longer distances, despite putting railways, and other public transport operators, to considerable extra expense in providing extra rolling stock and personnel just for the daily peak periods.
The first recorded example of season tickets on Britain’s railways was in March 1834 on the Canterbury & Whitstable Railway, providing ‘Family and Personal Tickets from Lady Day [25 March] to 1 November’, adopting a facility offered on the River Thames steamboats. It is clear from this that these were not intended for workers, but for pleasure-seekers. A variant were the subscriptions offered on the Dublin & Kingstown Railway from 1834. In 1836, the London & Greenwich offered ‘Free Tickets’ for a quarter’s travel at £5 first-class, £4 second-class and £3 third-class. The Leeds & Selby Railway rejected proposals for ‘composition’ tickets in 1834, but the idea was adopted by the Hull & Selby in 1841, and the Liverpool & Manchester the following year. The London & Brighton introduced first-class season tickets between the two towns for £100 in 1843, but by 1914, its successor, the London, Brighton & South Coast was offering this facility for just £43.
Many railways also offered special tickets for shareholders, while railway directors received a gold pass guaranteeing them free first-class travel anywhere.
Some railways resisted the trend, and it was not until 1851 that the Great Western introduced season tickets, and then only as far from London as Windsor and Maidenhead. Others, such as the London & North Western and the Eastern Counties, provided heavily discounted tickets at outer suburban stations to encourage new housing development, but were largely unsuccessful. On the other hand, the pressures on housing in central London meant that the Metropolitan in particular found that there was a movement away from the centre to the cheaper housing of the outer suburbs, for which the term ‘Metroland’ was coined. The trend towards longer journeys to work really became significant with the dawn of the twentieth century, helped by a combination of electric trams and the electric trains that were the railways’ response, but the lack of electrification in itself was no deterrent to the Diaspora of urban dwellers, and both Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street soon became busy commuter stations. Initially, only first and second-class season tickets were offered, but soon all classes were available.
The First World War saw a dramatic increase in the sale of season tickets as, to cut unnecessary travel, ordinary fares were increased, but not season ticket rates. Between the wars, the Southern Railway in particular sought to encourage season ticket holders to its newly electrified lines and ran advertising campaigns such as ‘Live in Surrey, Far from Worry’, and ‘Live in Kent and be Content’. Working hours were longer at the time and Saturday morning working was normal, so the morning and especially the evening peaks were longer than became the case post-war.
To further encourage longer-distance commuting, special trains were run. The most famous of these were the club trains in the North-West, but the Southern after electrification of the Portsmouth Direct had one train that ran non-stop from Haslemere to Waterloo each morning, known appropriately enough as the ‘Stockbrokers’ Express’, albeit informally. An all-first-class train ran every morning from Bournemouth, stopping only at Southampton, to Waterloo, but this ended with the end of steam as standardised electric multiple-units meant that this facility was no longer available. The advent of the High Speed Train meant that even longer distance commuting became attractive, again urged on by higher property prices in London and the South East, but it also meant that attractive cities such as Bath, Bristol and York could be home to London’s commuters.
The shortening of the evening peaks has meant that railway managers no longer seek commuter traffic as it demands personnel, infrastructure and rolling stock that is not needed for most of the day, with expensive trains making just one return journey daily. Nevertheless, the market is now so large and politically powerful that they have no alternative but to accommodate it, and this is written into the contracts for the train operating companies on the mainland. Lines with a good variety of traffic can cope well: The Portsmouth Direct could balance its daily peaks by using the same rolling stock for its intensive summer Saturday and Sunday service, while before defence cuts began to bite deeply, the crowds flooding to the coast and then home again were balanced by naval personnel returning to their ships. It is rare to see trains busy in both directions other than on the congested underground lines in Central London.
Even today, especially over longer distances, season tickets provide bargain travel and the passenger does not need to commute every day to enjoy worthwhile savings.
Competition
Until the late 1860s, competition between railway companies, or the interests anxious to sponsor a new railway, could be intense. In some cases, such competition could be ruinous for the companies involved, with perhaps the best example, which continued until almost the end of the century, being that between the London, Chatham and Dover, and the South Eastern Railways, which was not resolved until the creation of what became known as the South Eastern & Chatham Railway. In some cases, the competition was so fierce that battles broke out, including the famous Battle of Havant in 1859 when the London & South Western attempted to send its first through train from Waterloo down the Portsmouth Direct, only to find that the London, Brighton & South Coast had chained a locomotive to the rails!
Attempts were made to reduce competition, with the Scotch Railways Agreement being one example, that between 1860 and 1870 attempted to divide traffic for Scotland between the London & North Western, and its partners, at Euston, for Glasgow, and the Great Northern at King’s Cross, and its partners amongst the East Coast Group, for Edinburgh. At Portsmouth, the LSWR and LBSCR eventually worked the line from Havant to Portsmouth Harbour jointly, along with the Portsmouth-Ryde ferries and the line on the Isle of Wight from Ryde Pierhead to Ryde St John’s, which was interesting since neither company actually operated trains on the island. The LSWR and the Great Western also pooled their Channel Islands’ ferries, not only to safeguard the business, but also because overtly competitive masters had ensured that safety was often compromised in difficult waters.
Even late in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, the urge to compete remained. The most dramatic was that of the Midland Railway, with its new route between Settle and Carlisle so that it could send its trains from St Pancras in London to St Enoch in Glasgow. The route was longer and slower than those of its two competitors, but it ensured that its rolling stock was more comfortable, and, of course, passengers paying the third-class fare were accommodated in what had been second-class carriages.
The mergers of the mid and late nineteenth century produced many much stronger companies, and many of them were described by commentators as being ‘strong local monopolies’, with just limited competition at their boundaries. Travel between London and Exeter was competed for by the LSWR and the Great Western, for example, with the latter competing with the LNWR between London and Birmingham.
A reduction in competition was one of the objectives of the Grouping, but in many ways this failed. It left the London Midland & Scottish competing between London and Southend with the London & North Eastern. Competition remained between London and Birmingham, as before. The LMS and LNER, both hard-pressed financially for much of their existence, managed to invest considerable sums in strong competition and excellent trains with high-stepping locomotives for passenger traffic between London and Scotland.
Post-nationalisation, even before Beeching, attempts were made to rationalise the network. Many might consider that this was not so much an elimination of competition as an end to choice, and an end to diversionary routes when one line needed engineering work or was blocked by a mishap.
Cook, Thomas, 1808-1902
Originally a wood-turner by trade, Thomas Cook was an active Baptist and a strong supporter of the Temperance movement. His first venture was in conjunction with the Midland Counties Railway in July 1841, when he took a party from Leicester to Loughborough to a Temperance fair. He moved to Leicester and appears to have become a printer. He organised excursions every summer and soon went beyond the simple day trip and sent what had become his customers as far afield as North Wales and Scotland by 1846, but this was the year that he became bankrupt. He was back in business by 1851 and with his son John, 1834-99, became the Midland Railway’s agent for its heavy excursion traffic to the Great Exhibition in London, later claiming that he handled 165,000 people for this one event alone. He developed connections with other railways, including the Eastern Counties and London, Brighton & South Coast, and started sending travellers to France. His next move was to issue vouchers for hotel accommodation, which he redeemed, and which was the precursor of the package holiday. While he continued to acquire the business of other railway companies, in 1863, the Scottish companies decided to run their own excursion business. Nevertheless, he opened his first office in London in 1865, in Fleet Street, and made his son its manager. That same year, he visited the United States, and in 1866, he sent a tour across the Atlantic. In 1868, he sent tours to Egypt and Palestine, and during 1872-73, he made a circumnavigation of the globe, offering this to clients from then on until interrupted by the two world wars.
Throughout his life, Thomas Cook saw his role as an offshoot of his faith and his advocacy of temperance, while his son saw it as a straightforward commercial enterprise. The son was the businessman and no doubt the saviour of the business which his father had bankrupted earlier. After the relationship had become very heated and strained, with John objecting to his father’s philanthropy, Thomas Cook retired in 1879, returning to Leicester. It was John Cook’s vision that made the company world famous and a leader in its field, despite the jealousy of railway companies and shipping lines anxious to save his commission. By 1890, it had offices in Australia and New Zealand, with the British, French and German governments as customers. John even made the arrangements for Kaiser Wilhelm II to visit Palestine in 1898, accompanying him to ensure that all went well, but he caught dysentery and died in 1899.
His two sons did not inherit their father’s business acumen, and were unable to fend off the new rival, American Express that emerged early in the twentieth century. After much of their business had to be suspended during the First World War, they revived the operation post-war and in 1926 moved into a purpose-built headquarters in Berkeley Street. Just two years’ later they sold the business to Wagons-Lits, the sleeping car company and the business moved to Brussels. Post-war, the business passed to the British Transport Commission, which eventually sold it to the Midland Bank in 1971, the first privatisation, after which it was sold to German interests and, finally, to its old rival, American Express in 1996.
Coras Iompair Eireann, CIE
More usually known simply as CIE, Coras Iompair Eireann means Transport Company of Ireland and was formed in 1945 specifically for the nationalisation of railways in the Republic of Ireland, formerly the Irish Free State. It also acquired the railways’ extensive bus networks and later Dublin Corporation bus services. The mainstay of the nationalised railway was the Great Southern Railways, while the cross-border lines remained private enterprise until the collapse of the largest, the Great Northern Railway of Ireland in 1951, when control passed to CIE south of the border, and to the Ulster Transport Authority in Northern Ireland. CIE itself rationalised its railway network, but when UTA ceased operating freight trains, CIE continued to do so and operated into Northern Ireland.
In 1986, the railways came under their own management as Iarnrod Eireann, more usually known as IE, Republic of Ireland Railways, although that in turn remains a subsidiary of CIE.
Cork & Macroom Direct Railway
Opened in 1866, this became part of the Great Southern Railways in 1925, but passenger services were withdrawn in 1935. After nationalisation in 1945, it closed completely in 1953.
Cork & Muskerry (Light) Railway
A 3ft gauge line incorporated in 1883 and opened in stages in 1887 and 1888, connecting Cork with Blarney, Donoughmore and Coachford, and which in 1893 took over the line from Donoughmore to St Anne’s which had been built and worked by another company. It became part of the Great Southern Railways in 1925, and closed in 1934.
Cork, Blackrock & Passage Railway
Incorporated in 1846 as the Cork Blackrock Passage & Monkstown Railway, it opened between Cork and Passage in 1850 using the Irish standard gauge of 5ft 3 in. It was converted to 3ft gauge between 1900 and 1904 and at the same time an extension was built to Crosshaven. It was absorbed by the Great Southern Railways in 1925, but closed in 1932.
Cork, Brandon & South Coast Railway
Incorporated in 1845 as the Cork & Brandon Railway, the first section opened in 1851 between Cork and Bantry. Later, branches were built to Baltimore, Clonakilty, Courtmacsherry and Kinsale. It was absorbed by the Great Southern Railways in 1925 and passed into state control when that was nationalised in 1945.
Cornwall Railway
Sponsored by the Great Western, Bristol & Exeter and South Devon Railways, who provided a fifth of the capital when the company was incorporated in 1846, and which became known as the ‘Associated Companies’, the Cornwall was to build a 66mile line that would link Falmouth with the SDR at Plymouth, and also connect with the West Cornwall at Truro. Originally, W S Moorsom was appointed engineer, but Isambard Brunel took over. The line opened to Truro in 1859 and to Falmouth in 1863. The grandeur of Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash contrasting with the wooden bridges and viaducts used for the rest of the line which crossed many deep valleys.
The line was also supported by landowners and business interests anxious to reduce the transport costs of Cornish tin and copper, which had previously been shipped by sea and had become uncompetitive. The railway also assisted the china clay industry, but it was to be many years before it made an impact. The main beneficiary from the railway at first was to be agriculture, with Cornish produce able to be transported fresh to the major markets in London and the Midlands. The mild climate meant that Cornish growers were first with the new season’s produce. The CR also made Cornwall easily accessible to visitors.
The CR was managed jointly by the Associated Companies and the WCR. It did not make an operating profit until 1882, but the number of passengers grew by 68 per cent between 1860 and 1888, and turnover by 144 per cent. The following year, it was absorbed by the GWR. The new owner doubled much of the track, and post-Grouping replaced many of the wooden structures with stone or steel.
Corris Railway
Authorised in 1858 as the Corris, Machynlleth and River Dovey Tramroad to carry slate from the quarries at Corris to the River Dovey, the line was built to a gauge of 2ft 3in and operations started in 1859 with horses pulling the slate wagons. The section between Machynlleth and Derwenlas was closed once the Cambrian opened its line from Machynlleth to Borg in 1863, while the title was shortened to Corris Railway in 1865. Steam locomotives were not introduced until 1879. Four years later, the first passenger services were introduced between Corris and Machynlleth, and in 1887 these were extended to Aberllefeni.
The Bristol Tramways and Carriage Company obtained a controlling interest in the CR and so the company did not pass into the Great Western sphere of influence until the late 1920s, after the GWR had obtained powers to operate bus services and taken a majority holding in Bristol Tramways. The GWR absorbed the CR completely under an act of 1930, and in 1931 replaced the passenger service with buses. The slate traffic continued, although in decline, and the line was finally closed after nationalisation in 1948.
County Donegal Railways Joint Committee
Formed in 1892 as the Donegal Railway when the Finn Valley Railway, originally opened in 1861, and used the Irish standard gauge of 5ft 3ins and ran between Strabane and Stranlorlar, merged with the 3ft gauge West Donegal railway opened in 1889 which ran between Stranorlar and Donegal. The system underwent further work between 1893 and 1905, including conversion of the former Finn Valley line to 3ft gauge and construction of branches to Killybegs, opened in 1893; Glenties, 1895; and Ballyshannon, 1905. The County Donegal Railways Joint Committee was formed when the railway was taken over by the Great Northern Railway of Ireland and the Midland Railway in 1906, and while the line from Londonderry to Strabane was actually owned by the MR, all services were worked by the Joint Committee. The CDRJC also worked the Strabane & Letterkenny Railway, which opened in 1909. In all, the system amounted to around 125 miles of narrow gauge railway, the largest such system in the British Isles.
On Grouping, the MR’s interest passed to the London, Midland & Scottish Railway. The company worked through a sparsely populated area of Ireland, with Donegal being one of the three counties of Ulster left out of Northern Ireland in 1922, so that the line ran mainly in what became the Irish Free State but had its terminus just over the border in Londonderry. To economise, it was one of the pioneers of petrol and diesel railcars. On nationalisation of the GNR(I) in 1953, the company became jointly owned by the nationalised transport undertakings of the two parts of Ireland, but closures had already started in 1947, and by 1959, the company was a bus operator, with its services and vehicles eventually transferred to Coras Iompair Eireann, CIE.
Crewe
Originally a small hamlet, in 1837 Crewe found itself at the junction of three important railway lines, with the newly authorised Chester & Crewe and Manchester & Birmingham Railways, and newly completed Grand Junction Railway, all predecessors of the London & North Western Railway, meeting. In 1840, the GJR acquired the CCR, and acquired large areas of land to which it moved its locomotive and carriage works from Birmingham’s Edge Hill. When the MBR opened in 1842, it was worked by the GJR. Crewe’s expansion was rapid, for by 1843, the GJR had built 200 houses and was moving workers into these and the rapidly expanding works. The LNWR continued the expansion of Crewe, although carriage building was moved several times, eventually finding a permanent home at Wolverhampton. The town’s role as a junction was no less important, and both the North Staffordshire Railway in 1848 and the Great Western Railway in 1863 and 1867 sent new lines into Crewe. Meanwhile, the LNWR had to rebuild the station twice, in 1849 and again in 1867, to accommodate growth. By 1900, the LNWR employed 10,000 people in the town, where it had provided utilities and its first police force, while more than a thousand trains a day passed through and additional land had had to be purchased to the south to accommodate expansion. After Grouping, the London, Midland & Scottish moved its locomotive department from Derby to Crewe in 1932.
In 1938, with war in Europe looming, Rolls-Royce built an aero-engine factory, so that Crewe was no longer exclusively a railway town. Post-war, RR moved its car production to Crewe.
The years after the war also brought nationalisation and contraction, with the works eventually slimming down to a quarter of its peak size. Nevertheless, the town remained important to the railways and benefited from the electrification of first the lines to the Midlands from Euston, and then those to the North-West and, ultimately, to Scotland.
Cubitt, Sir William, 1785-1861, Benjamin, 1795-1848, and Joseph, 1811-1872
William trained as a millwright before moving to Ransomes of Ipswich, agricultural engineers, where he rose to become a partner, before becoming a civil engineer in 1826. His early work included improvements to the Oxford Canal; before being appointed engineer to the Birmingham & Liverpool Junction Canal in 1835, after which he became engineer to the South Eastern Railway (see South Eastern & Chatham) in 1843, which included the section through the cliffs between Folkestone and Dover, while his brother Benjamin worked on the company’s locomotives. He then acted as consulting engineer on the Great Northern Railway, again working with his brother before being knighted for his work supervising the erection of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851.
William’s son Joseph trained under Benjamin before becoming chief engineer on the GNR under his father, and then worked on his own as engineer to the London, Chatham & Dover Railway (see SECR) in 1861.
There appears to be no direct family connection with Thomas, William and Lewis Cubitt, three brothers who nevertheless also undertook work on the London & Birmingham Railway, including the famous Doric Arch at Euston.