R

Race to the North

The West Coast route was the first to open between London and Scotland, running via Preston and Carlisle, completed in 1848 and through trains worked jointly by the London & North Western Railway and the Caledonian Railway. It was followed in 1852 by the East Coast route via York and Newcastle, in which the main participants were the Great Northern, North Eastern and North British Railways. Both routes served Edinburgh and Glasgow, and while revenues were apportioned as the result of agreements made between 1851 and 1856, there was competition between them. The ECML soon became the faster, with the day express between King’s Cross and Edinburgh an hour quicker than that from Euston, but the LNWR at the time objected to fast running.

The cosy arrangement between the companies came under attack in 1876, when the Midland Railway completed its line to Scotland via Settle and Carlisle. Its line was longer and slower than the two existing lines, but it had admitted third-class passengers to all of its trains and improved their lot by abolishing second-class whilst scrapping its small stock of third-class rolling stock. By contrast, the fastest East Coast express was first-class only until 1887.

In May 1888, the West Coast companies suddenly announced that from 2 June their fastest express would run from Euston to Edinburgh in nine hours, the same time as that from King’s Cross. The East Coast companies responded by cutting the through journey time to eight hours, which the West Coast matched from 1 August. On 13 August, the East Coast schedule was cut to 7¾ hours, but on that day the train reached Edinburgh in 7hr 27min. Then, as suddenly as it started, the racing stopped and the two rival groups agreed minimum journey times for their trains.

Meanwhile, the NBR had been pressing ahead with its bridges over the Forth and Tay. Once completed, these cut the through journey time to Dundee and Aberdeen, making the East Coast line the faster to these cities. This was the spark that set off yet another ‘race’, between the overnight trains between London and Aberdeen. The timetable was ignored in the interest of getting the trains to their destination in the shortest possible time, but after the East Coast companies decided to stop the ‘race’, on the night of 23/24August 1895, the West Coast train ran the 540 miles from Euston to Aberdeen at an average speed of 63.3mph.

The races then ended between London and Scotland. On the plus side, it showed just how performance could be enhanced, if not the passengers’ sleep, but on the debit side the trains used were lightly loaded and often double-headed, while all other traffic had to give way to allow the racers priority.

Racing Rivals

The railway companies, even before grouping, could be said to be localised monopolies with competition at the edges. A glance at the railway map shows that between several destinations, more than one route existed. While the most lucrative of these, apart from the lines between London and Scotland, would seem to have been between London and Birmingham or Manchester, it was between London and Exeter that the first race broke out between the London & South Western Railway, running from Waterloo, and the alliance of the Great Western, running from Paddington, and the Bristol & Exeter, starting in 1862. In 1868, the Midland Railway managed to compete with the London & North Western between London and Manchester, and, from 1880, with the Great Northern between London, Leeds and Bradford, for which an expensive line between Kettering and Northampton was constructed.

The LSWR and the GWR then competed between London and Plymouth, for the prestigious boat train traffic with passengers joining or leaving liners at Plymouth to save a day or so steaming to London. The GWR even constructed one of its many ‘cut off’ routes during the early 1900s to shorten the distance to Plymouth in 1906. Many objected to the races because of the waste, not simply because two companies were trying to provide the same service, but because they deliberately ran trains that were seldom full. There was a more pressing argument against racing: safety. On the night of 29/30 June 1906, the up boat train from Plymouth to Waterloo, with a fresh locomotive and crew, after changing at Templecombe, ran through Salisbury at excessive speed, derailing at the eastern end of the station at 2.24am, killing 24 of the 43 passengers.

Railbuses and railcars

Lightly-trafficked lines encouraged the railways to consider railbuses and railcars. The terms often become confused, especially since the advent of diesel railcars, while there were also road-rail vehicles able to run on both road and rail.

The original railbuses were buses converted to run on rails. Amongst the earliest such vehicles was the French Micheline, a petrol-engined bus which had solid rubber tyres fitted to the flanges of flanged wheels and could run on rails, in many ways similar to an articulated lorry in that the low-slung passenger cabin was separate from the cab and engine, with which trials were conducted in Great Britain during 1932. Later, three modifications of standard four-wheel 40-seat buses were supplied to the London, Midland & Scottish Railway in 1934 by Leyland. While these had basic buffers and drawgear, they lacked the power to pull a trailer. In 1936, the LMS bought two Micheline vehicles built in the UK by Armstrong Siddeley, and these achieved modest success before being withdrawn in 1939.

Nevertheless, conversions of ordinary buses proved more popular with many light railways, such as those run by Colonel Stephens, and on the narrow gauge County Donegal Railways Joint Committee in Ulster.

Post-nationalisation, British Railways experimented with a variety of lightweight diesel railbuses which it used on a number of branch lines during the late 1950s and through the 1960s, before withdrawing the last of them in 1968. A somewhat more substantial vehicle was developed from the Leyland National bus, but production vehicles differed from the original specification and were eventually branded as ‘Pacers’.

The earliest railcars were steam-powered, with the first believed to have been Express, used on the Eastern Counties Railway from 1847. As the century progressed, many more railcars were introduced, usually consisting of a passenger carriage with a small steam locomotive sharing the same frame and having driving wheels in place of one of the bogies. The concept increased in popularity as a means of competing with tramways, and many of the later versions could be driven from either end. While cheaper to run than a full train, they nevertheless still required a crew of three, driver, fireman and guard. They were sometimes known by railway companies as steam rail motors. Few of them were completely successful as they either generated sufficient traffic to have to be replaced by push-pull two or three carriage trains, or were simply not powerful enough. Perhaps the longest-lasting were a fleet of Sentinel railcars introduced by the London & North Eastern Railway during the 1920s and which lasted into the 1940s.

The internal combustion engine offered a way forward, not least because it reduce the number of railwaymen by a third, and also because it only consumed fuel whilst working. The North Eastern Railway introduced two petrol-electric railcars in 1904, while vehicles with mechanical transmission were used by the London Brighton & South Coast Railway from 1905. The Great Western introduced a petrol-engined railcar in 1911. The early railcars suffered from the limitations of the early petrol engine, and by the time engines had become more reliable, it was the greater economy of the diesel engine that mattered. The leader in this field was the GWR, which between 1934 and 1942 introduced no less than thirty-eight diesel railcars, including two single-ended versions which, with a carriage inserted between them, became one of the first diesel multiple units, DMUs, and operated an express business service between Birmingham and Cardiff. The Northern Counties Committee in Northern Ireland also gained considerable experience with railcars. Diesel electric railcars were also built by English Electric during the 1930s and exported to Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.

Post-nationalisation, British Railways invested heavily in diesel railcars and multiple units for lines not justifying the cost of electrification, even though some of these services were fairly intensive.

Railway Air Services – see Air Transport and Railways

Railway Clearing House

As the number of railways grew and a network began to be created, it was clear that some system was needed to allow through booking of passengers or goods, and through working of trains. While some railway companies resisted other companies working over their lines, most came to appreciate the extra revenue while the increased number of through services benefited the railways and their passengers alike. There were other problems as well, including a lack of standardised signals or locomotive headcodes, while coupling systems and buffer positions also suffered from a lack of standardisation. Possibly the worst example of the lack of standardisation was that two red discs meant ‘all clear’ on the Great Western, but ‘danger’ on the London & Birmingham.

It was the LBR that foresaw the need to make through ticketing and running easier, almost certainly because they saw their railway as playing a strategic role in the creation of a network with longer distance services running through it. Led by the chairman, George Carr Glyn, representatives of nine railway companies attended an inaugural meeting of the Railway Clearing House held at 11 Drummond Street, near Euston, on 2 January 1842. Not surprisingly, most of the companies who attended were in the Midlands and North West. The Great Western, also burdened by its broad gauge, and the southern companies did not follow until the early 1860s, but by 1870, most railway companies had joined this voluntary association.

The RCH set itself five principal tasks:

1) Through booking of passengers.

2) Through booking of privately-owned carriages and horses.

3) Division of receipts on a mileage basis.

4) Encouragement of goods traffic on a rate per mile basis.

5) A system of settling all inter-company debts.

The financing of this system was twofold, with a £5 annual levy on each station belonging to the member companies augmented by a proportional levy on receipts. For the most part, the system depended on the honesty of the member companies, but from 1847 as an additional check, the RCH sent number-takers to take the numbers and check the contents of goods wagons travelling on what became known as ‘foreign’ lines, that is, outside their own system. Eventually, number-takers and clerks employed by the RCH totalled 3,000, with the clerks settling intercompany accounts working in what was know as the ‘long office’.

One of the most enduring decisions taken was also in 1847, when the members agreed to use Greenwich Mean Time at all of their stations, which was the beginning of the end for the days when each town had its own time. That year also saw the goods managers’ conference draw up an official classification of goods, but the RCH could only recommend suitable rates, and could never enforce a standard set of freight rates or of passenger fares. Ticket printing and date stamping was also standardised using the Edmondson system. In 1853, a book of distance tables was published. In 1867, a book of rules for working over ‘foreign’ lines was published, and semaphore signals were recommended, but appended were examples of the other systems likely to be found, but by 1880, the semaphore signal had become the standard. Standardising rolling stock was far harder, and in the case of locomotives, impossible, but it was also a struggle to standardise goods wagons, not least because of the high number of private owners’ wagons. It took until 1902 for the RCH engineers to recommend a standard position for Westinghouse vacuum brake pipes.

The RCH did little to standardise railway accounts, and this was left to Parliament with the Regulation of Railways Act 1868.

When the First World War broke out and the railways came under the control of the Railway Executive Committee, much of the RCH role disappeared, and more than a third of its employees joined the armed forces. Nevertheless, the efficiency of the wartime railway was boosted by a common-user scheme for wagons, tarpaulins and ropes, but number-takers still had a job to do.

Post-war, the RCH acted as a catalyst in helping the railway companies resolve many of the problems of merging more than a hundred companies into just four. A sign of the impact the grouping had on the RCH, with fewer companies involved, was that employment dropped from more than 3,000 in 1914 to 1,800 by 1939.

Nationalisation was seen as marking the end of the RCH, and the employees held farewell dinners and expected a final settling of accounts to keep them occupied during the first few months of 1948. In reality, the RCH still had a role to perform, helping the new British Railways, and so it was not disbanded until 31 March 1963. The Irish Railway Clearing House survived even longer, to 1974.

Railway Companies Association

Originating as a special committee of the Railway Clearing House in 1854, the need for the companies to consider issues relating to legislation and politics was such that it became the Railway Companies Association in 1869, with its own permanent staff situated conveniently at Westminster. The role of the RCA was primarily political, attempting to influence legislation and also, for a while, attempting to avoid recognition of the railway trade unions. It was successful for many years after the First World War in lobbying against nationalisation, and to some extent in lobbying for greater protection from road competition, but its ‘Fair deal’ campaign mounted in 1938, pressing for the freedom to fix freight rates, failed, and so too, ultimately, did the campaign against nationalisation.

Railway Mania

The term generally used to describe the fanatical passion for railways during the 1840s, when Parliament approved schemes for building 9,000 route miles of railway, not far short of the entire network today which is just over 10,000 route miles. To build these railways, more than £500 million was invested, equivalent to around £33 billion today. An earlier boom had been abruptly ended in 1825 when a succession of banking failures and a poor harvest prompted a recession, while a further boom started in 1835, lasting until 1837, with more than 1,500 route miles authorised by Parliament. Essentially railway booms were prompted by economic recovery, and while most of the early projects were sound, as the booms progressed, wilder and less well-considered projects flourished, with investors tempted to believe that this was an easy way to a fortune, not unlike the dot.com boom of recent years. The poor performance of many of the later projects and the exhausting of the supply of capital meant the end of the boom.

The growing dominance of the established railway companies later made it more difficult for newcomers to raise capital, and so many of the later projects were those sponsored or supported by the increasingly powerful companies. In a number of cases, railway contractors sponsored lines using profits made from earlier schemes to prolong the boom, leading to what became known as ‘contractors’ lines’. Nevertheless, there was a minor boom in the 1850s and again in the 1860s, stopped by the collapse of the bankers, Overend Gurney & Co.

Railways at War – see Wartime

Rainhill Trials

It was not until late 1828 that the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway started to consider the means of locomotion for the line. At this early stage, horses were still regarded seriously as an option, while there were also stationary steam locomotives using cables or steam locomotives. Two engineers were engaged to visit existing lines and recommend a form of traction; they both came down in favour of stationary steam engines. One of them, James Walker, also suggested that a competition be held with a prize for the best locomotive entered: the directors agreed and fixed the prize at £500, about £30,000 by today’s values. This was sufficient to attract three steam locomotives: John Braithwaite and John Ericsson’s Novelty; Timothy Hackworth’s Sans Pareil, and George Stephenson’s Rocket. The trials were held on the LMR at Rainhill and lasted for seven days during October 1829.

Rocket and Novelty managed 30mph, a speed far in excess of that attained by other steam locomotives of the day, with the former being more consistent. The LMR thus became, from its opening, a railway with steam locomotives. The line’s opening was marked by an accident to George Huskisson, President of the Board of Trade, and none of the speeds at the trials compared with the 36mph achieved by George Stephenson as he drove the mortally injured MP to Eccles for treatment.

Ramsbottom, John, 1814-1897

By 1846, Ramsbottom was locomotive superintendent of the London & North Western Railway’s North Eastern Division, before being promoted to the same post for the entire Northern Division in 1857, and then taking charge of the entire LNWR locomotive stock in 1862. His inventions included the modern piston ring and the tamper-proof safety valve, while his 2-2-2 locomotives were the first to use the Giffard injector, and his DX 0-6-0, first seen in 1859, were the most numerous ever to be built in Britain. He also modernised Crewe works.

He resigned in 1871 after a dispute with the LNWR’s chairman and became a consulting engineer, whose work included modernisation of the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway, including building their new works at Horwich.

Raven, Sir Vincent Litchfield, 1858-1934

After serving an apprenticeship under Edward Fletcher at Gateshead, he became an assistant divisional locomotive superintendent on the North Eastern Railway in 1888, before being promoted to chief assistant mechanical engineer in 1903, and chief mechanical engineer from 1910 to 1922. He was the first to standardise the use of three-cylinder drive and built more than 200 locomotives of this type, including 4-42 express, 4-6-0 mixed traffic, 0-8-0 and 46-2T freight and 4-4-4T passenger. He was of that generation of engineers who did not confine themselves to steam, and proposed overhead electrification at 1,500V dc between York and Newcastle; a system used successfully on the freight line between Newport and Shildon, opened in 1915. He also introduced automatic train control between York and Newcastle. During the First World War, he was superintendent of the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, for which he was knighted. He was after Grouping briefly technical adviser to the London & North Eastern Railway, but his plans for electrification suffered from the downturn in the economy and he left in 1924 to advise on railways in Australia and New Zealand, as well as on Indian railway workshops.

Reading

By 1838, the Great Western Railway was operating between London and a station close to Maidenhead in Berkshire, reaching Reading in 1840. The London & South Western Railway reached Reading in 1856, running over South Eastern metals from Wokingham, although it was to be another two years before the SER line from Farnborough was connected through Guildford to the rest of the company’s network at Redhill. Reading was already an important calling point and junction on the GWR by this time. The LSWR line to Waterloo has never rivalled that of the GWR to Paddington in terms of speed, and the opening of the Metropolitan Railway also placed the latter in a better position at first for those travelling onwards to the City of London, but nevertheless, the towns along the line soon became some of the smarter London dormitories. In addition to being slightly longer, the LSWR line also suffered from severe bottlenecks, especially at Richmond. While the SER line must have counted as one of the most pointless in the country, and a millstone around the neck of the company and its successors, it also provided some useful cross-country connections, but it was to take the emergence of London Gatwick as an important international airport for the line to show serious potential, and that was long after the demise of the Southern Railway.

Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway

One of the many coal lines built to by-pass the pressure on the docks at Cardiff, the Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway ran from Treherbert to Briton Ferry with a two-mile tunnel. Opened in 1890, the line developed into a small system of 29 route miles. The line passed into the control of the Great Western in 1906, but was not taken over completely until 1922.

Rhymney Railway

The Rhymney Railway was preceded by an old tramway connecting the Rhymney Ironworks with Newport, known locally as the ‘Old Rumney Railway’. In 1851, the Marquis of Bute encouraged the company to replace the tramway with a new railway to serve the new dock being built at Cardiff. The Rhymney Railway obtained the necessary consent in 1854-55, running down the right bank of the Rhymney Valley, and opened in 1858 thanks to running powers over part of the Taff Vale Railway. Finding itself hosting a competitor, the Taff Vale raised its charges, and in one case it took litigation by the Rhymney to force the Taff Vale to reduce its charges by 80 per cent. Seeking a solution by leasing itself to the Bute Trustees, the Rhymney was refused Parliamentary consent, a measure that had it been allowed may well have forestalled the creation of the Cardiff Railway. Growing coal traffic solved the problem, with the Rhymney becoming profitable during the 1860s, and in 1864 obtained approval to build its own line into Cardiff, which opened in 1871. That same year also saw an extension opened between Rhymney and Nantybwch to connect with the London & North Western Railway, and another extension into the Aberdare Valley, largely with the help of running powers over the Great Western Railway. The heavily-graded Taff Bargoed line was built jointly with the GWR and reached Dowlais in 1876 and Merthyr Tydfil in 1886. Meanwhile, most of the original lines that had been laid as single track had been doubled.

The cost of this expansion was that the company could not afford a dividend as late as 1875, but tight managerial control saw this rise to 10.5 per cent before the end of the century, despite competition after 1889 from the Barry and Brecon & Merthyr Railways. The Rhymney eventually found itself with two major traffic generating points, Cardiff and Caerphilly, with locomotive repair works opened in the latter town in 1902, while the station was rebuilt in 1913 to cater for the growing passenger traffic. In 1909-10, the Taff Vale also tried to include the Rhymney in its take over of the Cardiff Railway, but as mentioned above, Parliament refused to authorise this move. Nevertheless, the Rhymney’s manager, E A Prosser, became manager of the other two companies and worked all three as one, doubtless obtaining many of the benefits of a merger, possibly without some of the short term costs.

Road-rail vehicles

Passengers don’t like changing, while freight customers know that transhipment between different modes is the time when goods are most likely to be damaged or suffer pilferage. There is also the question that many railway stations were built some distance from the towns or villages they were supposed to serve. These problems were reflected in interest in convertible vehicles that could switch readily from road to rail, or vice-versa, but these proved cumbersome and difficult in practice, as well as heavy. In 1931, a commercial vehicle manufacturer, Karrier, built a heavy road coach in co-operation with the London, Midland & Scottish Railway. This had the appearance of a conventional single-deck coach, albeit with passenger doors on both sides, and cocentric road and rail wheels, with the change requiring the steering wheel to be locked and the road wheels raised. It worked for just a few months.

A trans-modal goods vehicle was developed in the United States during the 1950s, and in the UK the Pressed Steel Company obtained a manufacturing licence. Known as the Roadrailer, it was intended to be used in multiple behind a converter wagon to provide a complete goods train, but despite trials on British Railways in 1963, it never entered revenue service.

The complication and weight involved has meant that such vehicles tend to be used for railway engineering and maintenance work, as in the type produced by Mercedes Benz.

Road Transport and the Railways

From the earliest times, the railways needed road transport for collection and delivery purposes, and the superiority of the railways over road transport was such that often very short lines could be viable because of the superior performance, comfort and reliability of the railways. Eventually, railway companies were able to operate bus services to and from their stations, as well as having their own fleets of road vehicles to deliver small consignments to customers or collect from them.

The balance of appeal between railways and road transport began to change with the advent of street tramways, especially once these were electrified. This in turn was a major incentive for electrification of the railways’ suburban routes in the major conurbations, initially with the sub-surface Metropolitan District and Metropolitan Railways, but soon followed by surface railways with the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway taking the lead, followed by the London & South Western. After the First World War, the greater reliability of the motor vehicle, and the existence of many who had learned to drive and maintain these during the war, meant that both passenger and freight traffic was under threat from the lower costs and greater flexibility of bus services and road haulage. This started a long battle between the railways and road transport, with the former pointing out that the road transport operator paid a small share of the cost of infrastructure, while the railways were burdened with their full costs and also were constrained in their freight charges.

Eventually, Parliament introduced licensing for road haulage in 1930, followed by that for bus operation in 1933. This amounted to a system of virtual rationing with operators having to prove the demand for their services. Bus operators were restricted by route and fares, while hauliers by the number of vehicles. In the meantime, the railways were allowed to operate bus services away from their stations, and all the large companies took the opportunity to buy bus companies from 1929 onwards, often incorporating their existing vehicles and routes. In due course, the railways acquired Carter Paterson, the major parcels carrier, and Pickfords, but did so acting jointly. Nevertheless, in 1938, the railways returned to the fray again, with the Railway Companies Association mounting a ‘Square Deal’ campaign, seeking the freedom to set their own freight rates, but this proved to be unsuccessful and gained little public understanding or sympathy.

Robertson, General Sir (later Baron) Brian, 1896-1974

When the new Conservative government overhauled the British Transport Commission in 1953, they chose an experienced military administrator, General Sir Brian Robertson, as the new chairman. He was expected to provide internal discipline within the organisation, largely through giving it strong leadership, while also decentralising much of its operations whilst denationalising the road haulage firms. In fact, his restructuring of the BTC proved cumbersome, based on army principles rather than those of a commercial organisation. His ‘general staff’ soon proved very unpopular with professional railwaymen. He supported the Modernisation Plan, largely because it was seen as a way of reversing a poor financial position, but the BTC was ill-equipped to drive the plan through and it was hampered further by the area boards of British Railways and by commercial and technological incompetence. Despite this, Robertson established the Railway Research Centre at Derby and the British Transport Staff College, both of which were judged successful.

He retired in 1961 and was created Baron Robertson of Oakridge.

Robinson, John George, 1856-1943

After serving an apprenticeship at Swindon, in 1884 he became assistant locomotive superintendent on the Waterford, Limerick & Western Railway in Ireland, and superintendent in 1888, when he start to reorganise the company’s workshops and renew many of its locomotives and rolling stock. He joined the Great Central Railway in 1900 as locomotive and marine engineer, and became chief mechanical engineer in 1902. He was credited with producing comfortable passenger carriages and large goods wagons, while he showed a preference for 44-2 locomotives, and his heavy freight locomotive became the standard British locomotive used by the army abroad during the First World War. His inventions included a superheater and equipment for oil-burning locomotives, as well as improved buffers and fenders for carriages in an attempt to avoid telescoping and riding over other carriages in an accident.

Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway

Supported by the Southern Railway, which saw it as providing a feeder service, the Romney Hythe & Dymchurch Light Railway, the world’s largest 15in narrow gauge line, brought railway travel to Romney Marsh in Kent, an area over which building a standard gauge line would have been impractical because of the weight of the locomotives and rolling stock. It was established by a Light Railway Order of 1926 authorising the construction of a double line of 15in gauge for eight miles between Hythe and New Romney, and was opened on 26 July 1927. A success from the beginning, it became a favourite with tourists and an attraction in its own right, so that in 1929 a seven mile extension opened between New Romney and Dungeness lighthouse, with a long turning loop.

Enthusiasts for narrow gauge railways are accustomed to the layman regarding these as ‘toy’ railways, but the RHDR looked like a toy railway, and still does, and it was established to carry passengers, not goods. The locomotives have always been scaled down copies of main line and US locomotives rather than something distinctive as in Wales, and, for that matter, on the Lynton & Barnstaple. This problem probably arose from the fact that it was the brainchild of Captain J P Howey, a motor racing driver who also enjoyed driving steam locomotives.

During the Second World War, it was closed to the public on 30 June 1940 and commandeered by the military and used to move troops along this vital section of coast where, it was feared, an invasion might start. It suffered considerable wartime damage, but still managed to re-open on 2 March 1946 between Hythe and New Romney, while the Dungeness extension opened the following year.

Despite this, the post-war history was by no means as happy as the early years, with the line eventually facing closure until rescued by the preservation movement.