Railway History

Introduction

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An early station that only lasted four years:
see Terminus Wars

As walkers, we travel on the railways all the time, and never give them a second thought. In this, we have a lot in common with the Victorians, who created the network we ride on today.

Though railways were a technological wonder to them, they didn’t particularly like them, and they certainly weren’t nostalgic about them (see The golden age of the railways). They regarded them as a practical way to get around, and if they gave them a thought at all, it was usually to complain about them. Moans about late, uncomfortable and overcrowded trains are nothing new – they are as old as the railways themselves.

And yet, as walkers we see another side to the railways from the one the commuter sees. Fast and frequent trains whisk us from central London to a wide range of rural locations, and the number of times that there significant delays to the trains are remarkably rare. The network takes us to such wonderful rural stations as Wadhurst, Southease, Pluckley or Hever, almost invariably with an hourly service that runs seven days a week, from early morning till late at night.

But how did this network come to be created? And why is it the way it is? That is what these pages set out to answer. They describe how the railway started (Beginnings) and the amazing speed with which they were developed (From London Bridge to the sea and South East to Dover). They explain why there are two ways to get to Sevenoaks, Maidstone, Ashford, Canterbury and Dover (Bitter competition - and its benefits) while there is just one to get to Winchester or Southampton (A more rational railway).

They reveal why trains from some places go into only one London terminus, while others go into two or more (Terminus wars), and why a ticket to Yalding is valid for return from Borough Green (Bitter competition).

They answer such questions as why the trains on the Marlow branch reverse direction at Bourne End (Thames and Chilterns) and why minor delays on the Hastings line so easily escalate into major hold-ups (South East to Dover). They address that perplexing question of why the main departure boards at Victoria are divided into two sections, each with the trains in chronological order (Terminus wars).

They also tell you the story behind some famous landmarks we pass on the walks – such as the Ouse Valley Viaduct (From London Bridge to the sea) and the beautiful viaduct near Eynsford (Bitter competition). They alert you to some interesting survivals from a former age, such as the tiled map of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway in its heyday, which can be found in a passageway at Victoria station (Bitter competition: photos in Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor).

Last but not least, these pages explain why the south east kept many of its railway lines while other parts of the country lost theirs (The sparks effect, Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor), and they provide a corrective to that curious English nostalgia for the way the railways used to be (The golden age of the railways).

Hopefully, reading them will open your eyes, and make the railways you travel on a bit more interesting. And then you can forget all about them and go back to taking them for granted – which is after all, what they are for.

© Peter Conway 2010 • All Rights Reserved

From London Bridge to the sea

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Once the first railways had been established in London (see Beginnings), lines grew rapidly in the 1840s, the years of “railway mania” when dozens of new lines were proposed each year. This was an era much like the dotcom boom of the late 1990s, when even the most fanciful schemes attracted willing investors. Like the dotcom boom, it had its inevitable crash in 1848, in which railway shares fell by a third. But if investors lost money, the infrastructure still remained – much of it, to this day.

One of the earliest lines was the London to Brighton, which branched off from the London & Croydon Railway at Selhurst, and headed south for the coast. Construction work started July 1838 and it opened in sections from May 1840 onwards (they worked fast in those days!), reaching Brighton in September 1841.

A wonderful relic of this early railway – and a testament to the extraordinary infrastructure that was built in such a short time - can be see on the winter version of the Balcombe Circular walk which passes under the astonishing brick-built Ouse Valley Viaduct (pictured).

In 1846, the London & Brighton company merged with the London and Croydon, and also various other companies that were essentially only created to raise further money from willing investors – including the Brighton, Lewes & Hastings Railway, and the Brighton & Chichester Railway.

They became the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, and tracks were extended to Chichester and Lewes in 1846, Newhaven in 1847, and Hastings (along the south coast) by 1851. As early as 1847, the LBSCR was also running trains to Portsmouth. All of these routes are now part of the Southern franchise.

The London, Brighton & South Coast Railway goes on to play a large part in the creation of the lines we use as walkers. For more details see Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor. Meanwhile, Terminus wars details how it came to start services to Victoria station.

© Peter Conway 2010 • All Rights Reserved

Beginnings

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Primitive railways serving mines actually have quite a long history, dating back to the 17th century, with iron rails introduced in the 18th. But these “wagonways” mainly served mines and quarries and were horse-hauled.

One in south London was the Surrey Iron Railway, which opened in 1803, and which in 1805 was extended by the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone Railway to quarries near Merstham. The Surrey Iron Railway lasted until 1846, and part of its route was later used for the West Croydon to Wimbledon railway line. Part of the Merstham extension provided the route for the London & Brighton Railway in 1838.

But these wagonways were essentially just ways to move horse-drawn carts more easily and used rails different from the ones we use today. Much more sophisticated was the Canterbury & Whitstable Railway which opened in 1830, carried passengers as well as freight, and used steam power throughout. It boasted the first passenger train tunnel in the world - Tyler Hill Tunnel, whose portals can still be seen behind the University of Kent. In 1853 it became part of the South Eastern Railway, closing in 1931.

The Canterbury & Whitstable was initially cable-hauled, however (that is, using a stationary steam engine, a bit like a funicular railway today), and so in the opinion of most historians does not count as the first railway in the modern sense of the world. That honour goes to the Liverpool & Manchester Railway which opened four months later, and which caused a global sensation. Unlike all its predecessors it was entirely hauled by mobile steam engines – most famously, Stephenson’s Rocket – and it linked two large towns. While it was not the first railway to carry passengers, this gave it a significant passenger focus that no line had had before.

The Liverpool & Manchester set entrepreneurs thinking all over the country, and the first result in the south east came in 1836 when the London & Greenwich Railway opened, starting at what is now London Bridge station. To the amazement of its contemporaries, it was built on brick arches – 878 of them (which survive to this day and remain the longest run of brick arches ever built: this is why trains leaving London Bridge are travelling at rooftop level). In 1839 it was joined by the London & Croydon, a separate company which had its own station at London Bridge, and whose other terminus was what we now call West Croydon station.

The London & Birmingham Railway had meanwhile opened in 1838, starting out from Euston and travelling north through the Chilterns past Berkhamsted and Tring. Just beyond Tring station it created a long cutting that required an immense amount of labour to build, particularly in an age before mechanical diggers. Though it is not much noticed today, it was considered a great engineering feat at the time.

Also in 1838 the Great Western Railway started operations out of Paddington, though the present station dates from 1854, and 1839-40 saw the opening of the London to Southampton line, which soon became the London & South Western Railway – today’s South West Trains franchise.

On the opposite side of London 1839-40 saw the start of the Eastern Counties Railway, whose initial terminus was at Shoreditch, but which became the Great Eastern Railway in 1862 and opened Liverpool Street station in 1874. Kings Cross, the terminus of the Great Northern Railway, did not open till 1852.

© Peter Conway 2010 • All Rights Reserved

Bitter competition – and its benefits

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Have you ever wondered why there are two ways to get by rail to Sevenoaks, Ashford, Canterbury and Dover, but only one to get to Southampton or Petersfield? The answer lies in bitter competition between the Victorian railway companies - and two in particular who competed for traffic in Kent.

The early railway companies were profit-making businesses with no state support - something that was almost unique to the UK. In other European countries, governments tended to decide what railway lines should be built, and while private capital may have financed them, the state often provided revenue guarantees. In the UK, railways needed the permission of Parliament, but it was given by private bills on a case by case basis. Whether a railway was approved or not depended not on any overall government plan, but on the whim of MPs (who would have included key landowners with interest in the outcome).

The crest of 'The Chatham'
on Blackfriars Bridge

Despite this, Victorian railway companies often managed to establish control over their own particular area of the country. On the edges of their territory they might compete with rivals, but within them they had a monopoly. A good example is the the London, Brighton & South Coast, which occupied a triangle south from London, spreading out to Portsmouth one way and Hastings in the other (see From London Bridge to the sea).

Two large ceramic maps of the lines it ultimately built in this triangle are still to be found on the wall in Victoria station in the passageway down the side of Marks & Spencers. (The map nearer the concourse shows the longer distance lines: another near the station exit shows the suburban ones: see Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor for photos of the long distance map). Though some lines have since closed, this remains the territory of the Southern franchise to this day.

The South Eastern Railway might have expected to similarly dominate the lines from London to Kent, especially after its rapid route building in the 1840s (see South East to Dover), but in the 1850s it got a rude shock. In 1853, the East Kent Railway got permission to build a line from Rochester and Chatham to Canterbury. This opened from Rochester to Faversham in 1858, but instead of just becoming a branch line of the South Eastern and allowing itself to be absorbed by the larger company - the usual practice of the day - it asked to be allowed to run trains into London Bridge using the SER tracks from Strood.

South Eastern refused this request, and so in 1859 the East Kent became the London, Chatham & Dover Railway and set about living up to its name. It extended its lines from Faversham to Canterbury (now Canterbury East) in 1860, and in the same year opened its own line from Rochester to St Mary Cray near Bromley. (This is the line that goes through Sole Street, though this station did not open till 1861).

Through a series of alliances with small railways in London - mainly the West End of London & Crystal Palace Railway (see Terminus wars) - the company then got access to the new Victoria station in 1861. In the same year, it extended its lines from Canterbury to Dover and from Faversham to Whitstable and Herne Bay, with Margate and Ramsgate following in 1863.

All of this put the South Eastern Railway on the spot. You will remember that Parliament had forced it to run its trains south to Redhill on the London to Brighton line before heading east to Dover, Canterbury and Ramsgate. Now a rival company had built a quicker route to all of these places – to Dover its route was 10 miles shorter. Needless to say 'The Chatham' (as it became known) also lost no time in offering ferry services from Dover to Calais to compete with the SER’s Folkestone to Boulogne service. It even opened a line in 1862 from Swanley to Sevenoaks, crossing the lovely viaduct you see as you walk into Eynsford.

The SER’s answer was a hugely expensive new line through the North Downs from Orpington to Sevenoaks, and on through the Greensand Ridge to Tonbridge (the latter tunnel the longest in England at the time, at nearly two miles). This link opened in May 1868 and is now the mainline route.

By this time, the SER had had the satisfaction of seeing its over-ambitious rival go bankrupt as a result of the failure of finance house Overend Gurney in 1866 (the last bank collapse in the UK until the run on Northern Rock in 2007: Overend Gurney had invested too much in the second period of railway mania in the early 1860s). The failure also affected the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (see A miraculous survivor for the reasons), but both it and the Chatham recovered, and the stage was then set for 30 years of bitter competition between the Chatham and the SER that led to a heavy duplication of lines from which we still benefit.

It was not only Canterbury, Sevenoaks and Dover that had two stations (the Chatham station in Sevenoaks is the one now called Bat & Ball, incidentally). The Chatham also extended their Sevenoaks line from Otford to Maidstone East in 1874, and to Ashford in 1884. This route made the SER branch line from Paddock Wood to Maidstone somewhat redundant and yet it survives to this day. So do two different ways to get to Canterbury, Dover, Ashford, Maidstone, Sevenoaks and even Bromley (Bromley North being the other one).

The rivalry was fuelled by the SER’s chairman, Sir Edward Watkins. One of the giants of the Victorian railway, he had visions of linking the north of England with Paris via a Channel tunnel, and he had the means to do it, as he was also chairman of the Metropolitan Railway (the first underground line in London, opened in 1863) and responsible for building what became the Great Central route from the Midlands to London Marylebone in the 1890s (see Thames and Chilterns). In 1881 he even started building his Channel tunnel, which advanced a mile or so out to sea, but in the end was blocked by politics and money problems.

His opposite number at the London, Chatham & Dover was James Forbes, who was also in charge of the Metropolitan District Railway (now the District Line on the underground), which was a rival of the Metropolitan. Even though the two companies cooperated to create the Circle Line (which opened in 1884), the Metropolitan ran the clockwise trains and the District the anti-clockwise ones, and there was little or no cooperation between them. The two companies had separate ticket offices at each Circle Line station, and often encouraged passengers to go the long way round so as to use their trains.

The Chatham and South Eastern did co-operate on one line, however – the link between Dover and Deal, opened in 1881 - and in time came to realise that their fierce competition was doing neither of them any good. (The Chatham in particular was always a notoriously poor railway company, with ancient carriages and spartan stations). In 1899 they agreed to a joint management committee – the South Eastern and Chatham Companies’ Managing Committee, or the South Eastern & Chatham for short. This was not quite a merger – the two companies remained financially independent of each other – but was almost the same thing.

This alliance has consequences that last to this day. The two companies agreed to recognise each others tickets and routes, and it is for this reason that a return ticket to Yalding is valid for return from Borough Green. In Bickley, just east of Bromley, they built a connection between their two networks and this is often used to get around engineering works to this day (for example by running Charing Cross services out of Victoria).

Otherwise, the main legacy of the rivalry is the wonderful multiplicity of routes across Kent – all now in the Southeastern franchise. Thankfully the duplication of stations has for the most part gone. In Maidstone, Canterbury and Bromley there are still two stations, but in many other places - Sevenoaks, Ashford, Rochester, Chatham, Gravesend, Whitstable, Dover, Margate and Ramsgate – they were merged.

Incidentally, the Chatham and the South Eastern were not the only two companies to enjoy bad relations with each other. The South Eastern and the London, Brighton & South Coast also squabbled incessantly at the two points where they came into contact with each other. One was in Hastings, where the SER shared the LBSCR’s line for the last few miles into the town. The LBSCR would often block SER trains, and it was not until 1870 that they let them stop at St Leonards.

The other point of friction was at Redhill, where the SER’s original line to Dover started. The SER and the London, Brighton & South Coast shared the line from East Croydon to Redhill, but in fact ownership was split, with the LBSCR owning the part from Croydon to Coulsdon, and the SER from Coulsdon to Redhill. There was much argument about whose trains had priority, and finally in 1899 the LBSCR built a line bypassing this whole section of track, which is known as the Quarry Line. To this day, this allows fast trains to Brighton to bypass Coulsdon South, Merstham and Redhill, and is very useful during engineering works.

© Peter Conway 2010 • All Rights Reserved

South East to Dover

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The company's former offices at 84 Tooley Street

If you look at a map, you can see that there is a railway line that goes directly east from Redhill to Tonbridge and Ashford - a dead straight line that looks as if it is going somewhere in a hurry. This is the line that passes Edenbridge, Penshurst and Leigh on the way to Tonbridge, and such stations as Paddock Wood, Staplehurst, Headcorn and Pluckley between there and Ashford.

While the section between Redhill and Tonbridge might seem like a minor branch line these days, this was a major trunk route in the first two decades of the railways. It was in fact the original route of the South Eastern Railway, whose aim was to reach the all important channel port of Dover.

Created by an Act of Parliament in 1836 (as was the requirement for all rail companies), the South Eastern was forced to use London & Brighton Railway tracks as far as Redhill. The reason for this rather indirect route was that Parliament reckoned only one southern route out of the capital was necessary (thus showing a lack of foresight in transport planning it has displayed ever since).

This indirect route meant the line to Dover was 20 miles longer than the stagecoach route - quite a handicap in the days when trains only travelled at 20 miles per hour. The route explains why Tonbridge station is aligned from east to west, not north to south as one might expect when taking a train to Hastings, and explains why to this day there are trains from London Bridge to Tonbridge via East Croydon and Redhill. It was only in 2009 that this service was transferred from the Southeastern to the Southern franchise.

The energy of those early Victorian railway builders was amazing, and the line was constructed at great speed. Tonbridge and Ashford were both reached within the first year (1842: the station buildings at Pluckley are the original ones from this era) with Folkestone following in 1843 and Dover in 1844. Remember that this was in the era before mechanical diggers when all railway lines were built with pick and shovel by 'navvies' (an abbreviation of navigator - a term originally used for the labourers who built the canals). These hard working and hard drinking men must have been absolutely terrifying to the rural communities they passed through.

Once Dover had been reached, the South Eastern started building branches. The line was extended from Ashford to Wye, Chilham and Canterbury (the current Canterbury West station) and on to Ramsgate and Margate by 1846 (interestingly the very same route operated by the high speed trains out of St Pancras today). A branch from this line curved off from Minster, just beyond Canterbury, to Sandwich and Deal (in those days still an important port for sailing ships) by 1847 - though it was not till 1881 that this line was extended around to Dover.

Folkestone and Dover were the big attractions for the South Eastern Railway, however, as it gave them access to cross-channel ferries. This was a time when tourism was developing, as rich Victorians discovered the continent, and the South Eastern was one of the pioneers of regular steam packet services.

The company had bought Folkestone harbour in 1842, and in 1843 started services to Boulogne (an involvement in ferries that lasted right up till the 1980s and the Sealink services of British Rail, incidentally). The first recorded day trips from London to Boulogne took place in 1844, and by 1848 you could go from London Bridge to Paris Gare du Nord by this route in ten hours, thirty minutes. The first known day trip from London to Paris was in 1850.

On the other side of its territory, the SER struck a line south from Tonbridge (a town then called Tunbridge incidentally: the spelling was changed in 1893 to avoid confusion with Tunbridge Wells, which developed as a spa town in the 18th century. Modern pronunciation often incorrectly follows the new spelling).
This line reached Tunbridge Wells in 1846, Frant, Wadhurst, Stonegate (then known as Ticehurst Road) and Robertsbridge in 1851, and Battle and Hastings in 1852. The previous year the line from Ashford to Hastings (the one which serves Rye) had also opened. So this early in the railway boom, Hastings already had lines in three directions, the third one being the one to Brighton (see From London Bridge to the sea).

Incidentally, while Victorian railway builders built fast, their contractors were not above cutting corners, and on the line from Tunbridge Wells to Hasting the builder saved money by lining the tunnel with three layers of bricks rather than the seven specified. By the time this was discovered, it was too late to do much about it, except add the extra four layers on top.

This meant the tunnels on this route were narrower than all other English rail tunnels, and so for about a century slightly smaller trains had to be specially designed for the Hastings line. In the modern era, this became impractical and so all tunnels on this very hilly route are now single track. This explains why any delay on the Hastings line is quickly magnified into a major problem, and probably why most trains on it stop at all stations

Very early on the South Eastern also built a line that today seems like a rather quaint little branch line, but originally had an important purpose. This line ran from Paddock Wood to Maidstone – opening in 1844 and forming that town’s only railway link for the next 30 years – and was extended to Strood (a station at that time named Rochester) in 1853. On this line are Yalding, Snodland and Cuxton.

The SER had already approached Strood from another angle, having absorbed the London & Greenwich Railway (see Beginnings) in 1845. (Technically it just leased its lines, and the company remained in existence, collecting the rent, till 1923.) The hills around Greenwich blocked further progress, however and so instead a line (the North Kent Line) was opened from a junction near London Bridge to Lewisham, Dartford, Gravesend and Strood in 1849. Greenwich remained a terminus until 1878, when the Maze Hill tunnel was built linking it to Woolwich and beyond.

One other useful line for walkers that we owe to the South Eastern Railway is the one that goes to Dorking and Gomshall. Opened in 1849 as the nominally independent Reading, Guildford & Reigate Railway, it was in fact always operated by the SER and was bought by them in 1852. Amazingly, they ran through trains from London to Reading on the route, via Redhill, Guildford, Farnborough, Sandhurst and Wokingham, which must have ranked as one of the more indirect rail routes in the south east.

© Peter Conway 2010 • All Rights Reserved

Terminus wars

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The original London, Chatham & Dover station
at Blackfriars was on the south side of the river

Those living to the south of London are often lucky enough to have two different ways into London by rail. From Brighton or East Croydon you can travel to Victoria or London Bridge, and from Otford you can get services to Victoria or Blackfriars. On some routes the terminus is different on working days or Sundays, or in peak hours and off-peak hours.

Sometimes this choice is due to the competition between two rival rail companies in the 19th century (see Bitter competition - and its benefits), but it also reflects a desire by the Victorian railway companies to serve both the City of London and the West End, the businessman and the leisure traveller.

For the first twenty or so years of the railway era there was no such choice. For destinations in Kent, Sussex or Surrey you would have travelled from London Bridge, which was terminus of both the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway and the South Eastern Railway – a role it still fulfils to this day, with services now provided by the Southern and Southeastern franchises. The only other terminus for trains to the south of London was Waterloo, which had opened in 1848, replacing Nine Elms as the head station for the London & South Western Railway.

Both stations were at the time right on the edge of London, as were Euston (opened 1837), Paddington (opened 1838), and Kings Cross (which had opened as the terminus of the Great Northern Railway in 1852). The reason for this was that Parliament prohibited railways from coming into the city (even the Metropolitan Line, the first underground line, opened in 1863, had to obey this rule). They were also not allowed to cross the River Thames.

This rule weakened when Victoria station opened in 1860. The story of this station starts with the Great Exhibition of 1851, the world's first trade fair, which saw the Crystal Palace built in Hyde Park. When the exhibition ended, the palace was moved to a hilltop near Sydenham in South London - the area which bears its name to this day. There it remained a popular entertainments venue until 1936, when it burnt down in a fire.

Large scale events were held in the Crystal Palace: it attracted well over a million visitors each year, and in 1883 one event had 4,000 singers and as many orchestra players. So it made sense to use the new technology of railways to transport people to it. The result was the West of London & Crystal Palace Railway, which was opened in 1856 between Battersea Wharf (near the southern end of Chelsea Bridge) and the current Crystal Palace station calling en route at Clapham Junction, Wandsworth Common, Balham, Streatham Hill, West Norwood and Gipsy Hill. Two years later the line was extended to Beckenham Junction and Bromley (now Bromley South).

It was obvious that Battersea Wharf was not an ideal terminus, however, and several railway companies soon cooperated to build a line from Victoria to Pimlico and across the river to connect with the West End of London & Crystal Palace line. When this opened, in 1860, Victoria station was born. It became a second terminus for the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, who drove south from Balham to link up with their existing London Bridge to Brighton mainline at East Croydon.

A year later, the London, Chatham & Dover Railway also used the West End of London lines to link its network to Victoria, building a station next door to the London & Brighton one. In 1862-3 it built its own direct line to Victoria through Herne Hill and Brixton - its mainline route to this day - and ceased to use the The West End of London lines, which were eventually sold to the London, Brighton & South Coast.

Though side by side, the two stations at Victoria remained quite separate until 1924, a year after both companies were absorbed into Southern Railways (see The golden age of the railways), which is when the current archway between the two halves was created. You can see if you look at the facade of the station today that the architecture on either side is very different, and bizarrely even today the main electronic departure board at the station lists “Chatham-side” trains in chronological order and then “Brighton-side” ones. Railway staff are still heard to refer to “Kent-side” and “Sussex-side” departures. The recently restored roof on the Chatham side, incidentally, is the original one from 1862, now a listed structure.

The opening of Victoria meant that the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway could serve both the City and the West End, but even more of a worry for the South Eastern Railway was that its rival, the London, Chatham & Dover Railway (see Bitter Competiton - and its benefits), could run boat trains for the Channel Ports right from the doorstep of the wealthy customers most likely to use them.

Not to be left out, the SER started to demolish its terminus at London Bridge, and create the through platforms we have today. (The lines that still terminate at London Bridge are the former London, Brighton & South Coast ones, though the creation of Thameslink/First Capital Connect services has blurred this distinction. Incidentally, as at Victoria, the two stations were not joined until 1928.)

From the through platforms the SER extended its lines across the river to Charing Cross, opened in 1864. This enabled it not just to serve both City and West End, but to do so with the same train - something no other line can do to this day. But by this time the London, Chatham & Dover was already encroaching further into its territory by opening Blackfriars station (see below). To counter that, the SER built a spur from its Charing Cross line over the river to a new City terminus at Cannon Street, opened in 1866.

In the early days, long distance trains to Ramsgate, Folkestone or Hastings would have served both stations - that is, they started at Charing Cross, were shunted to Cannon Street, and went on from there to their destination via London Bridge. There was also a regular Charing Cross to Cannon Street shuttle which was a popular way to travel between the City and West End until the District Line was opened to Mansion House in 1871. (This track link allowing trains to run from Charing Cross to Cannon Street still exists and is occasionally still used during engineering works.)

The route from London Bridge to Charing Cross was always a bottleneck, however, with the SER only able to get permission to run two tracks across Borough Market, instead of the four it had elsewhere on the spur. The market (London’s original fruit and vegetable market, predating Covent Garden by centuries) was able to resist further expansion by referring to its 1550 royal charter and by a 1754 Act of Parliament that forbids it to use its property for any purpose other than a market. These ancient rights even blocked an attempted compulsory purchase order initiated by British Rail as it prepared for the launch of Thameslink services over the route in 1988. Only recently has the impasse been resolved, and the lines are now being widened as part of the Thameslink 2000 project.

Today a rather basic commuter station that is busy only during rush hours, Cannon Street was originally quite an impressive terminus, with a fine arched roof and a grand hotel similar to the one that still exists at Charing Cross. Unfortunately the City Terminus Hotel, as it was called, was not a success and later became offices. It was bombed in 1941, but the building survived until 1963. (My uncle remembers working in the 1950s in an office carved out of the former ballroom, with mirrors still in place on the walls). The station's arched roof was dismantled in 1958, giving the riverside towers that once framed it a rather odd look today.

The arched roof at Charing Cross met a more notorious fate. At 3.30pm on 5 December 1905 a loud crack was heard and it was noticed that one of the main roof girders had come loose. The station was evacuated and 15 minutes later the whole roof came down, killing five workmen and a bookstore vendor, and demolishing part of a neighbouring theatre. The roof was replaced with a more basic ridge and furrow roof, which lasted until the Embankment Place office building was built over the station in the late 1980s.

More sturdy construction went into Hungerford Bridge - the bridge crossing the river to Charing Cross, which now has the Golden Jubilee footbridges either side. Take a look at it the next time you cross the river (or see the photo in The sparks effect). A sturdy, if workaday, piece of Victorian engineering, it has withstood the constant pounding of heavy trains for over 140 years without complaint. The brick piers of this bridge, incidentally, originally carried a suspension footbridge designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, which is why there is a footway today. The chains of the demolished suspension bridge were used to complete the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol.

The route from London Bridge to Charing Cross was always a bottleneck, however – with just two tracks instead of four where it crossed Borough Market, leading to knock-on effects if there were delays to any particular service. Congestion got worse after Thameslink services started in 1988. One problem is that the market (London’s original fruit and vegetable market, predating Covent Garden by centuries), had ancient rights dating back to its 1550 royal charter, and by a 1754 Act of Parliament was forbidden to use its property for any purpose other than a market. These ancient rights frustrated attempts to expand the line, though some way round this impasse was evidently found, as the lines are now being widened as part of the Thameslink 2000 project.

With the other railway companies now able to reach both the West End and City, the only one left out was the London & South Western. It tried to solve the problem by building a link from its Waterloo terminus to the South Eastern lines at Waterloo East (originally Waterloo Junction) running its trains by this route into Cannon Street. But the two companies were continually squabbling over whose trains had priority and the link was not much used. The disused railway bridge for this link is still there, spanning Waterloo Road and now used as a storage space. The ghost of it lives on, perhaps, in the fact that tickets to London Terminals are not swallowed up by Waterloo's automatic ticket barriers, as they are at other London terminals such as Victoria.

The link to Waterloo East was not just disfunctional - it also split Waterloo into two and made it a disjointed station, with various clusters of platforms in various locations. It was widely regarded as the most confusing of the London termini by the Victorians, and was memorably lampooned for this in Jerome K Jerome's comic novel Three Men in a Boat. In the end, in 1898, the company built what is now the Waterloo & City Line to give it access to the City, which was later operated by British Rail and only transferred to the London Underground network in 1994. Shortly afterwards it embarked on a monumental rebuilding of Waterloo which took from 1900 to 1922 and gave us the magnificent station we have today.

As mentioned above, the London, Chatham and Dover Railway opened its City link in 1864, building a line north from Herne Hill to Blackfriars. Never as grand as the other London termini, this station nevertheless had big ambitions. Stones from the facade of the station, still preserved to this day, show all the destinations that could be reached from it in its heyday - not just Margate, Ramsgate and Canterbury, but also Frankfurt, Paris, Vienna, Geneva, Dresden, Florence – and even St Petersburg. All of these were reached via the LCDR’s lines to Dover and their express ferries to Calais. A portion of all LCDR mainline trains – to Dover and other places on its network – started on the Blackfriars spur, and were joined to Victoria services at Herne Hill.

The station has a complicated history. The original Blackfriars station opened on the south side of the river in 1864 under the name Blackfriars Bridge. There is a fine picture of it (see top of page) in the pedestrian subway that carries the Thames Path under Blackfriars Road. Some remains of it – a brick structure with arches – can also be seen just a little way to the south down Blackfriars Road, on the left before the intersection with Southwark Street.

The company soon built a line across the river, however, and opened a Ludgate Hill station (near where City Thameslink is now) in 1865. Beyond this the line linked up via a tunnel at Snow Hill to the new Metropolitan Line at Farringdon, which had opened in 1863. This created the only south-north line for mainline railways across London, and it was much in demand for both passenger and freight services. That in turn created a problem for the LCDR in that Ludgate Hill became very congested. To ease the problem it created a branch line to a new terminus at Holborn Viaduct, opened in 1874.

Just to confuse matters, in 1886 the LCDR built another bridge across the river (the one in use today) and opened another station – the current Blackfriars, but known as St Pauls until 1937. This was only a stone’s throw from Ludgate Hill, but for some reason both stations continued to operate until 1929, when Ludgate Hill was closed.

By this time the Snow Hill tunnel linking north and south had also fallen into disuse - it ceased to be used after the First World War. It was this tunnel that was reopened in 1988 to create the Thameslink services. Holborn Viaduct limped on - a strange station with no roof in its latter days - until 1990, when it was replaced by City Thameslink.

The last act in this saga came when freight traffic declined in the 1960s, leading to the original 1864 railway bridge being closed in 1971 and part demolished in 1985. Its red pillars still remain, however, and on the one at the southern end of the bridge you can still see the proud crest of the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, now beautifully repainted (see photo on Bitter Competition page).

(Incidentally, you might think this crest looks rather magnificent, but eminent Victoria art critic John Ruskin disagreed: “The entire invention of the designer seems to have exhausted itself in exaggerating to an enormous size a weak form of iron nut, and conveying the information upon it, in large letters, that it belongs to the London, Chatham & Dover Railway,” he fulminated.)

The South Eastern Railway also had a Blackfriars station, which was situated on its line between London Bridge and Waterloo East, about 400 metres to the south of Blackfriars Bridge. This only lasted four years – from 1864 to 1868 – until Waterloo Junction (now Waterloo East) opened to replace it, but is worth mentioning because its name is still clearly visible under the railway bridge across the road from Southwark tube station (see photo on Introduction page: the Charing Cross Railway named in the photo was the company created to raise money for the extension, which was inevitably taken over by South Eastern once the line opened).

One other relic of the South Eastern Railway is just down the road from London Bridge, at 84 Tooley Street, where you can still see the company’s name proudly carved into the stonework of its former offices – a strange wedge of a building, attached to the side of the elevated track. See South East to Dover for a photo of this.

© Peter Conway 2010-11 • All Rights Reserved

A more rational railway

2010-01-16T08:25:00.025Z

The Waterloo station we see today
dates from 1922

The rivalry between the South Eastern and Chatham (see Bitter competition – and its benefits) gave us lots of alternative routes, but many of them are rather indirect and slow. So what might a more rational railway network look like?

For an example, one only has to look to the London and South Western Railway – today’s South West Trains franchise – whose initial line from London to Southampton opened in 1840. Its network is much more logical, proceeding directly south west to Woking, splitting into Southampton and Portsmouth branches there, with the Southampton branch going on to Basingstoke, and a Salisbury line splitting off from it there. All of these places continue to have fast and direct train services to London.

Having said that, the choice of Southampton as the initial destination for the railway was a bit surprising at the time – Portsmouth might have been a more obvious choice, as it was a larger port, and Britain’s main naval base. But one key aim of the company was to provide an alternative route for freight being carried by sea from the developing port of Southampton to London. (A canal had originally been proposed to carry this traffic).

This focus on freight also governed the company's choice of Nine Elms – near Vauxhall station today – as its initial terminus: it was a good place to tranship cargo to and from the River Thames. In 1848 it moved to Waterloo, however (though the present station dates from 1922: see Terminus wars).

The London & South Western also had ambitions to drive a line to Bristol, and that was why it chose a northerly route through Woking and Basingstoke (the one just a village and the other a small town before the coming of the railways), rather than the more obvious route via Guildford, Farnham and Alton - a route with larger intermediate towns and richer farmland, which is the way an early 19th century road traveller would have gone. In the event, before the Bristol line could get off the drawing board, the Great Western Railway had proposed its more direct route to Bristol - the one we are all familiar with now - so that part of the plan was never realised.

The sea freight interests of the company are evident in the company’s initial name - the Southampton, London and Branch Railway and Dock Company. It was created in 1830, but took till 1834 to start construction and until 1840 to reach Southampton. (Contrast this with the South Eastern Railway and its rapid construction of lines in the following decade).

By 1848 the line had been extended from Southampton to Dorchester, but this bypassed Bournemouth (which was just a village) and instead went via Ringwood. It was not until 1865 that this line was extended south to Weymouth, and later still that a loop was built to take in Bournemouth. This is now the main line, with the Ringwood loop having closed in the Beeching cuts of the 1960s.

Portsmouth was initially served by a branch line from Eastleigh to Gosport, which is on the opposite side of the harbour to Portsmouth, opening in 1841. This is the line that Botley on the Netley to Botley walk is on. The more direct route to Portsmouth that we use today evolved slowly over the next 18 years: Guildford was reached in 1845 and Godalming in 1849, with the hilly section past Haslemere and Petersfield to Havant being added by 1858.

The line from Woking to Farnham and Alton opened in 1852, with a link to Winchester added in 1865. This latter section closed in 1973 and part of it is now the steam-operated Mid Hants Railway aka The Watercress Line. (Two other lines also diverged from Alton once - see Lines we lost).

Meanwhile in 1854, the LSWR opened its line from Basingstoke to Andover (passing Overton and Whitchurch), and in 1857 it was extended to Salisbury. This was just the start of a long foray into the west of England, that took it to Exeter in 1860, and beyond in the 1880s. The LSWR had purchased the Bodmin & Wadebridge Railway on the north coast of Cornwall as early as 1846, but didn’t manage to connect it to its network until 1899, via a line through the remoter parts of north Cornwall.

Apart from the summer holiday months, when the LSWR could run the grandly named Atlantic Coast Express along it, this line never made money. It became known as “the withered arm” and to nobody's great surprise closed in 1967.

© Peter Conway 2010 • All Rights Reserved

Thames and Chilterns

2010-01-16T08:24:00.029Z

First time travellers on the branch line from Maidenhead to Marlow are often surprised when the train reverses direction at Bourne End. It is easy to assume that you have somehow missed your stop and that the train is now heading back to Maidenhead. But no, the train soon curves away to the west and across the floodplains of the Thames towards Marlow.

Why does the train reverse direction in this way? The answer is that the line to Bourne End once went on to High Wycombe, and Marlow was just a branch line off it. This line was in fact only the second line to be built up into Chiltern Hills - the first being the London to Birmingham line that passed through Berkhamsted and Tring in 1838 (see Beginnings). When the Maidenhead to High Wycombe line was built, there were no Chiltern lines out of Marylebone and no Metropolitan Line out of Baker Street. It was to be thirty years before the High Wycombe line had any competition.

A detail of the canopy at Paddington

The Wycombe Railway opened in 1854, nominally as an independent company, but with the intention of being taken over by the Great Western Railway, as indeed happened in 1867. It was one of several branch lines off the GWR's mainline out of Paddington: the one to Henley opened three years later, for example. The Wycombe line ran via Cookham and was built in single track, in classic branch line style, as it remains to this day.

High Wycombe was not the terminus for long. In 1862 the line was extended to Princes Risborough becoming the first railway to reach that town. (Saunderton station between the two was not opened until 1901 and in 1913 was burnt down by suffragettes, one of several similar attacks, apparently.)

Once past Princes Risborough, the line was liberated from the confines of the Chilterns and spread out in several directions across the flat plains beyond. In 1863 a line was built to Aylesbury, again making this the first rail route to that town: this the line that passes through Monks Risborough and Little Kimble, and once again it is still single track. Another line went to Thame, and by 1864 had linked up to a junction on the GWR line between Didcot and Oxford (which is only 23 miles from Princes Risborough), and there was a short line south westwards to Chinnor and Watlington, opened in 1872 (see Lines we lost).

Rather surprisingly given that it was quite a substantial town, the branch line to Marlow did not open until 1873, 19 years after the Wycombe Railway had started services. It was built by the grandly titled Great Marlow Railway Company - a vehicle for local investors. Right from the start the Great Western Railway operated the branch, though it did not actually buy it until 1897. The train on this route was known as the ‘Marlow Donkey’ (a term of affection or an unflattering reference to its speed?) which explains the name of the pub near Marlow station today.

The Great Western Railway is of course one of the most celebrated of Victorian railway companies, and it is the only one to have kept its identity intact until the present day. In the 'grouping' of 1923, when the Victorian companies were merged into four large ones at the urging of the government (see The golden age of the railways), the GWR nevertheless kept its name and network, and merely added some other minor railways. From 1947, under nationalisation, it was the British Railways Western Region, but after privatisation in 1996-7, the franchise is once again known by its original Victorian name. Parts of its infrastructure were even recognised in 1999 as being UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The GWR’s chief engineer and creative genius was the famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Much has been written about his various engineering marvels, but for our purposes two are worth mentioning. One is Paddington Station itself. The present structure opened in 1854, replacing an earlier station to its immediate north west, and though it is rather grimy with diesel fumes (it is the only long-distance mainline out of London not to be electrified) it is worth taking a look next time you pass through it at some of the wonderful details of the buildings and canopy (see photo). There is an opulence and confidence about these that you find in no other major terminus.

The other point to note is that Brunel built the main line out of Paddington to be as straight, and flat as is humanly possible: this was to make his trains fast, though fact that he built the line to a wide 7ft gauge (ie track width: as opposed to 4ft 8.25 inches that was standard on the rest of the rail network) also meant he needed to avoid tight curves. The wider gauge was more expensive to build, however - Brunel was an engineering genius, not a business one - and made connection with other railway companies' lines impossible. In the end the GWR bowed to the inevitable and changed its tracks to standard gauge. The Wycombe branch was converted in one week in August 1870, though some GWR lines remained broad gauge until 1892.

Brunel’s obsession with keeping his railway line flat can be seen in the Maidenhead railway bridge across the Thames, which we often pass over on the way to walks, and which can be seen close up on the Maidenhead to Marlow walk. Opened in 1839, this has the two flattest brick arches ever built – 128 feet or 39 metres wide, but only 24 feet or 7 metres high - and was built this way to keep gradients on this stretch of line down to just 1 foot in 1,320. This bridge is the one that features in the famous 1844 Turner painting Rain, Steam and Speed, now in the National Gallery.

Maidenhead was the first terminus of the Great Western when it started services from Paddington in 1838, though the original station for the town was the one now called Taplow, on the London side of the bridge: it was not until 1878 that the current Maidenhead station opened. The line was swiftly expanded westwards to Twyford (1839), Reading (1840) and on via Pangborne and Goring, where it passes through the Chilterns to Swindon (all reached in 1840) and Bristol (1841).

An early branch line was the one from Reading to Hungerford, via Aldermaston, Newbury and Kintbury, all reached in 1847, which carried on to Bedwyn and Devises in 1862. Another line opened from Reading to Basingstoke in 1848, passing through Mortimer, which is apparently a fine example of one of Brunel’s ‘chalet-style’ rural stations. Both lines were built to keep the London & South Western Railway out of GWR territory.

The Newbury and Devises route was eventually to provide a shortcut to Plymouth, which is the normal main line route to this day (and is a reason why you need to take great care crossing the railway line at the end of the Kintbury to Great Bedwyn walk), but this did not open until 1906. Until then the Great Western was known not just as “God’s Wonderful Railway” but also as the “Great Way Round” because all its trains to Exeter went via Bristol (as a few still do). The London & South Western had a more direct route via Salisbury (see A more rational railway) but it has always been a slower one. The Great Way Round jibe was also a reference to the GWR’s indirect route to Wales, where trains had to go via Gloucester until 1886, when the Severn Tunnel finally opened: the fast line we use today via Bristol Parkway did not open till 1901, however.

Back in the Chilterns, the routes we use today came relatively late, perhaps because of the hilly nature of the terrain or its lack of population. The Metropolitan Railway was extended as early as 1868 to a point near the current Finchley Road, but under Sir Edward Watkin as chairman (who was also chairman of the South Eastern Railway) it then went to West Hampstead in 1879, Harrow in 1880, Pinner in 1885, Rickmansworth in 1887, and Chorleywood, Chalfont Road (now Chalfont & Latimer) and Chesham in 1889.

The original plan was to continue from there to Berkhamsted (which is just four miles away to the north east) and Tring, but Watkin also had a plan to run trains from the Midlands to the Channel Tunnel (see Bitter Competition), and instead the line was extended from Chalfont Road to Amersham and Aylesbury, via Great Missenden and Wendover in 1892.

The previous year the Metropolitan had also taken over the Aylesbury & Buckingham Railway, which had a line out to Verney Junction, a tiny village near what is now Milton Keynes, where there was a junction with the Oxford to Cambridge railway line, and a branch line to Buckingham. A couple of forlorn overgrown platforms can still be seen at this unlikely rural terminus of the Metropolitan, some 50 miles from London. Passenger services on the line were withdrawn in 1936, while Metropolitan trains from Amersham to Aylesbury (which were still steam-hauled north of Rickmansworth) ended in 1961.

Watkin’s aim in extending the Metropolitan Railway out to Verney Junction was pretty obvious, and by now the company’s shareholders were getting wind of it, and starting to complain that this was not a core business for a London railway. Nothing daunted, the irrepressible Watkin already had another idea for linking the Midlands and his proposed Channel Tunnel.

Among his many roles was being chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, and he came up with a scheme to drive that south from Nottingham towards Aylesbury to link with the Metropolitan Railway at Quainton Road, a stop between Aylesbury and Verney Junction. There were already three other main lines from London to the Midlands – including the flashy Midland Railway, which was itself regarded as an upstart when it had driven south from its Derbyshire heartland and opened the grandiose St Pancras Station in 1868 - and so this new scheme was widely mocked. The Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire soon acquired the nickname of the “Money Sunk & Lost”, and when renamed the Great Central Railway in 1897, it became the “Gone Completely”. This proved prescient, as the company never paid a dividend to its shareholders.

Watkins got his scheme approved by Parliament in 1894, but then had a stroke and had to retire. Nevertheless, his line got built. It shared Metropolitan tracks from Aylesbury into London via Amersham and Harrow, and the original plan was for a terminus combining the new services with those of the Metropolitan Line at Baker Street. But this met with opposition, and so instead the track turned aside into a new station, which eventually came to be sited at Marylebone. (There was another site considered further north. In Aberdeen Place NW8, about a kilometre to the north west of the current station there was until recently a grand old pub called Crocker's Folly, which was built in expectation of railway customers who never came. The building has now been taken over by a restaurant.)

In the same year that Marylebone opened - 1899 - the Great Central and Great Western jointly opened a link from High Wycombe to a point near South Ruislip station, taking in Beaconsfield and Gerrards Cross. This is the other main route out of Marylebone to this day. The Great Western used this route for its mainline to Birmingham Snow Hill, and a link to the line from Paddington still exists, though it is only used during engineering works. These more direct lines to High Wycombe made the Bourne End to High Wycombe route redundant, and it closed in 1970, though as noted we still use the rest of the branch to go to Marlow.

Marylebone was the very last London terminus to be built, and it had grand ambitions - as can be seen from the Landmark Hotel across the road from it – originally the Great Central Hotel. The station itself also looks rather grand from the front, though the poet John Betjeman likened its appearance to “a branch public library in a Manchester suburb”.

When you get inside, however, you find four platforms tucked away at one end, and in fact the station never had more than this, even though it was originally planned to have ten. Despite its grandiose name, the Great Central never attracted many passengers and even in its heyday had just 11 trains a day, seven of them express trains to Manchester. The rest of the land behind the terminal was eventually sold off to developers, and when the station wanted two new platforms in 2006 they had to be built awkwardly at the far end of platform four. The hotel, which had never flourished, became the headquarters of British Railways in 1948.

The station nearly closed altogether. After 1960, it lost its long distance services to Nottingham and beyond, and in the Beeching cuts a few years later it lost any services north of Aylesbury. In the 1980s it was proposed to split its remaining services between the Metropolitan Line and Paddington, and turn the site into a bus station.

But since the early 1990s everything has turned around. Train services into Marylebone have increased and the hotel, which re-opened in 1991, has gone from strength to strength. Chiltern Railways has been one of the big success stories of the 1996 rail privatisation, even re-starting services to Birmingham Snow Hill on the old Great Western main line (part of which is a line from Princes Risborough to Bicester that was opened jointly by the Great Western and Great Central in 1906).

There are also now plans to re-open services between Marylebone and Oxford (announced 2010 and due to open in 2013). These will use not the old GWR line from Princes Risborough to Thame and Oxford mentioned earlier in this section – that line closed in 1963 – but a new spur off the current Birmingham route at Bicester, which will come into the north of Oxford.

If built, this will be the first new link between London and a major town in over a century, and surely a resounding riposte to all those in the 1960s and 1970s who thought that railways were a thing of the past (see The controversial Dr Beeching).

© Peter Conway 2010-11 • All Rights Reserved

The controversial Dr Beeching

2010-01-16T08:24:00.027Z

The Horsham to Guildford line today

Look in the railway section of any bookshop, and you can find whole shelves full of nostalgic books about lost rural branch lines. The villain in these books is Dr Richard Beeching, who was appointed chairman of the board of the nationalised British Railways in 1961, and who in 1963 published a report entitled The Reshaping of British Railways, whose contents have been argued about ever since.

Not a railway man – in itself a crime in the eyes of railway enthusiasts then and since – Beeching had in fact been technical director at chemical conglomerate ICI before being offered the British Railways post. His brief was to find a way to make the railways commercially viable, and he proposed to do it by closing 5,000 of the 17,830 miles of track, and a third of the 7000 stations.

His idea was that proper investment could then be focused on what was left – a fact which is often ignored by his critics. Even at the time, Beeching was aware that his cuts would be controversial. “I suppose I will always be looked on as the axe-man, but it was surgery, not mad chopping,” he said in later life.

To be fair to Beeching, the idea that some lines needed to be closed was neither new nor confined to the UK. Almost every country with a developed railway network was trimming its lines at the time. France shut huge numbers of rural branch lines, and in the US the railways practically disappeared as a viable form of passenger transport. So the cuts in Britain were not unique, and nor were they the most savage.

Beeching’s report was also met on publication not with criticism but with praise. “Unanswerable. Dr Beeching has shown brilliantly how the railways may be made to pay,” said The Times, quoted by Matthew Engel in his book Eleven Minutes Late. The Daily Mirror praised the plan as “Beeching’s blockbuster”.

The plain fact was that in the early 1960s, railways seemed to be on the wrong side of history. The rise of cars and buses had already eroded passenger numbers in the 1930s, but had then been interrupted by the Second World War. For a period after the war, car ownership also remained low, but in the late 1950s it took off. Road transport looked like the future in 1963.

The M1 motorway had opened in 1959, and it was regarded as modern and efficient, while by contrast, railways, battered by the war, were tatty, slow and old-fashioned. It probably did not help that Ernest Marples, the Conservative transport minister who appointed Beeching, was emphatically pro-road, having made his fortune by road construction (including being one of the main contractors on the M1).

Road was not just taking over passenger travel. A key contributor to the income of the Victorian railway companies had been freight, with rail the only viable method for transporting most items to most places. This was particularly true on branch lines, though even London termini had large freight operations, now long forgotten. St Pancras, for example, was built at first floor level to allow enormous warehousing for beer and other items to be built beneath it (this is the area now occupied by the new Eurostar station check-in and associated shops). Meanwhile, Paddington had a vast freight yard just to the north of it, which has now been redeveloped into flats and offices, and the same is now happening to the former goods yards at Kings Cross. Much of the 2012 Olympic site was also once freight marshalling yards.

In rural locations, the station was an absolute lifeline, the route by which all cargo arrived. Pluckley, for example – now a classic un-staffed rural station, apart from a ticket office open for a few hours on weekday mornings – would have had in Victorian times a stationmaster, two clerks, two signalmen, two porters who doubled as shunters, and a plate layer, or lengthsman, who maintained the track. All but the last would have been primarily dealing with freight – booking it in and out, loading or unloading wagons, and shunting them in and out of sidings that have now long disappeared.

So important were railways to freight that they were by law common carriers – that is, they had to carry whatever was presented to them. But as Christian Wolmar points out in his excellent history of the railways, Fire & Steam (see Further reading), by the 1920s truck firms were springing up which had no such restrictions and could pick off the must lucrative business. Many of these firms had been started by First World War soldiers who had learned to drive in the army and acquired surplus military trucks on the cheap at the end of the war. Meanwhile, the railway companies were forbidden by the government from getting into the road haulage business, except for short distance feeds to their stations.

British Railways (which was created in 1947 when the remaining four railway companies were nationalised) was not relieved of its common carriage obligation until 1957. By that time, the decline in rail freight had become a rout. Under a government modernisation plan, British Railways had unfortunately invested £85 million (about £1.6bn in today’s money) in the construction of thirty massive freight yards around the country in the 1950s. This money was largely wasted.

The loss of freight meant that many rural branch lines were no longer viable, and it didn’t help that railway costs were also rising. In the Victorian era working on the railway was a prestige job – a stationmaster was an important local figure – but that also meant that staff could be made to work horrendous hours – often from early in the morning till late at night, six days a week. From the 1890s onwards, unionisation changed all that, and also increased wages. The first national rail strike was in 1911, and there were two more in 1924 and 1926. Running a railway was no longer cheap.

One last factor was that the competition between all the many Victorian railway companies. The British Railways Pre-Grouping Atlas (see Further reading) lists a staggering 150 different names, though some of these were joint ventures between railway companies already on the list. Such competition had produced both duplication (two companies operating similar routes) and lines built largely to keep other railway companies out (see A miraculous survivor). Now the railways were under one nationalised entity, it made sense to eliminate some of these.

All these factors had been building throughout the twentieth century, and as early as 1914 they had resulted in 200 miles of line – mainly special freight lines – being closed. According to Wolmar, between the two world wars another 1,240 miles, or six percent of the total network closed, and of the 19,414 miles British Railways inherited in 1947, a further 1,500 miles had been closed by 1962.

Beeching’s plan was based on what seemed like logical analysis at the time. He did a traffic survey which found that a quarter of the fare income generated by the railways came from just 34 stations, or 0.5 percent of the total. Half of the 17,830 miles of line carried just four percent of the traffic. At his own local station – East Grinstead – which at that time had connections to Three Bridges and Tunbridge Wells as well as to London (see A miraculous survivor), he found that 950 passengers daily went to London, 300 to Three Bridges and 25 to Tunbridge Wells. Put like this, it seemed obvious to shut the line to Tunbridge Wells. (A joke at the time said that Beeching had kept open the line he used each day to get to work, and shut all the rest).

Later critics of the Beeching report have pointed out that the very same argument could be made about the road network, however. Rural roads carry a tiny percentage of the national total, but no one argues that they should be allowed to revert to cart tracks as a consequence. Instead, they are seen as vital infrastructure, which the government must invest in and maintain. Yet if government money supports the railways, it is seen as a subsidy.

Beeching’s other failings, as Wolmar points out, were to ignore network effects – how much traffic branch lines contribute to main lines – and not to look at the external cost benefits of a railway line. Does it stimulate the economy, create jobs in the towns it serves? Does it reduce deaths from road accidents and so save the health service money? Today we take this kind of argument for granted. For example, Brighton, which has a fast train to London, is more prosperous than Hastings, which does not. As it was, Beeching cut important towns off from the railway just to save a few miles of track.

Despite this, many of the lines Beeching closed probably did need closing. It has been estimated that of the 6,000 miles of line that shut in the 1960s, 4,800 should have been shut, however emotionally attached some people were to them. The 1,200 that should not have been would probably include the Great Central line from Marylebone to the Midlands (see Thames and Chilterns), which was the only line in the country with tunnels big enough to take continental freight trains, and the route around the top of Dartmoor from Exeter to Plymouth.

The latter line was shut because the existing route – Brunel’s dramatic railway around the Devon coast at Dawlish – was considered sufficient. But running beside the sea, Brunel’s line causes endless corrosion problems in locomotives today. Closing the line from Oxford to Cambridge – which ran through the just-created city of Milton Keynes – was also not the brightest of ideas: the line to Bow Brickhill and Woburn Sands is a small part of this former route that still remains open.

Still, it could easily have been a lot worse. Beeching actually produced a second report in 1965, suggesting reducing the railway to 7,500 miles. For his pains, he was dismissed by the new Labour government of Harold Wilson, which nevertheless continued with the cuts in his original plan, despite having campaigned against them in opposition. The last line closures did not finish till the early 1970s.

Even in the 1980s there was a threat to close the Settle to Carlisle line in the north of England because one of its viaducts needed replacing, and in 1982 the Serpell Report presented six options to Margaret Thatcher’s government, one of which would have cut the 10,370 miles of railway still left to just 1,630 – London to Glasgow, Newcastle, Cardiff, Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Brighton, Dover and Norwich, with even the majority of London commuter lines being axed.

Thankfully, the report caused a furore that even Margaret Thatcher could not ignore, and the railway network has been left alone since. As it happens, 1982 also marked the low point in passenger numbers, which have been climbing ever since and are now back at 1920 levels. Whatever one thinks of privatisation - which happened in 1996-7, creating the current franchise system - it is impossible to imagine a Beeching or Serpell being taken seriously now. Railways are finally seen as part of the future.

© Peter Conway 2010-11 • All Rights Reserved

The sparks effect

2010-01-16T08:22:00.039Z

Charing Cross today: sturdy Victorian bridge,
modern electric trains

If Beeching made some poor choices about closing lines (see The controversial Dr Beeching), something else that ought to have given him pause for thought was the experience of the lines to the south of London. If you look at a map of the UK rail network pre- and post-Beeching, you will see that the south east suffered relatively few railway closures. Amazingly we can still travel by train to rural spots such as Southease, Wadhurst, Yalding, Edenbridge and Hever that would surely have lost their railway service had they been anywhere else in the country.

The reason for this is twofold. One is the influence of London, and people travelling to work and shop there. Today, 70 percent of rail journeys in Britain either start or end in London, and this is surely why such rural stations as Stonegate and Pluckley not only still exist, but have hourly services to London.

But the story is not that simple, because there is a reason that a culture of travelling up to London by train developed in the south east, and that is because Southern – the railway company that absorbed the London & South Western, the London, Brighton & South Coast, and the South Eastern & Chatham in 1923 (see The golden age of the railways) – was a pioneer of electrification.

It is a shock to realise that to this day the network to the south of London, along with those into Liverpool Street and Fenchurch Street, are only ones in the country to be (almost) completely electrified. Elsewhere, the main lines – east coast, west coast – and a few suburban routes are electrified, but other routes are still operated by diesels. The Great Western and Chiltern Railways are both still entirely diesel-operated.

The first electrified railway in the country (and indeed, the world) was the strange little Volks Railway along the sea front in Brighton, which opened in 1883. (It was created by Magnus Volks, in case you are wondering about the German name). His technology inspired the City & South London Railway – which ran between the City and Clapham South and is the ancestor of the Northern Line and indeed the whole deep tube system of London Underground.

Originally supposed to be cable-hauled, the City & South London switched to electric locomotives just before opening in 1890, becoming the first proper passenger railway in the country to use them. It was followed in 1898 by the Waterloo & City line (built by the London & South Western Railway – see A more rational railway). The first overground railway company to electrify was the London, Brighton & South Coast in 1909, and its first electrified line was the strange little loop line from Victoria to London Bridge via Peckham, which still exists today.

The LBSCR had electrified all its suburban lines by 1925, but they used overhead lines (the system used elsewhere in the UK, and indeed the world) rather than the third rail system we now have. When Southern was formed in 1925, however, it opted for the third rail system, which had been used on some suburban lines by the London & South Western. It was cheaper to build and less intrusive on the landscape, but is now generally regarded as the inferior technology. (True, overhead lines can get blown down, but the third rail is not so clever in snow, when it gets covered over or iced up, as we found out in January 2010.)

This decision meant all the LBSCR suburban lines had to be converted to third rail, but Southern – under the dynamic leadership of Sir Herbert Walker – made up for this by electrifying the lines out of London at a great pace between the wars. Electrification reached Guildford and Dorking in 1925, for example, and in 1930 it got to Gravesend and Windsor. Reigate and Three Bridges followed in 1932, Brighton in 1933, Seaford in 1935, Bexhill, Eastbourne, Hastings, Haslemere and Portsmouth in 1937.

Wherever electrification reached, passengers experienced what was called “the sparks effect”. Electric trains only needed one driver (instead of a driver, fireman and someone to clean their boilers at the end of the day as with steam locomotives). They did not need to be refuelled and watered, and did not need to turn around on turntables. They could accelerate faster and brake more sharply than steam trains.

In fact, Walker estimated he could run two and a half times as many electric trains for the same cost as the old steam service, and Southern responded by increasing the frequency of service on its electrified lines. It is from this era that we get the now standard idea of running trains at the same time every hour. Each time a line was electrified, Southern produced a proud new timetable, with modern designer covers and the words “Brighton Electric” or “Portsmouth Electric” blazed across them.

Electrification worked. Passenger numbers increased, and a culture arose that it was quicker to take the train to London than to drive. Commuter traffic doubled between the First and Second World Wars, and people began to travel in from Chatham, Alton or even Portsmouth, encouraged by Southern publicity. The company got ever more daring in its promotions, for example producing a brochure in the 1930s called “Evenings by the Sea” – the idea being that you went down to Brighton after work in the summer, or that you lived in Brighton and worked in London. It produced walking books for ramblers (see The Golden Age of Railways).

In short, Southern created the modern railway we use today, and as a general rule it was lines that had been electrified that escaped the Beeching cuts, while those that had not were closed (see Lines we lost and A miraculous survivor). As late as the 1990s, Network South East (as all the railways around London were known at the time) was just about profitable, along with the Intercity routes. (Under privatisation, it needs lots of government subsidy, but that is another story.)

In the rest of Britain, steam still ruled, however. This sounds illogical until you realise that electricity grids were nothing like they are now in the 1930s, and diesel trains used oil, still a new fuel and one only found in exotic parts of the world. Countries that did electrify their lines tended to be ones with steep gradients or lots of hydro-electricity (such as Switzerland and Sweden).

As it happened, Britain’s reliance on coal to fuel its trains, and its irrational network, proved invaluable in World War II when oil was a precious resource and German bombers tried to destroy key railway lines. But, as Christian Wolmar points out in his book Fire & Steam (see Further reading), by the 1950s, the penny should have been starting to drop.

If only all the money spent on freight yards in that decade (see The controversial Dr Beeching) had been spent on electrification instead. As it was, in defiance of the electrifying zeal in other parts of Europe, the nationalised British Railways built some 2000 steam locomotives between 1948 and 1960, all of which were to be scrapped by the mid 1960s.

Only rarely were the lessons of the sparks effect applied elsewhere on the network. There is a famous isolated example where a local manager put diesel railcars onto the line between Ipswich and Lowestoft and, by proving it could be viable with these cheaper and easier to operate trains, saved it from being axed. But this example was also ignored in by Beeching.

And though the west coast main line (London to Manchester and Glasgow) was electrified in the 1960s, as were the lines out of Liverpool Street, it was not until the late 1980s that the east coast mainline (London to Edinburgh) got the same treatment. The Great Western lines out of Paddington still have not been electrified to this day (the Heathrow line excepted), which surely must be tormenting the ghost of its visionary, engineering genius of a founder, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

© Peter Conway 2010-11 • All Rights Reserved

Lines we lost – and ones we didn’t

2010-01-16T08:22:00.031Z

It is fun to dream about what might have been, and while the Beeching cuts of the 1960s were kind to the south east’s rail network, for reasons outlined in the previous section, we did nevertheless lose some routes which might have been very useful for walkers. Equally, there were a few miraculous survivals.

As mentioned in The controversial Dr Beeching, lines were already being closed in Britain in the early twentieth century, and the south east was no exception. Some early closures resulted from the alliance between the South Eastern Railway and the London, Chatham & Dover Railway in 1899 (see Bitter Competition). That resulted in the SER’s line through Rochester and Chatham being closed in 1911, since it simply ran parallel to the LCDR track, the one we use today.

A map in Victoria station
of the LBSCR lines at their height

For similar reasons the SER line between Ramsgate and Margate was closed in 1926 – it was more direct, but avoided Broadstairs, which the LCDR line did not. A spur line to Ramsgate Harbour also closed at the same time - a pity, as the harbour station was situated right by the port and beach, whereas the current Ramsgate station is a mile or more from the centre.

More useful for walkers might have been the railway that ran from Brighton to Devil’s Dyke (the lunch stop on the Hassocks to Upper Beeding walk), which opened in 1887 and closed in 1939. The problem with this line was that it stopped half a mile from the summit, while buses had no such problems. Part of the former track is now a very pleasant cycleway, the happy fate of many disused rail lines.

World War II then intervened, and one result was that in 1940 the line from Canterbury to Folkestone via the Elham Valley was taken over by the army. It seems that the locals soon got used to the replacement bus service offered because the line only re-opened to the public briefly in 1946 before closing again in 1947. Even now it is not difficult to go by train from Canterbury to Folkestone, but this line covered a pretty corner of Kent - stations included Bishopsbourne, Barnham, Elham and Lyminge - that our walking routes currently don’t really access.

More closures followed in the 1950s, some of lines that should never have been built in the first place. A good example is the Kent & East Sussex Light Railway – the line that is now resurrected as a steam railway from Bodiam Castle. This line started life in 1900 as the Rother Valley Railway from Robertsbridge to Tenterden, and got its present name in 1905 when it was extended from Tenterden to Headcorn.

Quite what the economic purpose of this line was is hard to say. Apart from Tenterden, its stations were in remote countryside, and in some cases are situated miles from the villages they are designed to serve (eg Rolvenden, which is actually nearer to Tenterden than to Rolvenden Layne village, or Wittersham Road, which is three miles from Wittersham village).

The Kent & East Sussex was the brainchild of one Colonel Holman Stephens, who built a number of these light railways around the country. Another was the gloriously named Hundred of Manhood and Selsey Tramway, which ran from Chichester to the coast at Selsey, and whose trains are described by Matthew Engel in Eleven Minutes Late (see Further reading) as looking like Model T Fords on rails. Neither line lasted long once road transport took off: the Selsey Tramway closed in 1935, and the Kent & East Sussex in 1954.

Some other lines that closed in the mid 1950s included the Meon Valley Line, which ran from Alton south to Fareham and which had opened as late as 1903. It had been intended as a main line to Gosport, but was never used as such, and closed in 1955. Passing through such villages as West Meon and Droxford, this line served pretty walking territory in the western half of the South Downs, albeit that journey times from London would be about two hours, even today. Another line, linking Alton and Basingstoke, had an even shorter life. It opened in 1901, and closed again during World War 1. It reopened in 1924 due to local pressure, but shut again eight years later.

The South Downs west of Amberley and Arundel are in fact entirely inaccessible by railway these days, which is a pity as they have some stunning scenery. Today we can walk from Haslemere to Midhurst and come back by bus, but once three lines converged on the town.

Midhurst was in fact one of the branches of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway line that splits off from the main line at Three Bridges and carries on to Horsham, which was reached as early as 1848. The line – known as the Mid Sussex Railway – was extended to Billingshurst, Pulborough and Petworth in 1859, and to Midhurst in 1866. In the meantime, in 1863, the line we still use today had been built south from Pulborough to Amberley, Arundel and Littlehampton.

Midhurst was also served from the west by the London & South Western Railway, which opened a branch line from Petersfield in 1864. Meanwhile in 1881 the LBSCR struck south through the heart of the South Downs from Midhurst to Cocking, Singleton, Lavant and Chichester. This Chichester line closed in 1953, the Midhurst to Petersfield line closed in 1955, and the Pulborough to Midhurst followed in two stages from 1964-6. Walkers might lament the loss of all these lines, but especially the route via Cocking, which is surrounded by wonderful downland walks.

It is worth noting that none of these lines was electrified in the 1930s (see The sparks effect) and that is almost certainly what sealed their fate. Two other LBSCR lines that got the chop in the Beeching cuts for this reason, even though on the map they look to be quite useful cross-country connections, are the ones from Horsham to Guildford and from Horsham to Shoreham-by-Sea, which closed in 1965 and 1966 respectively. Contrast their fate with the line from Leatherhead via Dorking to Horsham, an LBSCR route which opened in 1867 and to this day serves remote and rural Holmwood, Ockley and Warnham.

Cycling along the old Horsham to Guildford line today (for photo see The controversial Dr Beeching), one wonders if it all might have been different. Opening in 1865 it branched off the Horsham to Pulborough line at Christ’s Hospital (once a major junction with four platforms) and for a hundred years chugged up via Slinfold, Baynards, Cranleigh and Bramley & Wonersh to Guildford, crossing the Greensand Ridge as it did so. Baynards station on this route is still lovingly maintained to this day in a private garden, looking for all the world as if the last train had just left – a surreal sight. At Cranleigh, platforms remain, and an information poster reveals that, like many branch lines, this one had just six or seven trains a day, with the last one at around 7pm.

The Horsham to Shoreham-by-Sea line also started at Christ’s Hospital, and took in West Grinstead (yes, there is such a place: a tiny village compared to its eastern sister), Partridge Green, Henfield, Steyning and Bramber. Opened between 1858 and 1861, it nevertheless only had ten trains a day by 1910, with just two on Sunday, and the 26 mile journey from Horsham to Brighton took an hour.

The line was considered for electrification, and who knows what might have happened but for the Second World War. As it is, it is now a wonderful walking and cycle route (together with the Horsham to Guildford, it constitutes the Downs Link between the North and South Downs Way), and who is to say that is not a better use of the track?

The next section – A miraculous survivor – considers a whole clutch of other London, Brighton & South Coast lines, some of which survived and some of which didn’t in the 1950s and 1960s, but to finish this section, a brief trot around some other closures.

There was once a South Eastern Railway line from Paddock Wood south to Goudhurst and Hawkshurst – it opened in 1883 and closed in 1961. Much used by hop pickers (working class East Londoners for whom hop picking was a working holiday), it also gave access to a part of the High Weald that is now very hard to reach by public transport. Closure was probably inevitable, however. The difficult terrain meant that the line had to be built in the valley, while the towns were on hilltops. There was a long steep climb from the station at Goudhurst to the town, for example, and Cranbrook, the stop between Goudhurst and Hawkshurst, was two miles from the town.

Elsewhere, there were a whole host of branch lines in the north of Essex and Suffolk which we might well have used for walks had they remained open. The line to Bures and Sudbury (which once went on to Cambridge and Bury St Edmunds) is a lone survivor.

There was also once a line to Westerham (on the Edenbridge to Westerham and Oxted Circular walks) which left the South Eastern Railway mainline at Dunton Green, just north of Sevenoaks. There was fierce local resistance to its closure in 1961, with locals arguing correctly that it could be an important commuter line. Instead, its route became part of the M25. The town continues to be well-served with bus routes, however.

In the Chilterns, a Great Western branch line from Princes Risborough ambled south west along the foot of the Chilterns Escarpment to Chinnor and Watlington, a point four miles north of Stonor on the Henley via Stonor walk. Had it not closed in 1957, it would surely have been as useful to us today as the line from Princes Risborough to Monks Risborough and Little Kimble (see Thames and Chilterns).

Perhaps the saddest closures of all, however, are the ones that occured in the early 1970s, just a few years before attitudes to the railways changed. Invariably these closures happened despite fierce local opposition. An example was the link between Alton and Winchester via Alresford – a proper main line, with double track - that provided an alternative route between London and Southampton, missing out Basingstoke.

Closure of this 16 mile section of track was proposed in 1967, but was vigorously resisted until 1973. The problem with the line was that it had never been electrified, so instead of through trains from London to Winchester via Alton, a shuttle operated between Alton and Winchester, which seemed to be perversely timed not to connect with the London service.

Even before the line was closed, the Mid-Hants Railway was formed to re-open it, but British Rail ripped up the track with indecent haste, and sold land between Winchester and Alton for house building. As the Watercress Line, the Mid-Hants now operates steam trains from Alton to Alresford (having laboriously re-laid the track), but access to the pretty Itchen Valley between Alresford and Winchester via the former station at Itchen Abbas has sadly been lost.

A similar story attended the Wareham to Swanage branch line, which had not even been proposed for closure by Beeching. Why this useful branch to a popular seaside town was considered unviable is a mystery, but it still got the chop in 1972 after a five year battle with protestors, cutting off access not only to the beautiful cliff walks around Swanage, but also to the tourist attraction of Corfe Castle, whose station nestles at the heart of the Purbeck Hills. Once again, however, a steam railway has stepped into the breach, and has nearly completed the task of reconnecting the line to Wareham.

Beeching and those who followed him did not always win, however. One of the lines slated for closure by Beeching was the Ashford to Hastings one (the line that passes Rye), but this delightful little line across Romney Marsh still lives, despite not being electrified. True, in the last few years calls at the admittedly remote station of Winchelsea have been reduced to every two hours, but you can still get an hourly train to Appledore, a station a good walk from the pretty village it serves, and a wonderful example of an old-fashioned branch line station.

There was, incidentally, once a passenger service from Appledore to Lydd, with one branch going to New Romney & Littlestone on Sea and the other to Dungeness. This closed beyond Lydd in 1937 and between Appledore and Lydd in 1967, but the line still remains open to serve the nuclear power stations at Dungeness, which is probably what saved the Ashford to Hastings line too. You can also still get to both New Romney and Dungeness on the minature Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway, opened in 1927 and still going to this day.

© Peter Conway 2010 • All Rights Reserved

A miraculous survivor

2010-01-16T08:21:00.022Z

What would it have been like to travel on a Victorian branch line? You can visit one of the many preserved steam railways up and down the country to get some idea, of course, but these are all careful exercises in nostalgia.

To experience a quiet rural line in the modern era, try travelling on the line from London Bridge to Uckfield, which runs south from Oxted and Hurst Green, through Edenbridge Town and then a series of isolated country stations to Crowborough and Uckfield itself. Get off this line at Hever, Cowden, Ashurst or Eridge, and you have some idea what it must have been like to travel to such deep country halts in the nineteenth century.

The lines between Lewes, Tunbridge Wells
and East Grinstead in their heyday

That this line exists at all is a true miracle, given that many other lines in this area disappeared in the the 1950s and 1960s. The Uckfield line itself has been slated for closure more than once, but somehow survives to this day to provide excellent jumping off points for rural walks.

The line was one of a clutch built by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway in the second half of the nineteeth century. They are fairly typical of late Victorian lines, in that their profitability must always have been somewhat questionable. The real aim of the routes was to prevent rivals such as the Southeastern Railway and the London, Chatham & Dover Railway from encroaching on LBSCR territory. The LCDR, for example, had a plan to built a line from Beckenham to Brighton, which would have competed with the LBSCR's most lucrative route.

What is now the Uckfield line was in fact originally two lines, both of which were aimed at giving the LBSCR access to Tunbridge Wells. The first opened in stages between 1858 and 1861 linking Lewes to Uckfield, Buxted, Crowborough, Eridge and Groombridge, before chugging into a station that was later known as Tunbridge Wells West to distinguish it from the current one (which was and is served by the Southeastern Railway), but which until 1923 was simply Tunbridge Wells LBSCR station.

Another line soon fed into this station. It took an 1855 branch line to East Grinstead from the LBSCR main line at Three Bridges and in 1866 extended it via Forest Row and Hartfield to Groombridge and Tunbridge Wells. This route can now be followed for almost its entire length as a cycleway and footpath.

The Three Bridges branch enabled the LBSCR to compete with the Southeastern Railway for traffic from London to Tunbridge Wells. It was a somewhat longer route than the SER's, but the LBSCR made the best of this by marketing it as "the pleasant route". When a link was built between the two Tunbridge Wells stations in 1876, the LBSCR was also able to offer direct trains from Brighton, via Lewes and Tunbridge Wells to Tonbridge (then named Tunbridge: the spelling was not changed until 1893 to avoid confusion with Tunbridge Wells). Later on, trains were even run from Brighton to Chatham.

The expense of building these lines was not good for the LBSCR's finances however, and it was a contributory factor to its failure in the financial crash of 1866 (see Bitter competition), but the company recovered and in the 1880s was back trying to fill gaps in its network with three further lines.

One used a branch line that already ran from Polegate near Eastbourne to Hailsham. It was extended northwards through the hilly Weald to Heathfield, Mayfield (lunch stop on the Wadhurst Circular walk), and Rotherfield to a point south of Eridge, where it merged with the Lewes to Tunbridge Wells line. Opening in 1880 this became known as the Cuckoo Line, after the Cuckoo Fair at Hailsham. Though on paper it offered a more direct route from London to Eastbourne than the one we now have, it was in fact always a single track branch line.

Line number two opened in 1882 and struck south from Oxted to offer a more direct route from London to East Grinstead, and then on via Kingscote and Horsted Keynes to Lewes. There was also a spur (which still exists) from Horsted Keynes to Haywards Heath, which was added the following year. Finally, in 1888 a line opened from Oxted (or more precisely Hurst Green) to Edenbridge Town, Hever, Cowden, Ashurst and Groombridge, where it linked into Tunbridge Wells, giving the LBSCR a more direct route from London to Tunbridge Wells.

Thus the network remained until the 1950s - and thus is it preserved on the tiled map on a wall of one of the passageways into Victoria station to this day (see photo). You will notice from this map that though the two halves of what is now the Uckfield line were in place, trains did not run directly from London to Eridge and beyond. Though track was laid to make this possible as early as 1888, it was rarely used. Instead to make such a connection you would have had to change at Tunbridge Wells, or more likely at Groombridge, which in its heyday was a busy junction with more than 200 trains a day passing through it.

Had all this network remained in place, it would have provided some wonderful opportunities for walkers. One thinks especially of the Cuckoo Line, through the heart of the Weald. The stations on the Tunbridge Wells to East Grinstead line would also have been useful, though in fact they are easily reached today by hourly buses.

However, inevitably given the quiet territory some of these lines passed through, they became candidates for closure when traffic declined after the Second World War. The first to go was the line south from East Grinstead to Lewes. It is hard to imagine that this line ever produced much passenger or freight revenue, given that it linked two towns already well-served by the railways, and as early as 1955 British Railways tried to close the line.

They were stopped by a local resident, Margery Bessemer, who discovered a clause in the 1878 Act of Parliament giving permission for the route requiring them to run at least four trains a day in each direction. BR then ran what was known as the “sulky service” – the bare legal minimum – until it could change the law and close the line legally in 1958.

This closure started to change our view of railways, because almost immediately a group of volunteers got together to re-open a part of the line, and in 1960 the Bluebell Railway was created. It was not the first volunteer steam railway – that honour goes to the Talyllyn, a narrow-gauge track in North Wales which was saved in 1950 - but the Bluebell started a trend that has spread all over the country. In the south east alone there is the Mid-Hants Railway from Alton to Alresford, the Spa Valley Railway from Tunbridge Wells to Groombridge and the Kent & East Sussex Railway from Bodiam to Tenterden. Nearly all of them have as part of their ambition to restore a normal scheduled service to their lines.

It is easy to sympathise with these mid-twentieth century protestors against line closures, but as Matthew Engel points out in his book Eleven Minutes Late (see Further reading) not all of this protest was very convincing.

In 1955, the Prison Commission objected to the closure of the line across Dartmoor to Princeton, home of Dartmoor Prison, but then had to admit it transported both its prisoners and its coal by road. Meanwhile fierce protests against the closure in 1954 of the line from Oxford to Woodstock (where Blenheim Palace is situated) was undermined by the fact that on average only five people travelled on each train. (Woodstock’s closure makes it all the more amazing that the even more remote Hanborough survived, because, like Charlbury, it is on the line to Worcester).

Protests were certainly unable to save the Cuckoo Line from Eridge to Polegate, which closed in 1965, the timetable having been revised in 1964 to make connections at either end of the line inconvenient (a common British Railways tactic at that time). The last train carried the poignant words “Farewell, faithful servant”.

Nor did objections save the line from Three Bridges via East Grinstead to Groombridge, which closed in 1967. A study done for Beeching found that only 25 passengers a day used trains between East Grinstead and Tunbridge Wells, though 300 travelled from East Grinstead to Three Bridges.

All these cuts left only three of the former LBSCR lines still running. The one from East Grinstead to London was a popular commuter route (and Beeching's own route to work: see The controversial Dr Beeching), so closure was never considered there, but the lines from Oxted to Tunbridge Wells and from Lewes to Tunbridge Wells had never been electrified (see The sparks effect) and ran through quiet rural territory. The towns at either ends of the lines all had adequate rail links via other routes, and they were both branded by Beeching as “unremunerative”.

What must have looked at the time like the unstoppable steamroller of closure started in 1964 when a new timetable robbed the Lewes to Tunbridge Wells line of its connections to Maidstone and Chatham via the tunnel between the two Tunbridge Wells stations. Then in 1966, British Railways applied to close the whole line from Hurst Green to Lewes.

Helping their case was the fact that the section from Lewes to Uckfield was doomed anyway. In 1964 a new bypass was being planned around Lewes, which would cut across the Lewes to Uckfield line. To provide a bridge over the railway would have cost £135,000 on top of the £350,000 costs of building the road.

Another option might have been to re-route the line using a track abandoned in 1868 into the Wivelsfield to Lewes line, but that would have cost £95,000. Parliament refused to fund either option.

That should have been the final nail in the coffin of the Uckfield line, but it was not. Some 3000 objections to closure were received, and for the first time protestors used the Ministry of Transport’s own cost-benefit analysis against it. They showed that the cost of closure in extra travel hours for passengers would be twice as much to the economy as keeping the loss-making line open.

Government ministers hemmed and hawed, and in 1968 gave way, deciding that the line was an important commuter route into London that should be saved. The line from Lewes to Uckfield still closed as planned in 1969, however, cutting off a useful alternative line from London to the south coast. The decision was almost immediately regretted when a train accident in 1972 closed the Brighton line for a month

With the rest of the line saved, the dominant pattern of service was to run trains from Uckfield to London Bridge, as happens today, bypassing Groombridge and Tunbridge Wells West. The once busy line through Groombridge was reduced to an hourly shuttle from Eridge to Tonbridge via the two Tunbridge Wells stations. This lasted until 1985 when the track and signalling needed replacing and it was decided that the cost could not be justified. To widespread consternation the link was closed - the last line closure carried out by British Rail anywhere in the country. It was taken over by the Spa Valley Railway, which now runs a steam service along the route.

The line to Uckfield survives, however – still unelectrified, and still serving its dozy rural halts. It had a doubtful period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when its trains were old, its stations run down and it had no Sunday service for most of the year. For a time it looked as if it might be closed after all, but somehow it survived and has recently been given new trains and smartened up stations.

The re-opening of the Lewes to Uckfield link has been proposed several times, but still looks a distant prospect. In 1987 Network SouthEast agreed to contribute £1.5m to a scheme to re-open the line, a quarter of the projected cost, but local authorities would not fund the rest.

In 2000 the rail franchisee Connex promised to conduct a feasibility study into re-opening the line in their ultimately unsuccessful bid for the South Central (now Southern) franchise. Most recently in 2008, a government enquiry looked at re-instating the link but decided that the £140m cost could not be justfied by the two percent increase in traffic expected.

If only they had spent the £95,000 in 1969...

© Peter Conway 2010-11 • All Rights Reserved

The golden age of the railways

2010-01-16T08:20:00.016Z

Ah, those were the days! Hearing a steam train hoot on the Bluebell line, or visiting one of its lovingly recreated stations, it is easy to get romantic about the golden age of the railways. We imagine ourselves on comfortable trains chugging to rural stops where the smartly-uniformed and unfailingly polite staff would rush to carry our bags.

It was never really like that, however. The Victorians did not particularly love their railways, and tended to give them mocking names, usually referring to their slow speed, lax safety standards or dirty carriages. The London, Chatham & Dover Railway, for example, was the “Undone, Smash’em and Turn’em Over”. The London & South Western was “The Long and Slow Way Round”.

Don’t think that complaints about delays, overcrowding or unhelpful staff are anything new, either. In The Middle Class: A History (see Further reading), Lawrence James quotes an eyewitness report in 1870 of the “furious impatience” of the genteel crowd returning from day trips to Epsom and Crystal Palace in 1870.

“Nothing incensed the middle classes more than kicking their heels on platforms waiting for overdue trains, or being squeezed into carriages,” James notes. Two years later, he points to a long correspondence to The Times about signal mishaps, mechanical failures and drivers delaying departures by bantering with station staff on the Portsmouth line.

The trains themselves would by our standards have seemed uncomfortable, smelly (from the smoke) and slow. Locomotives travelled at about 20-30 miles per hour at the start of the railway age, though to be fair in those days this seemed miraculously fast compared to the stagecoach. (At the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway in 1830, observers thought 30 mph was so fast it was almost like flying.)

But speeds stayed at that level on many branch lines well into the twentieth century, not helped by the fact that trains had to make extended stops to unload freight or detach goods wagons. A 26 mile journey from Brighton to Horsham on the Shoreham-by-Sea to Christ's Hospital branch (see Lines we lost) took an hour in 1910. At around the same time, my grandmother could remember taking the branch line from Axminster to Lyme Regis in Dorset. “We used to joke that you could get out and walk faster,” she said.

Speeds of express trains were better – as early as 1852 the Great Western Railway has a train that went from London to Oxford in just over an hour, an average speed of 55 mph and about as fast as the best services on this route today. But this was very exceptional at that time, and it was not until the end of the century that this became a normal speed on major routes.

By then some companies had a prestige train that went even quicker. Between 1888 and 1895 there was a “race to the north”, as the three companies operating from London to Scotland competed to have the fastest train. But at the same time, notes Jack Simmons in his book The Victorian Railway (see Further reading), correspondents to The Times were debating “the crawl to the south”, wondering whether the South Eastern Railway or the London, Brighton & South Coast was the slower. The Times commented “It is difficult to say with certainty which of the two has the better right to call itself absolutely the worst line in the country.”

Horrible crashes were common. 1,100 people were killed and 3,000 injured in railway accidents in 1872, and in 1876 there were ten major crashes and derailments. In 1865 the writer Charles Dickens was lucky to survive a horrendous crash near Staplehurst. He was on the way back from a trip to France, and had taken a South Eastern Railway train from Folkestone to London. Engineering work on a bridge overran, but someone forgot to warn the oncoming train, which plunged off the bridge into the river, killing ten people. Dickens developed a lifelong hatred of the railways as a result.

It took a lot of nagging from the government, and even more foot dragging and grumbling on the part of the railway companies, for basic safety technology to be introduced. For example, even though the technology had existed since the 1870s, vacuum brakes on all carriages – so that if they become detached, they simply stopped – were not made compulsory until 1889, after a terrible rail crash in Ireland. In the early days of the railways carriages had no brakes at all – they simply slammed into each other when the train slowed.

Signalling was not regulated until 1871, and even then the regulation was voluntary. Block signalling, which means that it is impossible for two trains to be on the same section of track, was not mandated until 1888. Before that, companies had all sorts of systems, many of which were prone to human error. There was a famous crash in 1861 where one train ploughed into another in the Clayton Tunnel – the one that carries the Brighton main line under the South Downs and whose portal can be seen on the Hassocks to Lewes walk.

If you despair of toilets being out of action on trains today, you would not have liked the Victorian railway either. Early carriages had no corridors – they were just single compartments with no doorway to the rest of the train. So there were no toilets, because there was no way to access them. (Some carriages of this sort remained in service on London commuter routes well into the 1990s.)

Some trains made what we might now call comfort stops but when Great Western trains stopped for this purpose at Swindon you only had ten minutes, and everyone on the train would be rushing to the same place. Women could get round the problem with various patent devices that were essentially portable bedpans which could be concealed under their voluminous skirts – providing no men were in the compartment too, of course.

The carriages were not heated either. If you were lucky you got a footwarmer - a metal container full of hot water that soon went cold. Not till 1893 did train companies start to use steam from the locomotives to heat their carriages. By that time some trains had corridors, and with them came toilets and – on longer distance routes – dining cars. The Midland Railway into St Pancras pioneered all this in the 1870s (copying the Americans, who had had them for a decade or more), but it was the flashy upstart – the Virgin Atlantic of its day, that tried to win customers from more established rivals by offering better service. Many other companies didn’t copy it until the 1880s.

And this was on prestige expresses, not branch line trains – and not all prestige expresses even then. Christian Wolmar in Blood, Iron & Gold (see Further reading) cites a lady travelling from Calais to Nice as late as 1886 on a train with no toilets, no dining car and no corridors – and she was travelling in first class. At the time, both the South Eastern Railway and the London, Chatham & Dover Railway were notorious for the poor quality of their carriages, so try and imagine what it might have been like travelling on them in third class.

You certainly would have struggled to read a book. In the early days a first class carriage might have one smelly oil lamp, giving out a feeble light, though from 1880 onwards gas lighting was introduced throughout trains. To be fair, in those pre-electric light days that might have been all the passengers were used to, but gas lighting continued well into the twentieth century.

Electric lighting was first pioneered in the 1881 by the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway, but it was not copied by other companies until the 1890s. In 1914, three quarters of carriages still had gas lighting, and the Midland Railway didn’t abandon it till 1921. In 1948, ten percent of carriages were still gas lit.

Reading a book was anyway difficult because the ride would have been very bumpy. Right into the 1980s, there was an art to holding a coffee cup or reading a book on trains in the south east because the train lurched so much. The problem was the joins between the rails, which have now been eliminated by a technique called continuous welding (invented in 1968, but not universally applied till much later, I am assuming).

Early Victorian trains were even worse. Carriages had four fixed wheels, and only later were enhanced to six, and then eight, with four each on two swivelling bogies, which gave a smoother ride. The hapless London, Chatham & Dover was notorious for its old rolling stock – it used four wheeled carriages until the end of the 1880s.

You could also forget about a regular hourly service on a branch line. The line from Horsham to Guildford was quite typical in having six trains a day on weekdays, with the last one at about 7pm. On Sundays a line might only have a couple of services. Many companies observed a “church interval” – that is, there were no trains on Sunday mornings, so that the working classes wouldn’t be tempted to skip church and go for a day out. The Metropolitan Railway (today the Metropolitan Line on the Underground) kept its church interval until 1909. Some lines in rural Wales (eg the one to Tenby and Pembroke) have one to this day.

So if there was a golden age of the railways, it was probably not the Victorian era, and the 1920s and 1930s were not much better either. In World War I the government had effectively taken over the railways, and as a result it was realised that the myriad independent Victorian railway companies were not very practical.

So “grouping” was forced through in 1923, whereby the companies were merged into four large players. Southern Railways was one, incorporating the London, Chatham & Dover; the South Eastern; the London, Brighton & South Coast; and the London & South Western. The other three companies to emerge from grouping were the Great Western Railway (the Victorian company plus a few smaller ones); the London & North Eastern Railway (the east coast main line); and London, Midland & Scottish (the west coast main line).

By this time, the companies were starting to notice the threat from road transport (see The controversial Dr Beeching) and so for the first time they started to develop publicity departments. This is something the Victorian railway companies never bothered with – indeed, the whole idea would have been alien to them. As Jack Simmons says in The Victorian Railway: “Most Victorian railway managers continued to think it was their function to provide whatever service they deemed best, which their passengers must take or leave as they choose.”

The Big Four, as the grouped companies were known, threw themselves into publicity with gusto, however, and none more so than Southern, which was a master of the art. A stream of glorious posters and brochures were produced portraying resorts such as Bexhill, Seaford or Folkestone as the ultimate in chic, or proclaiming “South for Sunshine” or “Sunshine Holidays in the South”. (Southern even promoted “Winter Sunshine Holidays”, which was stretching it a bit).

Southern actively encouraged walkers too, rambling being a popular new pastime in the 1920s and 1930s. You could get rambling tickets, which allowed you to return from a different station to the one you set off from (bring these back, please!) and group tickets allowing eight to travel for the price of four. Posters exhorted “Don’t miss autumn in the country”.

The company also produced walk books - there were five editions of Southern Rambles for Londoners between 1933 and 1938, with walks of up to 15 miles and suggestions of what to wear and see. One, quoted in South for Sunshine (see Further reading) had advice that is still pertinent to this day: “The official weather forecast is seldom correct. The unofficial weather forecast of the postman or farmer is equally unreliable. The English weather defies all prophecy.”

So was this the golden age of the railways? All of the rural branch lines were still intact in those days, but as Matthew Engel puts it in his book Eleven Minutes Late, this was really the golden age of the railway poster, not the golden age of the railway. The new electric trains were doubtless state of the art, but on steam-operated branch lines, services were slow, carriages tatty, and aged tank engines often broke down.

But fast forward to today and look around you. Whatever the political or economic rights and wrongs of privatisation, we have modern, comfortable carriages (particularly the wonderful Electrostar trains on Southern and Southeastern, with their variable seating layouts, spacious interiors and air conditioning) which – on the whole – run exactly to schedule, and take us almost everywhere we need to go with an hourly service that runs from early morning to late at night.

True, we can no longer take the train to West Hoathly or Mayfield or Goudhurst, but we still have Edenbridge, Balcombe, Hassocks, Amberley, Saunderton, Rye, Southease and dozens of other lovely stops from which to explore the countryside. We almost invariably get a seat, and if we are lucky there is a trolley serving coffee. We can look up trains online, or check how they are running from our mobile phones. We can count on trains to run in (nearly) all weather conditions.

We also know that the dark days of the 1960s and 1970s are behind us, and governments no longer see railways as an anachronism that will fade away before the all-conquering car. Indeed, with global warming climbing up the agenda, railways are virtuous once more. Passenger numbers have recovered from their 1970 lows and are now back at 1950 levels. There is even talk of reviving closed branch lines.

So yes, there is such a thing as the golden age of the railways. You are living in it.

© Peter Conway 2010 • All Rights Reserved

Sources and further reading

2010-01-16T08:19:00.005Z

There are multiudes of tediously detailed trainspotter-type books about every branch line that ever was, but much of this material is now available free (minus the endless photos of steam trains) on Wikipedia, which has entries on many of the railway lines mentioned here.

For a very readable (and definitely non-trainspotter) history of the railways in Britain, see Fire & Steam by Christian Wolmar, (Atlantic Books), which I drew on widely in creating these pages. I also drew on his sequel, Blood, Iron & Gold, which is a history of the railways globally, and Eleven Minutes Late, by Financial Times journalist Matthew Engel (published by Macmillan) – a very readable reflection on the history of Britain’s railways and their place in our culture

Of the trainspotter-type books, the most invaluable is the British Railways Pre-Grouping Atlas and Gazette (Ian Allan Publishing), which shows you every line, station and railway company that existed at the height of the railways in 1922.

Ian Allan Publishing also publishes a series of Lost Lines books by Nigel Welbourn. Lost Lines, Southern is the one most relevant to the lines we use as walkers, though Lost Lines, London also helped inform these pages.

More for the enthusiast, but invaluable in my researches were Railways of Britain: Kent and Sussex and Railways of Britain: London North of the Thames, both by Collin and David McCarthy (and both Ian Allan Publishing). These books detail every railway company that ever existed in their respective regions, and what happened to them.

If you want to wallow in nostalgia for a golden age that never was, the delightful South for Sunshine (Tony Hillmam and Beverley Cole: published by Capital Transport) is a small picture book of publicity posters of the Southern Railway, with images that make Seaford look as glamorous as St Tropez. Meanwhile, Paul Atterbury, published by David & Charles, has produced a series of coffee-table books on rural branch lines, including Branch Line Britain, On Country Lines and Tickets Please.

The bookshop of the London Transport Museum is a good place to find all the above

Some other historical books that I also drew on:

The Victorian Railway , Jack Simmons, Thames & Hudson – a seminal academic work on this subject, though probably too detailed for the casual reader.

The Smell of the Continent, Richard Mullen & James Munsen, Pan Macmillan, p157-162 - a charming account of how modern tourism was developed by Victorian travellers to Europe

Victorian London , Liza Picard, Orion Books, maps, p42-45, index p390 – an interesting anecdotal look at all aspects of Victorian life.

The Middle Class: A History, Lawrence James, Abacus, p368ff.