Читать книгу Full Steam Ahead: How the Railways Made Britain - Peter Ginn - Страница 8

It was heavy industry that spawned the railways and the railways that were then to drive the expansion of heavy industry. The two went hand-in-hand, mutually supportive and entirely co-dependent throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Ffestiniog railway in the heart of Wales is the world’s oldest surviving narrow gauge railway, dating back to 1832. It is thirteen and a half miles long and runs between Ffestiniog and Porthmadog, through some of the most dramatic and beautiful of Britain’s countryside. The railway was built in order to transport slate from the quarry to the docks, bypassing a long overland route by packhorse, cart and river boat. Small manageable wagons could thence be loaded right at the quarry mouth and moved smoothly, without any slate-damaging jolts and knocks down to the harbour quayside, within a couple of hours. It was a vast improvement over the old system. Even a narrow gauge wagon could carry a much bigger load than a packhorse, and it cut out entirely the need to then unload the slate from those horses and reload it into small, flat-bottomed riverboats. These then had to be sailed downstream with the tide along the somewhat energetic but shallow river Dwryrd, only to need unloading again before the slate was transferred to the sea-going vessels. Just one year earlier, the tax upon the coastal transport of slate had been lifted – and the overland routes and imports had been significantly unburdened by this financial control – so the moment was ripe for the Welsh slate quarries to increase their production and share of the market. The owners of the Ffestiniog quarry, Samuel Holland and Henry Archer – the first a quarryman and the latter a Dublin businessman – decided that this was the moment to invest. What they decided to construct was a railway line of a type that they were familiar with, a tried and tested technology that had enhanced and expanded the businesses of several of their quarrying neighbours. Because, despite its status as the oldest surviving narrow gauge line, the Ffestiniog railway was by no means the first, even in the mountains of Wales, and it was entirely lacking in locomotives.

THE EARLIEST RAILWAYS

Railways existed long before steam locomotives and even before static steam engines. Indeed, the first recorded mention of a railed way for wagons in Britain can be dated to the very start of the seventeenth century – in 1603, the same year that Elizabeth I died. Over the next two centuries, many remote sites from Northumberland to Snowdonia constructed flat or gently sloping track-ways with wooden guide rails, so that heavy loads could be moved easily around in a controlled manner using muscle power – either that of humans or horses. Mines and quarries were the major users of this transport system, as they were the businesses that had the heaviest and bulkiest of materials to move in volume. It was the weight of the loads that made a railed way so preferable to an open roadway. Rails provided a way of spreading the wagon’s heavy load across the ground, rather than it being concentrated upon the couple of inches where the wheel met the road surface. Where road vehicles quickly churned up the mud and became stuck, railed wagons glided across. Rails also helped control the direction in which a wagon moved and kept it within a series of set locations. Mines and quarries were busy places that often featured many narrow passageways and restricted spaces, so this element of control and organization was extremely valuable.

Still in operation to this day, the Ffestiniog railway’s origins lie in Welsh slate mining during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Presenters Peter Ginn, Alex Langlands and Ruth Goodman on one of the station platforms on the Ffestiniog railway.

As time went on, mine and quarry owners refined the systems that they used – improving wagon shapes, finding ways of making stable, well-drained trackways and, from around 1760, adding iron strips to the top of their wooden rails in order to prevent excessive wear. Fully iron rails arrived a generation later, cast in three- or four-foot long sections. It was this well-developed, muscle-powered railway that appeared upon the hills of Snowdonia in 1798, when the Ffestiniog’s neighbour, the Penrhyn quarry, built its railway. Railways then were the servants of industry; they were shaped by its needs and they existed in places wherever industry needed them – often far from centres of population. However, at this time the railways were still very much a junior partner in the complex networks of waterways, sea routes and roads that joined up the trade of the British Isles.

SLATE

When the Ffestiniog railway was first built, it was constructed so that the two rails were 23½ inches apart (this distance between the rails is what is referred to by the word ‘gauge’). Such a restricted gauge was chosen partly because a narrow gauge requires a much smaller path to be cut through tunnels and cuttings. It also uses less expensive, narrow bridges and fewer materials altogether. However, the narrow 23½-inch gauge was also chosen because this was the gauge of the rails that were already in use underground within the quarry.

The narrow gauge used for the Ffestiniog railway was inexpensive and designed to enable access to the darkest corners of mines and other inaccessible areas.

Some slate is quarried in an open-cast fashion, but the quarry at Ffestiniog is more akin to a conventional mine. The slate here is of a very high quality, allowing it to be split by hand into remarkably thin, consistent and structurally sound layers. In 1935, one Ffestiniog worker described how a single piece, only one inch thick, could be split into 26 layers, so that each slate would be a little less than a millimetre thick. Such thin layers were also fairly elastic and, crucially, they did not absorb water. This meant that slate from this deposit could be used to make superb roof tiles. They were very light due to their thinness, were able to cope with the slight warping of roof timbers and they did not become heavier when it rained. This meant that a roof covered in Welsh slate could be constructed from much lighter, thinner timbers than that of any other available material. The Ffestiniog slate shed water beautifully, too, meaning that roofs could be built with a far less steep pitch to them. Imagine the impact that all this had upon house building at the time. Indeed, you can see it around you to this day. The roofs of old cottages that were built to take thatch have a very steep pitch (around 70 per cent), even if the thatch itself is long gone. Think instead of the rows and rows of Victorian houses – the roofs are much shallower, rarely pitched at no more than a 45-degree angle, 30 degrees being much more common. The costs of building such a slate-roofed home with its smaller surface area and smaller, lighter timbers was substantially less than that of building a thatched home.

Ffestiniog slate was of the highest quality. It could be easily split and fashioned, was ideal for lightweight, supremely waterproof roofs and was also cheaper than most competing materials.

Due to an expanding population, the demand for cheap, yet properly watertight houses was high. The townscapes of Britain were utterly transformed as the slate industry blossomed. And it grew very largely because of the improved transport that the railways offered. While the output of the quarries had to be carried away by packhorse and small riverboat, there was little incentive to increase production – the quarry owners would simply not have been able to shift much more material. However, even without locomotive power, the railway could move exponentially more material, as well as moving it more quickly. Moreover, this new method of transport, whilst requiring an initially large capital outlay, was much cheaper to run. In many ways, the slate industry is simultaneously an example of an industry with a latent market waiting to be filled as well as one bursting with resources ready to be exploited. Transport was the bottleneck. The railway opened up the flow, and money and people poured in.

“THE SLATE HERE IS OF A VERY HIGH QUALITY, ALLOWING IT TO BE SPLIT BY HAND INTO THIN, CONSISTENT AND SOUND LAYERS.”

Victorian quarrymen were a hardy breed, who largely fashioned slate by hand, before the mechanistic advances of the mid- to late nineteenth century.

In 1808, the entire parish of Ffestiniog was home to 732 people; by 1880, that figure had risen to 11,274.

During the nineteenth century, the only real competition for slate as a roofing material was tiles. However, in the 1830s these were still heavier than slate and also expensively hand produced. Of course, slate also required a good deal of handwork, from extraction to shaping – but it was still cheaper to produce. The quarrymen worked in small gangs of between four and eight men and their wages were determined by the finished output of the gang. About half the members of the gang would be ‘rock men’, who cut the slate out of the ground. The others would be equally divided between ‘splitters’ and ‘dressers’, who shaped the rock into slates. Independently of these gangs, ‘bad rock men’ were employed to remove other rock that was impeding progress and ‘rubbish men’ to remove the waste rock. By 1860, sawing, planing and dressing machines assisted in dividing up the large rough blocks into more manageable pieces for the splitters to work with, and helped trim the edges into regular, standardized rectangles. Rather than reducing the amount of work as such, mechanization allowed for faster processing, which in turn brought costs and prices down. All these factors made slate even more competitive as a product compared with its main alternative, tile.

The Ffestiniog railway line is a remarkable feat of engineering. With no motive power, the loaded wagons were intended simply to run down to the quay under the force of gravity. That meant that the gradient of the line had to be a steady one-in-eighty. If the railway became steeper, the trucks might speed up and run themselves off the rails at the bends; if the line flattened out, there was the danger of the wagons slowing to a standstill. Only the very last portion of the line was level, where the momentum of the loaded wagons was enough to allow them to run on for a distance before gently stopping just before the quayside. The surveying and construction skills involved in the building of the line can still be seen and appreciated today, as the line snakes its way around the hillside over embankments and through cuttings, following the contours of the landscape. Such skills had been honed in building the canals, and by the mid-nineteenth century they were the stock in trade of a large body of professional men and skilled labourers.

These days the Ffestiniog railway no longer transports slate – only passengers. However, its proud heritage lives on.

Historian Ruth Goodman aboard the Ffestiniog railway steam train Prince.

SLATE MINING

Widely known as ‘blue gold’, the slate extracted from Welsh mines has been used to cover roofs across the globe. Welsh slate mining was an industry that expanded with the railways. It began with simple horse-drawn railways that took the slate from the mine to the ports and ended with an extensive rail network that could move vast quantities of heavy loads across the entire country.

Prior to descending into the mine, we looked at the exposed stratigraphy of the rocks around us. The band of slate was quite clear and went down into the ground at a 35-degree angle. We entered the mine, went down the trackway that would have once been used to haul up the slate, and found ourselves in a different world. The mine we were in was the second largest slate mine in Wales (the biggest was just across the road). Branching off a central circular passage were a number of caverns from which the slate was extracted. I was asked by our television sound engineer, ‘why are you whispering?, and the only answer I could give was that the mine reminded me of a cathedral.

Families which lived near the Welsh slate mines often worked together in gangs and were paid according to the amount of usable slate that they produced. Once you were assigned a plot, as a miner you had to see it through until the slate was exhausted. This could easily take up to 30 years. As a rule of thumb, of all the material extracted from the ground, only ten per cent was usable as roof tiles. The rest was cast onto giant heaps adjacent to the railway near the entrance of the mine. This has completely changed the surrounding landscape, effectively creating new hills.

Slate is a sedimentary rock formed in layers that are easily visible to the naked eye. To mine it, holes were drilled by hand, perpendicular to the grain. On a new face of slate, before a platform was created upon which the miners could work, the first holes had to be drilled. To do this the miners used a chain wrapped around one of their legs, which supported their weight.

Slate is a relatively soft rock, so the drill that makes a hole which can be filled with powder and a fuse to blast a new face is simply an iron rod with a bulbous section that is heavy near to one end. The short end of the rod is used to start the hole and the long end to finish it. The drill is simply moved up and down by hand and the weight pulverizes the rock below to dust.

We were in the mine with electric lights and modern access routes. When the mine was fully operational in the nineteenth century, each cavern may have been lit by just one candle. The miners covered their own expenses, so burning lots of candles would impact on profit. The work was repetitive, often dangerous – especially when blasting – and the men spent much of their time chained to rocks in the half-light. In some instances, it is easy to imagine these conditions breaking the spirits of the miners, but in Wales it was quite the opposite. Poetry, song and political ideology were all penned in the mines. Lunch was taken in a caban (Welsh for cabin) built out of discarded slate in the mine area that the men were working. It was here that many discussions took place – and they were often minuted, so some records of their contents still survive to this day. Competitions with miners from other caverns also took place, often based on song or poetry.

However, it was above on the surface where the real competition was arguably happening. The slate taken up there had to be cut down to size in order to make the roof tiles. Tiles ranged in sizes and had names such as ‘king’ (largest), ‘empress’, ‘princess’ or ‘lady’, according to their dimensions. The skill of the cutter and the speed at which he worked would directly impact upon the usable product produced. The rock had to be sawn, split and trimmed – and slate dust is not kind to the lungs....

STEAM

However, we must not forget steam. That, too, has a long and convoluted history. Claims that such and such was ‘the man who invented the steam engine’ tend to obscure the fact that all great people stand upon the shoulders of giants. Look closer, and what you see is a long journey of ideas, experiments, refinements and improvements, with the baton of progress moving from one hand to another, and advancements often dependent on other tangential developments. Amongst all the great visionaries and engineers involved in the story of steam engines, one of the greatest was James Watt. Using huge skill, he applied new scientific thinking from the academic world and combined it with what he discovered by analyzing the working model of another man’s engine. This statement, of course, does not take anything away from Watt’s genius or his astonishingly hard work. But steam engines did not simply pop into existence one night after somebody watched a kettle boiling…

The young James Watt was a clever lad who did not really fit within the usual schooling system of his day, having no head for Latin or Greek; however, he did have both a good feel for numbers (his grandfather had set up a school of mathematics) and for practical matters. Watt’s father was a gifted maker of precision instruments who gave his son a set of small tools as a present. As a child, James was reported as enjoying nothing more than taking his toys apart and putting them back together, often in different combinations. One of his father’s workmen even remarked that he thought ‘Jamie’ would have ‘fortune at his fingers’ ends’. It was years later, when he was working for the professors of the University in Glasgow producing the instruments and apparatus that they required for teaching and research – as well as making musical instruments – that James Watt’s researches into steam power began. Ideas had been discussed and models made from the latter part of the seventeenth century onwards, and the first commercial steam-powered engine had emerged back in 1698, when Thomas Savery produced his ‘Fire Engine’. This machine could pull water vertically upwards for a distance of forty feet, earning it the nickname, ‘the miner’s friend’. It addressed a newly urgent problem. The mines of southern England were reaching greater depths and experiencing severe flooding problems. Traditional methods of pumping out all this water using horse or water power were proving inadequate, both systems being unable to move sufficient amounts of water from such depths. In practice, Savery’s engines were prone to exploding, with catastrophic and often fatal consequences, but it was clear to everyone within the mining and engineering community that steam power was the way forward. After several people had made improvements to Savery’s invention, the next major leap came in 1712, when Thomas Newcomen devised a beam engine that could drive a piston. The five horsepower that Newcomen’s engine could produce more than doubled the power of the Savery engine, and this machine proved to be altogether a much safer beast. It would be this engine that transformed mining capabilities across the country and which so intrigued and inspired James Watt around fifty years later.

“AS A CHILD, JAMES WAS REPORTED AS ENJOYING NOTHING MORE THAN TAKING HIS TOYS APART AND PUTTING THEM BACK TOGETHER.”

In the late eighteenth century, Glasgow University was a forward-looking institution, interested in and supportive of many different kinds of scientific investigation. So perhaps it comes as no surprise that it should have owned a working model of a Newcomen engine. However, for ‘working’, read ‘broken’… Attempts to repair the model in London appeared to be going nowhere, so the engine was returned to Glasgow and was handed over to James Watt. The model revealed several shortcomings to Watt and sent him off on a furious search through the scientific literature of the day. However, since much of that literature was not in the English language, he had first to learn French, Italian and German before he could decipher a lot of key information. Watt might well have disliked business – ‘I would rather face a loaded cannon than settle an account or make a bargain’ – and had indeed been involved in several business failures, but he was nonetheless an incredibly inventive and driven man who was unafraid of hard intellectual as well as physical work. By several accounts, James Watt was also a pleasant man to be around; for example, his workshop at the university became a popular place for academics, engineers and others to gather and socialize. Combining all he had learnt from the scientific papers and from the model of Newcomen’s engine, Watt began to investigate the theory of ‘latent heat’. At this time, he discovered that another man at the university, Professor Robert Black, had already come up with the theory and had even been teaching it for several years. Some lesser men might have given up at that point, but Watt was not a man of petty jealousies; neither was Robert Black, and so the pair teamed up.

“WHEN PEOPLE SAY ‘JAMES WATT INVENTED THE STEAM ENGINE’, THEY MEAN HE WAS THE FIRST TO COME UP WITH THE IDEA OF CONDENSING STEAM.”

James Watt improved Thomas Newcomen’s basic design in 1769, with a more efficient engine featuring a cylinder that stayed hot.

When people say ‘James Watt invented the steam engine’, what they mean is that he was the first to come up with the idea of condensing the steam in a separate chamber. Born out of his hard-won understanding of latent heat, he could see that Newcomen’s engine lost most of its power re-heating the cylinder after each stroke. Newcomen’s piston was driven when hot steam pushed in one direction, a spray of cold water cooled the steam, and the piston was drawn back by the resultant vacuum. However, each cooling cycle cooled not only the steam but the cylinder, too. Watt realized that the now cool cylinder was drawing much of the potential energy of the steam, simply to reheat it on every stroke, making Newcomen’s engine supremely inefficient. Having identified and analysed the scientific problem, Watt then had to find a way of solving it mechanically. Many of his early attempts were dogged by the difficulty of getting truly precision parts made. The theory and designs were basically right in principle, but the skill levels of many of the workmen he had to rely on sometimes let him down.

James Watt was a powerful innovator, whose great expertise lay in analyzing and adapting the technical ideas and developments of other engineers.

It would take many years of hard slog, further technical insight and invention to sort out the technical difficulties of full-scale production. Watt’s major backer and business partner during this period was Joe Roebuck, who owned the Carron colliery and had the foresight to see that steam-powered engines were the way forward. However, the development of Watt’s engine took more time and money than Joe Roebuck’s business could support. Consequently, Watt had to abandon full-time developmental work and work as a surveyor – a job that he hated – and Joe Roebuck, faced additionally with a small economic downturn, went bankrupt. That might well have been that – and James Watt could well have remained a footnote in history – if not for another example of different skills, ideas and histories coming together at the optimum moment.

Once he became bankrupt, Joe Roebuck’s share in Watt’s steam engine was bought out by one Matthew Boulton. Boulton was not an engineer, but rather a businessman – perhaps the first great businessman, a man who could be said to have invented the production line. He ran one of the largest factories in the world at Soho in Birmingham, and was a genius at marketing, networking and financial control. He was also hugely rich. With money, and the efforts of plenty of skilled (and more disciplined) workers and customers organized by Boulton, the first of Watt’s rotary motion ten horsepower pressurized steam engines went into production in 1781. Steam power was no longer largely confined to pumping water out of mines – Boulton and Watt’s engines, capable of providing a steady powered spinning motion, could be turned to a vast array of industrial processes. From hereon in, steam began to revolutionize a host of different businesses. It was Boulton rather than Watt who had seen the importance of rotary motion and how it could be successfully employed.

LOCOMOTIVES

Let us return to the Ffestiniog railway by way of the early steam engines, Puffing Billy and The Rocket. In 1832, as they launched their railway building project, Holland and Archer could conceivably have chosen to employ steam power, either from a static engine that could haul wagons up and down small inclines on the end of a rope or chain, or from a true steam locomotive. However, neither option would have seemed to be a particularly attractive proposition at that precise moment. The slate business enjoyed the benefit of only needing to transport their heavy wares down from the mountainside to the docks, so that exclusively empty, lighter wagons needed to make the journey back up. Consequently, a static engine designed to haul wagons back up inclines was unnecessary, so long as the wagons could be made light enough for a horse to do the job. As for a steam locomotive – well, in 1832 there was no narrow-gauge engine available that was strong enough to perform the role.

On 29 October 1804 at Pen-y-darren ironworks, Merthyr Tydfil, a self-propelled steam engine made its way along the iron railway towards Abercynon. The anonymous locomotive had been built by Richard Trevithick, who was well established as a steam engineer and had worked out a method of using pressurized steam that obviated the need for Watt’s separate condenser. Trevithick adopted this approach, as he did not want to have to pay a licence fee for the use of Watt’s patented device. Trevithick had experimented two years previously at Pen-y-darren, with the support of the owner and the assistance of Rees Jones, who was an employee of the ironworks. However, the 1804 run does not appear to have been a serious attempt to launch steam locomotion, but rather was staged to win a bet. A large crowd gathered to see the locomotive pull five wagons with ten tons of coal and seventy men the full nine and three quarter miles at walking pace. The bet was won, but the heavy engine broke the iron-topped wooden rails and was immediately retired from action. However, with so many people watching and with such an important name as Trevithick involved, it was not long before many other engineers began experimenting with locomotives.

Presenters Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn on the Ffestiniog railway in north Wales.

Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) was a Cornish inventor and mining engineer. His work built on that achieved by Watt and advanced the new science of steam locomotion.

The Puffing Billy locomotive was made in 1813 under William Hedley’s patent No. 3666 for the Wylam colliery.

Puffing Billy is the oldest surviving locomotive in the world. It began work in 1814 at the Wylam colliery near Newcastle upon Tyne, hauling wagonloads of coal from the mine to Staithes landing quay on the river Tyne. The engine carried on doing this until 1862. Like the railways themselves, locomotives were designed for industry. Of course, the investment in building these still quite experimental engines was large, but so too were the potential profits. Transport costs contributed very substantially to the price of a commodity as heavy as coal. Just as slate had a ready and waiting market at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so too did coal. The steam engines built by James Watt, Richard Trevithick and others were dotted around numerous mines and quarries, mills and foundries – and all ran on coal. Meanwhile, domestic demand for coal was also growing, as towns and cities with soaring populations found themselves outstripping the local supply of firewood. The Wylam colliery owner realized that if he could cut his transport costs and therefore his prices, he would have no trouble selling much larger volumes of coal. Like many of his competitors, he already owned an iron-topped wooden railway with wagons hauled by horses, but he could see the possibilities in the new technology and was willing to invest.

A gigantic heap of coal at a modern coal-powered power station in Helsinki, Finland. It is the sheer volume of coal required for energy that has driven so much haulage technology over the decades.

A painting of a British coal mine pit head in 1820. Note the combined use of equine power, manpower and the great new innovation – steam.

Initially, Wylam colliery also had trouble with the weight of the engine (eight tons), which damaged rails, but they persevered. Puffing Billy was one of three engines that ran on the line and was designed by a team that included the engineer Thomas Hedley, the engineman Jonathan Forster, the blacksmith Timothy Hackworth and the colliery owner Christopher Blackett. Such collaboration between men of very different social backgrounds and classes is a real feature of the early history of the railways. They were dealing with cutting-edge technology and there was no time for vested interests to be indulged. Expertise, intelligence and enthusiasm were welcome wherever they were found (although, of course, not from women…).

DIFFERENT TYPES OF COAL

Not all coal is the same. Stand in the yards of any of the preserved railways or at any steam fair in the country and you will hear grumbling about ‘the wrong sort’ of coal. Every coal deposit has a different chemical composition that affects how much energy it releases when burnt, how quickly and hotly it burns, and how much tar and smoke it produces in the process.

Steam engines require the very best stuff – the clean-burning coals that will not coat the firebox and boiler tubes with tar. They also need coal that is highly calorific, giving the engines the energy they need to work, and they need it to have a very low water content. From the very beginning of the era of steam railways, south Wales had a reputation for producing top quality ‘steam coal’ – particularly the area around Merthyr Tydfil. Domestic fires do not have quite the same need for high-end anthracite type coals; they might burn better using good coal, but they can work on much cheaper, dirtier, wetter and less calorific types. The cheapest varieties of coal are the brown coals that are halfway between peat and anthracite, but even the best ‘house coals’ are cheaper and of lower quality than ‘steam coal’.

Consequently, throughout the days of steam travel, there was a thriving cross-country trade in different types of coal. It was perfectly common for a colliery that produced mainly domestic coal to have to bring in steam coal in order to fire its pumping engines and locomotives.

Many of the intervening locomotives between Trevithick’s anonymous engine and Puffing Billy moved on a form of rack and pinion system in order to maintain traction. However, the Wylam colliery engines had smooth wheels and ran upon a smooth track. Their success as working vehicles proved once and for all that on gentle inclines iron wheels upon iron track provided plenty of grip – although in slippery conditions, a little sand sprinkled onto the tracks every now and again could be helpful. Moving at what now seems a very stately five miles per hour, Puffing Billy made quite a visual impact. Upon a casual glance, the engine presents a rather confused picture, with rods, beams and shafts sticking up and moving about in several directions at once. There is certainly no indication of streamlining, or much in the way of facilities for the crew. In fact, Puffing Billy looks much more like a slightly flimsy static engine mounted upon an astonishingly sturdy cart with a chimney bolted on the front. You can even see large cog-wheels beneath the cart bed. Behind it ran another little wagon full of coal, and out in front of the engine ran a second one, carrying a large barrel full of water. Unsurprisingly, considering the rather precarious-looking arrangement of rods and beams, the engine wobbles and judders rather a lot when it is in motion. Many people think that the phrase ‘to run like Billy-o’ was inspired by Puffing Billy. There is no doubt that in 1814 it was considered to be a fast machine – and to this day all that shaking about still gives a sense of bustle.

The Rainhill Trials, October 1829. These were conducted to find a locomotive for the world’s first fully steam-hauled railway – the Liverpool and Manchester – which opened the following year.

The Rocket is still the most famous steam engine in the world. Built by the father and son team George and Robert Stephenson, it set the world speed record in 1829 at the Rainhill Trials, when it reached 36 miles per hour. These speeds seem so slow now to us, almost two hundred years later. However, in 1829 no one on earth had ever travelled faster than a horse could gallop – and most people had never even owned a horse to gallop upon. Only fifteen years previously, Puffing Billy had been considered speedy at just five miles per hour, and the Stephensons themselves were surprised at Rocket’s performance. It was also a considerably better-looking machine than poor old Puffing Billy. Much of the confusion of beams, rods and shafts had gone – instead, this engine looked sleek and punchy. The Stephensons had created something quite revolutionary, mixing together their own unique vision with everything they had learned from a host of other engineers. In part, the Stephensons’ success stemmed from their understanding that this engine needed to do something quite different from all those that had gone before – namely, carry passengers. Of course, many people had ridden in wagons pulled by steam engines before on an ad hoc basis, but passengers and their speedy transit were the challenge that the Liverpool and Manchester railway had set. Their business model did not involve moving coal or slate from mine to dock: it involved the linking of two cities, the Liverpool and Manchester of their name. Yes, they expected there to be freight on board the trains, but they were also looking for passenger traffic. The company set up the competition to decide who would get the contract to build the new locomotives for their railway. The rules were clear. Firstly, there was a weight restriction to prevent damage to the rails, which as we have seen, was a recurrent problem at this time. The passengers were to be carried a full sixty miles. This, too, was a challenge. Early engines such as Puffing Billy were designed for travelling quite short distances, averaging around fifteen miles in one stretch, and needed to stop and refill with water in between runs. However, the directors of the Liverpool and Manchester railway company were looking for reliability and speed, so that they could run regular services.

The Rocket was designed by Robert Stephenson and built at his Forth Street works in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1829. Although not the first steam locomotive, essentially it was the template for most other steam engines for the next 150 years.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, pictured in1831, several months after its inauguration. This was the world’s first passenger railway service.

“MUCH OF THE CONFUSION OF BEAMS, RODS AND SHAFTS HAD GONE – INSTEAD, THIS ENGINE LOOKED SLEEK AND PUNCHY.”

Probably most of the credit for designing the Rocket deserves to go to the younger of the two Stephensons, Robert. His father, George, was busy elsewhere designing and supervising the building of the Liverpool and Manchester railway line, although the two kept in close touch. There were a great deal of technical improvements incorporated within Rocket, but probably the most important and the one to have the longest-term impact was the multi-tube boiler. The older engines worked by wrapping a large canister full of water around the chimney of a firebox. The hot smoke and air from the fire travelled along the chimney and heated the water as it passed through the horizontal section within the canister of water (the boiler) and then escaped vertically up the chimney at the far end. The rocket had not one but 25 parallel tubes that carried the hot gases through the boiler full of water. With so much more surface area contact between the hot tubes and the water, far more of the energy could be transferred. Put simply, 25 small hot pokers plunged into a bucket of water will heat that water very much more quickly than one large hot poker. When the much cooler gases reached the end of the boiler, they were allowed to come together again to escape up the chimney, aided by a shot of steam. This ‘blast pipe’ system fed a small stream of exhaust steam into the base of the vertical chimney, creating a vacuum that in turn created a fierce ‘draw’. In addition, the Rocket also made use of the radiant heat of the firebox by giving it a double skin and passing water through between the two layers. The Rocket was designed to be light and fast, but not particularly strong. Passengers in their carriages are a much lighter load than wagons of coal or slate, and Rocket was intended from the outset to pull no more than three times its own weight.

COOKING WITH COAL

As someone who has a lot of practical experience of cooking upon a variety of both wood and coal fires, I can honestly say that I think wood is very much my preferred fuel. Wood is tremendously controllable. Of course, you need skill to get the best out of it, but if you know what you are doing it is possible to control wood fires with more accuracy than can be achieved using any modern appliance. Unlike electric plates or halogen hobs, wood fires respond instantly – and they also add a distinctive flavour to food. On the other hand, coal is slow to heat up and cool down, the merest hint of its smoke gives the food an unpleasant taste, and it is filthy to work with. Wood ash is easy to clean up, there is usually very little of it and it leaves no stains. In the case of coal, however, there is always lots of ash and the black smuts that fall like snowflakes leave greasy, staining marks on everything in the vicinity.

In the nineteenth century, when household after household converted to coal fires, they did not do so because it was a better fuel. Rather, they made the change because it was cheaper. However, coal must be substantially cheaper before people are induced into making such a change, not just because of its general inferiority, but because of the costs of the conversion required for burning it. A wood fire simply requires a space, and hopefully a chimney and some round-bottomed pans on legs. Of course, the big kitchens of Victorian grand establishments were equipped with far more equipment than that – the burning brands of wood were held upon brandreths or trivets, and spit dogs were used to hold spits in front of them. Many big kitchens had a sort of crane fixed into the chimney from which a pot could be suspended, and some had mechanical devices for turning their spits. However, within the commoner’s cottage you could if necessary dispense with all that expensive ironware – even your cooking pots might be just inexpensive earthenware, if necessary.

Put a pile of coal on the floor in the hearth and you will soon discover how difficult it is to cook upon. It needs far more draught than wood in order to burn at all, so as an absolute minimum you will need an iron basket in which to put your coal, so that the air can get to it properly. The next thing you will discover is that the pots and pans you use over your wooden fire will not work so well over coal. The earthenware variety will quickly succumb to heat shock, and all those round-bottomed metal pots are no longer efficient over the varying, different-shaped flames. Therefore, if you want to cook over a coal fire, you will have to invest in a new set of metal pans.

As the nineteenth century progressed, coal did become markedly cheaper and wood became ever more difficult to source and purchase. As coal became less expensive, so more people converted their fireplaces. Similarly, as demand for coal rose, the collieries became more willing to invest in railways, and as railways spread, the coal became progressively cheaper to transport and buy. It was a powerful and irresistible cycle of supply and demand.

An archetypal Victorian kitchen, shown together with an array of contemporary utensils. This is actually the perfectly preserved kitchen at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall. Copper pots and pans hang from the wall above the cooking range, which would have been fired by coal.

The Foxfield Railway is a preserved standard gauge line located south east of Stoke-on-Trent. The line was built in 1893 to serve the colliery at Dilhorne on the Cheadle coalfield. It joined the North Staffordshire Railway line near Blythe Bridge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Page 37 from the notebook belonging to John Urpeth Rastrick (1780–1856), used to record details of the Rainhill locomotive trials in 1829. Rastrick was one of the judges.

“THE GREAT DAY ARRIVED. TEN LOCOMOTIVES HAD BEEN ENTERED INTO THE RACE AND VAST CROWDS GATHERED. THE PRESS WERE THERE IN NUMBERS.”

The great day arrived. Ten locomotives had been entered into the race and vast crowds gathered. The great and the influential had all been invited, the press were there in numbers from all over the world – with a particularly large contingent from the United States. Five of the engines never made it to Rainhill, problems with design, manufacturing and reliability forcing them to withdraw. Two more arrived but had to withdraw on the day. Just three engines were still in the running. Fireboxes were lit and steam began to build.

It is hard to overplay the public interest that this event generated. This was an arena displaying the absolute white heat of the technology of the time. All the various small-scale lines, the experiments and the stuttering commercial successes of the last few decades had shown that steam locomotives running on iron railways were the future. There might well still be technical difficulties, but it was easy to see that in time these would be ironed out, and that a new, connected world was just around the corner.

GEORGE STEPHENSON (1781–1848)

George Stephenson was world-famous in his lifetime and has not been forgotten since. His father worked at the Wylam colliery near Newcastle upon Tyne, shovelling coal into the firebox of the static pumping engine, and the family lived alongside the wooden railway. Thus, rail and steam entered George’s life, almost from the first. However, his was a family with few of the advantages that usually offer hopes of success. Neither of his parents could read or write and George, like so many children in the last years of the eighteenth century, was working out in the fields from the age of six or seven. School would have cost money that his family simply did not have. By the age of ten, George was driving the horse-drawn, coal-filled wagons along the wooden railed way. Life began to change when he moved from tending horses to following in his father’s footsteps and instead began tending steam engines.

As a 17-year-old engineman, George had a few pennies to spare, and these he chose to spend upon an education, attending night school after a long day at the pit. Within the year, George had learnt to read and write and handle basic arithmetic. Such determination and drive were to be lifelong traits. Over the next few years, George Stephenson moved around the local pits, working in one menial capacity or another upon the static engines. Finally, in 1811 at High Pit Killington, he got a chance to shine when he fixed a broken-down engine and was promoted to the position of engineer. This was a huge social leap, one that would not have been possible if he had remained illiterate, and still one that probably raised a few eyebrows in the class-conscious days of the early nineteenth century. Immersed in steam technology, intimately familiar with railed ways, ambitious and intelligent, George was hearing regular reports of the experiments taking place with locomotives, the hot topic of the day in colliery circles. It was almost inevitable that he would become a builder of steam engines. His first working example Blucher was ready in 1814. He had modelled it upon one built by Matthew Murray that was working nearby, but he must also have seen Puffing Billy, which entered service that year upon the Wylam colliery railway, just outside his childhood home.

In 1819, George moved on from engine building to the construction of entire railways. His first was an eight-mile section of track for Hetton colliery that ran entirely upon mechanical power – a world first – with gravity providing downhill motion and locomotives working on the level and slight upward inclines. There was no holding Stephenson back now. Ten years later, the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway took place. This seminal event is often cited as the dawn of modern railways. It was one of George Stephenson’s engineering projects. In a whirlwind of activity, he persuaded investors to put up money, surveyed the route, designed cuttings and embankments, organized and supervised the labour, designed and built the engines, set up a new dedicated engine building company to do so (the first ever) and ran a PR campaign. As far as George was concerned, the days when railways were only of interest to those involved in mining and quarrying were over. His vision was for railways that moved everything and everyone.

‘Railways will come to supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country, when mail coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the Great Highway for the King and all his subjects. The time is coming when it will be cheaper for a working man to travel on a railway than to walk on foot. I know that there are great and almost insurmountable difficulties that will have to be encountered; but what I have said will come to pass as sure as we live.’

(George Stephenson, 1825)

Well before the Stockton and Darlington opened, Stephenson was already working on the Liverpool and Manchester railway – a line that would focus on moving people rather than coal.

From the moment that the Rocket reached its top speed of 36 miles per hour at the Rainhill Trials in 1829, George, and increasingly his son Robert, were at the very heart of an explosion in British railways. As enthusiasm boiled over and line after line was developed and promoted across the whole country, everyone wanted the father and son team of the Stephensons on board.

THE HUSKISSON INCIDENT

‘You probably have by this time heard and read accounts of the opening of the railroad, and the fearful accident which occurred at it, for the papers are full of nothing else.... The engine had stopped to take in a supply of water, and several of the gentlemen in the directors’ carriage had jumped out to look about them. Lord W.-, Count Batthyany, Count Matuscenitz, and Mr Huskisson among the rest were standing talking in the middle of the road, when an engine on the other line, which was parading up and down merely to show its speed, was seen coming down upon them like lightning. The most active of those in peril sprang back into their seats: Lord W.- saved his life only by rushing behind the Duke’s carriage, and Count Matuscenitz had but just leaped into it, with the engine all but touching his heels as he did so; while poor Mr Huskisson, less active from the effects of age and ill health, bewildered, too, by the frantic cries of ‘Stop the engine! Clear the track!’ that resounded on all sides, completely lost his head, looked helplessly to the right and left, and was instantly prostrated by the fatal machine, which dashed like a thunderbolt upon him’.

(Fanny Kemble, 1830)

This tragic accident occurred during the opening ceremony of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the line built by George Stephenson and the line that the Rocket was built to run on. Hugh crowds had gathered to watch and a host of important people invited. Mr Huskisson was one of those VIPs. He was the MP for Liverpool, a man generally liked and admired. Should such an accident happen now to so prominent a person in the context of a new technology, it is hard to imagine that technology having any future at all. However, it is testament to the cheapness of life – even elite life – in the early nineteenth century, and to the enormous wave of excitement surrounding the new technology, that the whole incident passed with barely a blip. Certainly, the subsequent fortunes of the Liverpool and Manchester railway and other railway schemes were completely unaffected by the incident.

“ROCKET STEAMED AHEAD ALMOST FROM THE FIRST AND GEORGE STEPHENSON BECAME AN OVERNIGHT INTERNATIONAL CELEBRITY.”

Rocket steamed ahead almost from the first and George Stephenson became an overnight international celebrity.

IRON INDUSTRY

It was not only locomotives that were developing quickly. Just as railways were closely tied to the needs and fortunes of the mining industries, so too were they entwined with the iron industry. Good quality iron, in quantity at affordable prices, was essential for anyone building locomotives or iron railways. The railways had been servants of the iron industry, moving coal and ore in the days of horsepower, and they continued in that role in the days of steam. However, they also sparked an international demand for the products of that industry, most directly and immediately a demand for rails.

The biggest name in this connection is Dowlais, an iron foundry that was already at the leading edge of innovation. In 1815, it was the largest producer of wrought iron in the world. Cast iron taken direct from the blast furnace is brittle, but wrought iron (iron that has been worked, driving out the excess carbon content and incorporating elements of slag within its crystalline structure), can bend and flex. The Dowlais Iron Company did not invent the wrought iron rails, but they did have the facilities, expertise and commercial muscle to produce them in quantity – vast quantity. They were able to take this British invention and sell it worldwide.

The rails were the result of the work of John Birkinshaw who worked, not for Dowlais, but for the Bedlington ironworks in Northumberland. When this company became involved in a local scheme for a railed wagon-way, Birkinshaw turned his attention to the problem of the rails themselves. Short lengths, three or four feet-long of solid cast iron, had taken over from the earlier system of wooden rails with an iron strip tacked on top, but problems with rails were endemic. They just kept breaking – particularly under the weight of locomotives. Lengths of wrought iron produced by blacksmiths were being tried, but many people were sceptical, as wrought iron is notorious for its propensity to rust. Hearing of such experiments, Birkinshaw wrote to the agent of the Earl of Carlisle up at Tindal Fell, who owned both cast and wrought iron sections of track. The agent was unequivocal in his assessment: wrought iron was better. Tindal Fell had been using it for eight years and had not had to replace any wrought iron rails, whilst the cast iron sections had to be replaced ‘almost daily’. Nor did the wrought iron rails rust. The agent speculated that rust was kept at bay by the constant use and by ‘condensation of the upper surface of the metal by the heavy weights rolled over it, which produces a hard compact coat, like that produced by cold hammering steel and copper plates.’ John Birkinshaw set about designing a method of producing such rails in long lengths and in large volume. He worked out how to shape the iron using a pair of shaped rollers and a ‘powerful steam engine with great velocity’. A red-hot iron bar was fed between the rollers and fifteen foot long lengths of rail emerged on the other side.

Presenter Peter Ginn stands on the footplate of an old steam train, dressed in period costume.

Dowlais ironworks, Cardiff, at night. This painting is by the artist Lionel Walden and dates from the late 1890s.

Victorian ironworking in a foundry. This painting is the work of the French painter, Fernand Cormon (1845–1924), and was produced in 1893.

George Stephenson had patented his own improved rails, but after he had seen Birkinshaw’s in action, he wrote to the promoters of the Stockton and Darlington railway: ‘To tell you the truth, although it would put £500 in my pockets to specify my own patent rails, I cannot do so after the experiences I have had.’ Always open to new ideas and more interested in the success of the railway than in personal get-rich-quick schemes, Stephenson used Birkinshaw’s rails and advised everyone else to do the same over the decades to come.

Production of those rails began with John Birkinshaw’s employers, the Bedlington foundry, but it was to be the Dowlais firm that capitalized upon his invention to the greatest profit and benefit.

Back in 1783, Peter Onion (the brother-in-law of one of Dowlais’ owners) had come up with and patented a method of ‘puddling’ pig iron to turn it into wrought iron. Refinements were of course to follow, but this was the first time that it became possible to produce wrought iron in quantity. The old medieval small-scale bloomeries had produced wrought iron in small batches directly from the kiln. The new large-scale blast furnaces that are sometimes credited with kicking off the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century produced much larger quantities, but it was pig iron that they output, not wrought iron. Pig iron was superb for casting, but if you needed wrought iron you were still dependent on the old bloomeries, until puddling came along. A combination of new industrial process, a good location and good business management made this firm in South Wales the centre of the international iron industry. Life in Merthyr Tydfil was changing fast. As a forward-looking business, Dowlais soon invested in one of Boulton and Watt’s steam engines to drive the bellows on their blast furnace (the first one in Wales), and a second soon followed to power the new rolling mill that took the puddled wrought iron and rolled it out into bars. They were ready to expand their operations. As news trickled out of the success of Birkinshaw’s wrought iron rails, the Dowlais company could see the great potential that this new product had for them. Having cracked the problems of producing large quantities of wrought iron and got to grips with steam engines, they were perfectly placed to add one more rolling mill that could turn a useful material into a brand new finished product. They were keen to tender for any new railway business. According to Dowlais’ records, they managed to sell rails to the Stockton and Darlington railway in 1829, although presumably most were actually made by the Bedlington Iron Foundry where Birkinshaw worked. They certainly supplied a large number the following year to the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. However, what made the real money were the offshore sales. By 1831, Dowlais were selling to the United States, providing all the rails for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Five years later, they had won contracts for the entire length of the Berlin and Leipzig line and that between St Petersburg and Pauloffsky. The Grand Duke Constantine of Russia himself came in person to witness the construction process. Twenty thousand tons of wrought iron rails left Dowlais that year along the newly built Taff Vale Railway down to Cardiff docks. Ten years later that tonnage had more than quadrupled, now produced by 18 great blast furnaces. It was a vast enterprise, employing around one and half thousand adult men, nearly eight hundred adult women, about twelve hundred teenagers and another five hundred younger children. Meanwhile, as the people laboured, the ores to sustain these levels of production poured in from Whitehaven, Barrow, Cornwall, Northampton, the Forest of Dean and Spain, in addition to the native ores of Wales. Most of that ore, in a great industrial cycle, was brought in by rail.

An extensive network of wrought iron rails was a pre-condition for creating the early railways. Fortunately, new technology was at hand to enable the mass production of iron that was required.

“PIG IRON WAS SUPERB FOR CASTING, BUT IF YOU NEEDED WROUGHT IRON YOU WERE STILL DEPENDENT ON THE OLD BLOOMERIES.”

Coal ships moored at Cardiff docks in the late nineteenth century. The railways provided the missing link that enabled the coal to be transported directly to the water and the world.

Presenters Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn, aboard and in front of a beautifully restored old steam engine.

The triumph of wrought iron rails lasted for a mere 35 years before they were ousted by steel. Just as a technical leap in iron production allowed wrought iron to move from small-scale to large-scale manufacture, the ‘Bessemer process’ made steel into a mass-market material. Steel rails promised to last four times longer and consequently cut the costs of track maintenance. Henry Bessemer patented his process in 1856 and Dowlais was the first firm to take out a licence to use it. However, it took them nine more years of experimentation and investment before the first steel rails rolled their way out of the factory on wagons of the Taff Valley Railway. Theirs were not in fact the first to be laid. That honour fell to a small section of railway line at Derby station, produced from the results of an abortive experiment with scrap metal and the Bessemer process by Robert Forester Mushet at the Ebbw Vale Ironworks. However, once again Dowlais was soon producing a huge volume of rails and the massive exports that went with this output.

Whether you analyse slate, coal or iron – or indeed a host of other industries – you cannot fail to see the symbiotic nature of their relationship with railways. Without the heavy industry, there would have been no track and no locomotives; but without first the track and later the locomotives, there would have been precious little industry. The two developed hand in hand, each taking the other up to the next level. Every advance for one sparked an advance for the other, throughout the nineteenth century.