The railways may not have transformed society, but they did change a lot of habits, broaden people’s horizons in a dozen different ways, and impose their own ‘industrial’ discipline by standardising time itself. Before the coming of the railways, time had been an indefinite concept related to the movements of the sun. Towns even a few miles apart kept different times. The railways’ need for regularity inevitably led to something of a revolution.
According to Michael Robbins in The Railway Age, early time-sheets have footnotes converting Greenwich time to local times; and the general adoption of a standard ‘railway time’, even in Britain, had to wait until 1852, when the railways’ partner, the Whetstone telegraph, had spread throughout the country. Nevertheless a handful of towns retained their own time until Greenwich Mean Time was officially adopted in 1880. Even then a few older habits persisted. For another half a century a specially-regulated watch was sent daily from Euston to Holyhead to time the departure of the mail boat to Ireland, and the clock at Christ Church, Oxford, remained on local time for over a century.
It never occurred to the British that other people might have different ideas about the time. On a journey to Paris Charles Dickens found that one of his fellow-travellers was ‘a compatriot in an obsolete cravat, who thinks it a quite unaccountable thing that they don’t keep “London Time” on a French railway, and who is made angry by my modestly suggesting the possibility of Paris time being more in their way.’
Dickens’s journey, in 1851, could be checked by that new-fangled idea, the railway timetable. In 1839 William Bradshaw had published his first timetable covering all the passenger services in Britain. Eight years later he provided a similar volume for the railways on the continent of Europe. After he died of cholera in Norway in 1853, his name lived on as a symbol of reliability and devilish complication.
Standardisation was a slow process. Miller’s Wintering on the Riviera, published in 1879, complains that ‘in Menton no two clocks were alike. By common consent they all differed. On going south to Avignon, the time is nearly a quarter of an hour in advance of Paris time; at Menton it is twenty minutes.’ Not surprisingly ‘one of the first inquiries on first reaching a hotel is, “What is the time of your town?” and to note the difference between that and railway time.’ Fortunately ‘the complex and extraordinary mode of measuring time formerly in use in Italy, by counting twenty-four hours from the varying time of vespers, seems to be now wholly abandoned.’
The Americans learnt from others’ errors. Although their continent could not be linked in a single time zone, the railroads performed a major act of unification, or, rather, had it thrust upon them. Until the adoption of Standard Time on 18th November, 1883, Americans ran their lives by ‘sun time’ which varied by about one minute for every thirteen miles.
The first suggestion for a system of time zones came from an unlikely source, Professor C. F. Dowd, principal of the Temple Grove Seminary for Young Ladies at Saratoga Springs. He had found that the clocks in the station at Buffalo showed three separate times. Further investigation revealed a total of eight thousand in the country as a whole, a total he proposed to reduce to four time zones. Although he was only an amateur he developed the necessary intellectual framework including time zones and linkage to the Greenwich meridian. His ideas were ignored by the railroads, since he was presenting the passengers’ viewpoint, not that of the operators. In standardising their times – an eleven-year process – the railroads developed their own trade organisation. A ‘Time-Table convention’ met in 1872 to arrange passenger train schedules. The convention changed its name several times as its role broadened, until it became the still-flourishing Association of American Railroads.
Under the guidance of William F. Allen, editor of the Railroad Guide and the Association’s founding secretary, the railroads adopted the General Time Convention on 11th October, 1883. It came into force a mere five weeks later, on 18th November – a Sunday because there was less traffic. The ‘day of two noons’ passed off quietly, though some towns on the boundary between zones, like Pittsburgh, found it difficult to decide what time they should adopt; and one town, Bangor, Maine resolutely refused to accept the power of the railroads to dictate people’s lives, declaring that no one had the power ‘to change one of the immutable laws of God’. Moreover, the council had touched a raw nerve: the railroads had acted quite independently of the federal government, and as a result Congress only ratified their decision in March, 1918.
‘Railway time’ remained a symbol of national unity: in Russia all the clocks on the immense journey across Siberia remained on Saint Petersburg time; and the British imposed standard – railway – time in South Africa after the Boer War. Nevertheless pockets of anarchy remained. In 1900, the Railway Magazine reported from Portugal that ‘town time’, especially in the country’s second city, Oporto, remained between eight and twelve minutes ahead of railway time, which was supposedly derived from the Lisbon Observatory.
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The railways may have imposed their own time, but they could not guarantee that countries would take the opportunity they offered to organise their food supplies more rationally. Famine relief was a leit-motif in discussing railway-building in China or India, where bullocks consumed more food than they transported in the carts they pulled. By 1880 the British in India had found that railways had their limitations, most obviously that railheads in such a vast country were often far from the seat of the famine. Nevertheless railways could bring dramatic relief. In China an estimated thirteen million people died from starvation in the great northern drought of the 1870s, against a ‘mere’ half million in a comparable drought in 1920–21, after the construction of a railway through the affected regions.
Railways were needed to prevent famines even in apparently well-provided countries, including France. As late as 1846–47 there had been desperate food shortages in much of rural France, with their usual accompaniment of profiteering. In Roger Price’s words,* ‘The existence of the railway helped to establish a climate of confidence, so that a poor harvest no longer resulted in a panic rush to buy up foodstuffs … after 1856 there were no more cases of wheat prices doubling at times of shortage, and after 1867 no more increases of 50 per cent or more.’ In the process the previous substantial regional differences were ironed out. In the early 19th century wheat cost four times as much on the Côte d’Azur as it did round Paris: by the 1860s the difference was merely the few francs required to transport the wheat across the country by rail. The same theme is found in Germany and Eastern Europe. Even before the arrival of cheap American grain, agrarian societies used railways to balance the local shortages, which were far more common than any general threat of famine.
Even where famine was not a threat, railways served to regulate the price of basic foods. In the 1830s Bostonians had advocated the construction of railways westwards to provide cheap food for the workers, and after the Western Railroad was completed in 1841 it became known as the ‘regulator to the bread market of Boston’, wrote R. O. Cummings in The American and his Food. The effect could be even more fundamental. It was the railways which transformed the whole of Japan into a rice-eating country. Previously the potato had been the staple food in quite a number of rural areas.
Railways altered the balance between foods available at a price, and those affordable by the mass of the population. In Zurich, Switzerland’s first railway became known as the Brötlibahn because it brought delicious bread rolls from Baden in time for the breakfast tables of most of Zurich’s population. By contrast the boxes of Japanese tea whisked across the United States in the first transcontinental freight train were destined exclusively for the better-off.
Railways provided the mass of urban populations with supplies of healthy milk for the first time. Before the construction of the first stage of the Erie Railroad in 1842–43 New Yorkers drank almost exclusively thin, sour skimmed milk, usually of dubious cleanliness. By 1849 the Erie was delivering nine million quarts of milk to the city, and in the post-Erie decade average consumption had multiplied several times.
Even before the railways London was self-sufficient in milk. Somehow the Metropolis supported enough cows to provide milk – of a sort. In 1852 Punch said that a clean glass of milk would be one of the seven wonders of London, and asked if the capital would have to wait for it until 1922 – the next year when there would be a February with five Saturdays in it.
In the event Londoners had to wait less than fifteen years. In 1865 a major outbreak of cattle plague led to a court order to destroy all the cattle in London. ‘Within a week there was not a cow left legally alive within the boundaries of London and the inner home counties. And the capital faced a milk famine’, according to Bryan Morgan in Express Journey. An enterprising dairyman, George Barham, took the opportunity to bring in supplies of milk by rail from round London, emphasising its freshness by calling his company – which still supplies London with much of its milk – Express Dairies.
Barham had greatly expanded the radius from which London drew its supplies – the Great Western’s lines from Berkshire and Wiltshire became known in time as the ‘Milky Way’. Paris’s ‘zone of provisioning’ for every type of fresh foodstuff expanded five-fold to over 150 miles in the quarter of a century after 1830. In Russia the distances were even more spectacular. By 1911 half the meat eaten in Moscow and Saint Petersburg came from Siberia.
The most obvious ‘railway foods’ were naturally perishable items like fresh fish. ‘Those who came from Boston,’ declared Daniel Webster at the opening of the Northern Railroad in 1847, might have brought along ‘fish taken out of the sea at sunrise’. He was being rhetorical, but speaking truer than perhaps he realised. Oysters were probably the first new delight to be introduced to the tables of both New Yorkers and Parisians by the railways, and there was great excitement in Chicago in 1842 at the arrival of the first lobster. Twenty years later the Chicagoans were eating fish from Boston as a matter of routine. The benefits were universal. Live fish was brought from Scandinavia to Germany, and one of the first cargoes carried by Japanese railways was live carp for gourmets in Tokyo. Forty years earlier, in 1848, Londoners were already eating over 70 tons of fresh fish a week brought by rail from Yarmouth and Lowestoft, thus reducing their previous dependence on smoked or dried fish.
Londoners’ fish came courtesy of the Eastern Counties Railway and it was not unusual, especially in the United States, for the increased supply of a particular commodity to be associated with an individual railway. The Erie not only improved the New Yorkers’ supply of milk. It was also responsible for ensuring that more strawberries were consumed in New York than in any other city in the world. Previously New Yorkers had to pay twelve times the price paid by the inhabitants of Baltimore, who were much nearer the strawberry fields. Another railroad, the Camden & Amboy, became known as the ‘Pea Line’ after the vegetables it brought from New Jersey, although it could just as well have been called the ‘Peach Line’ after another major speciality.
Urban catchment areas could be enormous. By 1852 Chicagoans were able to buy fresh green peas brought by express freight from New Orleans, a thousand miles away. The opening of the transcontinental railroad provided another surge: not just Japanese tea but, in much greater quantities, deciduous fruit, apples and pears from California.
Railways not only broadened urban menus: they also lengthened the season for previously short-lived delicacies. New Yorkers could enjoy strawberries for four months because the railroads enabled them to bring in supplies from such a wide area, while tomatoes became available the whole year round. By the late 1860s the Parisians could indulge in one of their favourite snobberies, the consumption of expensive primeurs, early fruit and vegetables brought from far and wide for the delectation of jaded metropolitan palates, sometimes more interested in the earliness than the taste. The fruits came from all over France: tomatoes grown at Perpignan, near the Spanish border, grapes from the south, and other specialities from every corner of ‘l’Hexagone’.
Transporting such perishables demanded increasing quantities of ice (see Chapter V). By the 1850s fresh strawberries from Southern Illinois were being transported in refrigerated cars to Chicago, and even stored through the year. The first refrigerated beef was shipped from Chicago in 1857, and within a couple of decades the railroads had perfected proper mobile refrigerated cars in time for the first oranges to be shipped from Florida in 1886. Florida’s great rival, California, followed a year later.
By then the world market for meat and for tropical fruits, especially bananas, had been revolutionised by the development of refrigerated ships, but these would have been useless without proper railway links at both ends – across the pampas of Argentina and the jungles of central America, and into the heart of the consuming countries.
Most of these foods were destined for a mass public. In times of relative economic progress and constantly increasing competition among railways, there was a considerable ‘trickle-down’ effect, above all in the biggest cities, where the diet of the poor had been appallingly narrow. Everywhere railways introduced fresh produce from far and wide onto urban menus for the first time. The majority of the population in the United States and Western Europe seem to have benefited from the increased availability of fresh meat – average consumption in Germany doubled between the 1830s and the 1870s, and rose another thirty per cent in the 1880s and 1890s.
In France the choice widened in the fifty years after the late 1830s. Bread consumption rose by only a fifth, while that of potatoes and root vegetables rose by a half, meat by over three quarters, fruit and fresh vegetables doubled and the consumption of sugar quadrupled. Thanks to reduced prices bread accounted for only two fifths of the total cost of food – itself relatively stable as a proportion of average wages – against nearly three fifths before the arrival of the railways. By the end of the century protein in the form of meat, eggs and fish, formed nearly a third of the average Frenchman’s food intake, against a mere fifth fifty years earlier.13
In Paris these trends could be seen in extreme form. By the end of the century Parisian consumption of such basic commodities as wine and wheat was static and expenditure was increasingly concentrated on relatively optional ‘secondary’ foods, like meat and vegetables, fruit and fish. By the end of the century, even the poor of Paris could afford butter and apples from Normandy, oranges from the South of France, and vegetables from all over France. By then the French were eating far more meat than ever before, half a century after the American working classes had been able to increase their consumption of railway-hauled meat.
The diet of even poor New Yorkers in the 1860s included tomatoes, string beans and turnip greens in addition to the potatoes which had been the only vegetable they could afford as late as 1851. Urban workers often spent more on food once a better variety became available, a little-mentioned factor in the relative fall in alcoholism in the late nineteenth century – although precisely the opposite happened in France, because wine was one of the agricultural products whose production and consumption was most increased by the spread of the railways.
Even in France the flow was not confined to the capital. Inland provinces learnt to savour for the first time the joys of eating fish, and such previously exotic products as coffee. Everywhere rustics ceased to be entirely self-sufficient, preferring to buy basic foods like bread rather than bake their own, to the chagrin of self-appointed custodians of rural values but to the great relief of overburdened rural housewives.
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The food the railways carried was not only physical. It was also spiritual, enabling pilgrims to travel far more easily. But there were natural hesitations before God-fearing folk were prepared to use such an obviously secular phenomenon. The Russian bishops, for instance, were afraid that ‘pilgrims would come to the monastery [Sergiev Posad (now Zagorsk), site of the sacred Troitsk monastery] in railway cars, in which all sorts of tales can be heard, and often dirty stories, whereas now they come on foot and each step is a feat pleasing to God’. Despite this reluctance the Metropolitan himself opened the line from Moscow to the holy spot, and by the time the Trans-Siberian was opened, the church was happy to commission a splendid ‘church car’ to minister to the congregations en route.14
The pattern was repeated with different religions throughout the world. The first railway in what was then called Persia was a narrow-gauge line which ran six miles from Tehran to a shrine in the village of Shah Abdul Azim. In Japan at least two railways served important shrines, at Ise and a special line from Oji to the temples at Nara. By the 1890s there was a convenient stop for pilgrims to pay their homage to Mount Fuji.
Some of the promoters of the first railways in India had hoped to spread Christianity, others were afraid that pilgrims would not use them to travel to their sacred shrines. According to Herbert Spencer, Robert Stephenson referred the matter ‘to the Dhurma Subha of Calcutta, the great sanhedrin of orthodox Hindoos, who, after consulting the sacred texts and the learned pundits, delivered it as their opinion that the devotee might ride in a railway carriage to the various shrines without diminishing the merit of the pilgrimage.’ The result was an amazing growth in pilgrimages, to the mutual advantage of the ‘Hindoos’ and the railway companies. (Quarterly Review, 1868).
Railways could also be used for secular worhsip. As late as 1968 the pious Chinese built a railway sixty miles from Hangsha, the capital of Hunan province, to Shao-sha, the birthplace of Mao-Tse-Tung. Over the next decade, before the cult of Mao’s personality waned, three million passengers took the leisurely four-hour journey every year.
Railways were obviously most suitable for mass religious movements and so concentrated attention on a small number of famous shrines, leading to the neglect of older sites. The most obvious beneficiary was Lourdes, which can truthfully be described as The Shrine the Railway Made.
Bernadette Soubirous’ visions had started in the late 1850s, before the route of the line from Bayonne to Toulouse had been decided. So the town council seized with both hands the opportunity to ensure that the line passed by Lourdes.
In October 1862, the council agreed to compensate any landowners who suffered, even from the railways’ surveys. In May 1863 councillors asked the railway to site its station as close as possible to the centre of town and complied with every one of the company’s requests. They admitted the navvies and railway workers to the local hospital and ignored their riotous behaviour.
Their reward came in 1866 with the simultaneous opening of the grotto and the railway from Tarbes, which connected with trains to Bordeaux and far-off Paris. Between 1870 and 1878 a total of 958 pilgrimages to Bernadette’s shrine brought 661,000 pilgrims to Lourdes, 100,000 of them on a single day, 3rd July, 1876, to rejoice in the newly-proclaimed doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and affirm the idea of la France Catholique.
At much the same time similar ideas were being spread throughout France by another railway-based religious order, the Assumptionists, who exploited the railways to assemble mass rallies, largely of the most humble of folk. The Assumptionists were a strange, and in their time highly important, sect, founded by the scion of a rich land-owning family, who acquired considerable political influence through their ability to mount mass rallies.
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But the railway’s most dramatic influence was not on Christianity, but on Islam. Throughout the 19th century increasing numbers of pilgrims had made the difficult and dangerous journey to Mecca. In September, 1900, Sultan Abdul Hamid proposed to build a railway to Mecca as a pious gesture on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his accession to the Ottoman throne. The idea was immediately greeted as an important affirmation of Muslim values.
The Sultan naturally insisted on building a purely Muslim railway. He decreed that15, ‘only Muslim workers and Muslim materials ought to be employed; timber from the vast forests of Anatolia and Macedonia; ballast from the country being crossed, rails and wagons from the Imperial workshops; engineering regiments would provide the workforce, the schools of Constantinople the engineers and the foremen.’
In the event much of the material had to be bought in Europe, together with some skilled labour, supervised by the German engineer who had built most of the railways in the Levant. The combination of ferocious piety, the Sultan’s will-power and German organising ability ensured that this railway, nearly a thousand miles in length, was built within eight years.
Meissner Pasha, the German chief engineer, was simply given the two terminals, Damascus and Mecca, and told to connect them by rail as best he could. He was a genius. He had to handle a huge construction force composed of a dozen nationalities. The line was built across some of the bleakest, hottest, most implacable terrain in the world, without natural resources of any kind. His worst problem was with the Bedouin, furious at being deprived of the pilgrims who had been their prey, ruffians eventually hunted down by an implacably efficient Turkish general, Kaisim Pasha.
Meissner was not allowed to complete his work. Neither he, nor any other infidel, was allowed to venture beyond Medina Saleh, the 587th mile-post on the line. Fortunately he had trained up a highly-accomplished Turkish engineer, Muktar Bey, who brought the line into Medina in August, 1908. But then the Bedouin took their revenge, wiping out a whole construction camp, and thus scotching any idea of building the railway the final 300 miles to Mecca itself. Unfortunately the line ran for a mere eight years until T. E. Lawrence blew it up. Since then it has lain abandoned, the break-up of the Ottoman Empire signalling the end of any hope of cooperation between the peoples along the lines.
In Anglo-Saxon countries deep religious faith produced, not railways, but strong hostility to the very idea of running them on the Sabbath, as a serious challenge to the fundamental Sabbatarianism which was as much a feature of the age as the railways themselves. The famous Versailles accident of 1842 was naturally exploited by the Sabbatarians as an awful lesson meted out to the Godless foreign travellers who had dared desecrate the day. After an equally appalling accident in Clayton tunnel just outside Brighton twenty years later16 ‘plenty of people rushed about proclaiming the accidents as a judgment of God.’ In between times the railways’ Sunday excursions were denounced as ‘trips to Hell at 7s 6d.’
Versailles, 1842: 52 people perished in the worst rail disaster in the world at the time.
But it was not the excursionists (who included such devout souls as Thomas Cook) who forced the railway companies to break the Sabbath. According to Michael Robbins in The Railway Age it was the absolute need for mail trains to run on a Sunday which broke the resistance of the Sabbatarians in both Scotland and Wales. They were never as powerful as was made out, and most clerics probably reacted like Dr Grantley in Trollope’s Barchester Towers: ‘If you can withdraw all the passengers the company I dare say will withdraw the trains. It is merely a question of dividends.’
Nevertheless the argument rumbled on. In 1883 the inhabitants of a small Highland village managed to prevent a load of fish from leaving on the Sabbath and were greeted as heroes when they returned from serving the jail sentence to which they were sentenced. Six years later ‘the anti-Sunday Travel Union’ had 58 branches with some 8,000 adherents. Partly owing to its activities, trains on suburban lines normally ceased running on Sundays during the hours of Divine service.
Similar battles were fought in the United States. In Galesburg, the railroad was the blunt instrument which broke the power of the Sabbatarians. The first Sunday train was boarded by the impressive figure of President Blanchard of Knox College, who was told to go to Hell when he ordered the engineer to take the engine back to the roundhouse. And that, wrote Ernest Elmo Calkins,17 was the end of the power of ‘the little group of pious men who had founded Galesburg to be a Christian town after their own ideal’.
In South Africa the Reverend Van Lingen managed to prevent any Sunday trains from desecrating the Sabbath at the settlement of Paarl. After denouncing the railway from the pulpit he founded a Sunday stage coach service for passengers from Cape Town which successfully kept the railway at bay for half a century.
There was, and remains, a strong counter-current, a positive railway-worship among clergymen of the Church of England. Bishop Eric Treacy and Canon Roger Lloyd were famous railway writers; Canon Reginald Fellows wrote a history of Bradshaw, founding father of railway timetables (which Archbishop William Temple was reputed to know by heart); and more recently the Reverend Wilbert Awdry made a fortune by recounting the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends.
* The Modernisation of Rural France.