Читать книгу Full Steam Ahead: How the Railways Made Britain - Peter Ginn - Страница 9

As I sit on a train gliding through the countryside, moving more quickly than the cars I can see on a nearby motorway, I wonder to myself how the passenger experience has changed over the years. Trains are an established part of our lives. Whatever we may think about them as they go by, they are not new to us. However, when the railways were first built, the impact of trains on the surrounding countryside was immense.

The train I am travelling in is a thoroughly modern ‘Pendolino’, and there is an unbroken, if somewhat complex, lineage between this train and the very first passenger trains. The Pendolino is closely related to the highly advanced but infamous public failure, the APT (Advanced Passenger Train). The APT was an attempt to improve the speeds achieved by the Intercity 125 trains that still run today. This quest for improving train speeds has led to many of the innovations on the railway and has directly impacted on the passengers over the decades.

The speed of the APT was increased through the deployment of a controversial tilting mechanism, but after a series of problems and a loss of financial and political support, the APT project was soon abandoned. The patents for the tilting mechanism were sold to the railway division of FIAT in Italy, who were working on their own set of tilting trains. These patents were used to improve the designs and eventually the Italian Pendolino was born.

The Pendolino trains have received their fair share of criticism, much of it relating to the passenger experience. The seats are crammed in and there is little room to spread out. If you are lucky enough to get a seat that is near one of the few windows on board, the view is limited and there is nowhere comfortable to rest your arm. Many of these restrictions on passengers are derived from high-speed rail safety regulations, which particularly apply when trains cross one another in a tunnel. I wonder what the views of a Victorian traveller aboard a Pendolino might have been, if their only other experience of rail travel had been aboard one of Britain’s first passenger trains?

The first recorded steam-powered device was the aeolipile, created in the first century AD, but it was in Britain during the eighteenth century that true advancements in steam power were made. Beginning with Thomas Savery’s steam pump in 1689, improvements were steadily made in the technology and steam became inseparable from the industrial revolution. As steam power was harnessed to create rotary motion and engines became lighter and more powerful, the idea of using a mobile steam engine that ran on rails became a reality.

The Class 390 Pendolino is an electric high-speed train operated by Virgin Trains in the United Kingdom. It uses Fiat Ferroviaria’s tilting train Pendolino technology and is built by Alstom.

The Advanced Passenger Train (APT) – this one pictured in 1972 – was a short-lived, early attempt to bring tilting train technology to Britain’s railways.

The InterCity 125 was the brand name of British Rail’s High Speed Train (HST) fleet, which was built from 1975 to 1982 and was introduced in 1976.

“THE BENEFITS TO PEOPLE WHO TRAVELLED BY STEAM RAILWAY WERE THAT THIS METHOD OF TRAVEL WAS BOTH CHEAPER AND FASTER.”

As with any new technology, it took time to work out how to make passenger trains profitable. The Stockton and Darlington railway (1825) had one passenger carriage named ‘Experiment’ and although it was pulled by a steam engine during special ceremonies and the like, it was usually pulled by horse. Horse-drawn railways were not new, as the rails allowed the horse to pull a much heavier load. This could just as easily be people as goods. One such example is the short-lived Swansea to Mumbles horse-drawn passenger railway of 1807.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway is considered by many to be the first true steam-hauled public railway service, featuring compartmentalized coaches and a proper timetable. The design of this railway’s coaches influenced many others, and early passenger travel on the steam railways began. The benefits to people who travelled by steam railway were that this method of travel was both cheaper and faster. The drawback was that, at times, it could be very uncomfortable. The movement of the train itself could cause discomfort, and driving wind and rain often added to the misery of the passengers. Sometimes, during or after heavy downpours, water would slosh around the bottom of the carriages and soot, smoke and cinders from the engine would find their way into passengers’ eyes or down their collars. However, this was the way of the future – and nothing was going to stop the railways.

BUILDING THE PERMANENT WAY

Once it became apparent that the railways were the way forward, several companies formed and many railways were built. Not all came to fruition and not all were successful, but the one thing that all the companies had in common was that they needed someone to construct the track, known as the ‘permanent way’. That someone was the ‘navvy’.

The word ‘navvy’ is an abbreviation of ‘navigator’ and is synonymous with the construction of the British railways. By the end of the nineteenth century, one in every hundred people in the UK was a navvy. The work of navvies – labourers, essentially – is often equated with large historical building projects, such as the great pyramid at Giza. However, it is much harder to envision the scale of the railway navvies’ work compared with that involved in a single-site construction project. Additionally, whereas an individual monument will often show evidence of an associated workers’ village, the very nature of the permanent way meant that the transient camps that navvies established left little or no remaining trace on the landscape.

NAVVY CAMP

In order to better understand how navvies lived and worked, we travelled to Herefordshire, where Colin Richards had erected a navvy camp based on a nineteenth-century photograph. Stepping into the camp was like going back in time. We had certainly picked the day for it, as we had had a relatively mild winter but this was the first truly cold day. The night before temperatures had dropped as low as minus ten degrees, and during the day they never got above freezing. The surrounding countryside looked magical, with trees covered in a heavy frost, but it was so cold that even the smallest leaves hanging directly above the blacksmith’s forge never thawed out.

My father used to say to me that ‘any fool can be cold and wet’. I have spent much of my life outdoors and have always heeded these words, but the one part of my body that I find the hardest to keep warm is my feet, especially when I am wearing hobnail boots. The metal studs seem to conduct the cold and no amount of socks ever seem to help.

We met Colin Richards next to the still. He was brewing up a carrot whisky and we had a glass as we talked about health and safety. The nineteenth-century navvies were relatively well paid when compared with farm labourers or factory workers, but they had to work very hard. They had a reputation for playing hard, too. It is a common misconception that the navvies were Irish. Although some navvies who worked on the railways came from Ireland, they represented only about ten per cent of the total number of men who worked on the permanent way.

“THE WORK OF NAVVIES – LABOURERS, ESSENTIALLY – IS OFTEN EQUATED WITH LARGE HISTORICAL BUILDING PROJECTS, SUCH AS THE GREAT PYRAMID AT GIZA.”

Presenter Ruth Goodman looking out of the train window on her way to navvy camp.

Many of the navvies were local men, but the promise of good money also attracted seasonal workers, who often came from the farms that the railways disrupted. However, many workers were dedicated, full-time navvies who operated in groups known as gangs and followed the work around the countryside. These groups started out pretty small, but grew in size as the demand for railways increased.

Many established communities feared the arrival of the navvies, as they passed through villages and towns constructing the permanent way. They had no roots and were often viewed as having no religion. Their rough lifestyle, combined with a disposable income, meant that the local innkeepers were generally kept happy. However, the navvies had a reputation for fighting, and tensions between rival gangs competing for work were often settled in a bar room brawl.

Anyone who has ever visited Camden in north London has probably noticed the sheer amount of urban infrastructure there that is associated with the railways. Camden was at one time quite a rural area, but the railways quickly changed that. The district lies in spitting distance of three of Britain’s largest train stations: King’s Cross, Euston and St Pancras. It also proudly boasts the Camden roundhouse, one of the oldest railway buildings to survive, and is criss-crossed by sidings, main lines and the underground.

Peter Ginn and Alex Langlands being welcomed by Colin Richards at the navvy camp.

To build all of this, navvies had to be in the area for a long time. Thus, in order to prevent trouble and to avoid injuries from fighting that might prevent a gang from working, multiple pubs were constructed to segregate the different nationalities. The four pubs in question were the Edinburgh castle, the Dublin castle, the Windsor castle (no longer a pub) and the Pembroke castle.

When navvies moved through towns or villages, they would generally stay in local lodgings. However, much of the urbanization we see associated with railway lines post-dates the lines being built. Indeed, much of the housing in Camden, especially around Primrose Hill, consists of cottages that were hastily erected in order to house railway workers.

Many of the navvies working on the permanent way would have found themselves effectively in the middle of nowhere, living in makeshift dwellings, and drinking homemade hooch, rather like Colin Richards’ carrot whisky. As we sipped from our glasses and the burn in our throats fended off the chill in the air, Colin gave each of us a bowler hat.

In the mid-nineteenth century, life was cheap and health and safety was in its infancy. Industrial accidents were commonplace and a navvy’s work was often dangerous, especially during the construction of tunnels or deep embankments. A navvy had to trust that the environment they were working in was as safe as possible. They also had to trust those around them – but ultimately they were responsible for their own safety.

The bowler hat was a popular choice of headgear amongst the Victorian working classes. The hat is believed to have been commissioned by Edward Coke (pronounced ‘Cook’), who approached the London hatters Locke & Co. Coke wanted a hat for his gamekeepers at Holkham Hall that could withstand a blow from low hanging branches when they were on horseback and, if tales are to be believed, a thump over the head from a poacher’s stick. The resulting stiff felt hat withstood Coke stamping on it twice and, satisfied with its strength, he replaced his gamekeepers’ previous headgear of choice – the top hat.

Both the top hat and the bowler hat were originally designed with a practical, hard-wearing purpose in mind, as opposed to being mere fashion statements.

The bowler hat does have other names, such as the Billycock or the Derby. One thing that is certain: it has become an iconic piece of headwear. It is very similar to a modern hardhat. It has a rim that gives the eyes protection from either debris falling from above or from catching yourself on a protruding nail when turning your head. It keeps the rain off and is relatively hard. If I were a navvy and had the choice, I would definitely have worn a bowler hat.

During the twentieth century, the bowler became synonymous with gentlemen working in the city. It is part of the guards’ walkout uniform for officers, along with a pinstriped suit and a tightly furled umbrella. This has meant that the hat’s original working class origins have faded. Indeed, while wearing my own bowler hat at navy camp, I lost count of the number of people who, upon spying it, said to me ‘you must be the foreman’. My reply was to inform them that if they ever travelled to South America they should try and visit one of the indigenous ethnic groups known collectively as the Quechuas. British railway workers introduced the hat to the continent in the 1920s, and to this day many of the Quechua women still wear bowler hats.

For many men in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a bowler hat was part of standard everyday attire.

SAW MILL

One of our first jobs at the navvy camp was tarring sleepers. However, before we could do that we had to make the sleepers in the first place. The railways were a new technology. No one knew how a train powered by steam would behave as it moved along rails. In the early days (the 1830s) it was thought that the track had to be rigid. It is easy to see how that idea could gain credence, as powerful, heavy but inefficient engines moved slowly along the permanent way.

Early sleepers were made out of stone, and to ensure maximum rigidity these sleepers were often concreted into position. The rails that made the track were initially quite short and simply spanned the gap between the rigid sleepers. Stone was a cheaper material than wood, but as the railway technology rapidly progressed and rails were made longer, it soon became apparent that something had to give – both literally and economically! Although it was more expensive, the plain fact was that wood offered the extra degree of flexibility that was required by several tons of train and freight moving at speed.

So, in time, the stone sleepers were removed and wooden ones took their place. As an interesting aside, the spire at St Walburge’s church in Preston is the third tallest spire in the UK after those of Salisbury and Norwich cathedrals (and the tallest spire of any parish church). It is constructed exclusively from the limestone sleepers that were removed from the Preston and Longridge Railway.

Presenters Peter Ginn and Alex Langlands making ready to fell a tree for the production of wooden railway sleepers.

In 2007, road excavations uncovered a number of intact stone sleepers that were used as long ago as 1825 for the Stockton and Darlington railway. These were the very first sleepers to be laid down and weighed only 75lb, so that they could be carried by one person. However, they soon proved to be too flimsy and were quickly replaced by larger ones. Most of the 64,000 original sleepers were destroyed, but some were used in a retaining wall and it was these that were uncovered during the works for the Darlington Eastern Transport Corridor.

The sheer number of main lines, branch lines and sidings mean that the total number of railway sleepers in use in Britain is absolutely colossal. In the 1930s, at arguably the height of Britain’s railways in terms of infrastructure, the Great Western company owned an estimated 9,000 miles of track which equated to almost 20 million sleepers in use. However, sleepers, like rails, had to be replaced and during the same period the London, Midland and Scottish railway had an annual requirement of 1.25 million sleepers.

By the 1930s, sleeper production was big business, involving the mass importation of wood and extensive mechanical processing and treating. One hundred years earlier, it was a different story. Some early wooden sleepers were manufactured in the half round. This would mean harvesting young managed woodland, sawing the wood to length (which in the Victorian era was nine feet, becoming eight and a half feet in the twentieth century), and splitting the log in two. Splitting a log is a lot easier and quicker then sawing it, and if the tree has grown in relative shelter and the grain is straight, the split should result in a nice, flat face.

These half-round sleepers persisted for a while and crossed over with the uniform square-cut sleepers that are well known today. A type of wooden sleeper that was very short lived was the triangular sleeper, with the apex of the triangle driven down into the ballast stones. A triangle is the profile that one would achieve when splitting a tree with a much larger circumference into sleeper-sized chunks. The problem with split wood is that each face is unique and will be governed by the grain. Mass production requires order and uniformity. The nine-foot wooden sleeper with a square-cut end of ten by five inches was quickly adopted as standard.

The permanent way had to be as level as possible, as trains struggle with inclines and steep gradients are out of the question. The steepest sustained gradient on Britain’s railways, that does not employ a third rail for traction like a fell system, is Lickey Incline. At two miles long, it has a gradient of 1 in 37.7 or 2.65 per cent. Steam trains ascending this incline would often need bankers, which are other steam engines, to help them push their load uphill.

Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn inspecting the angle of the ‘gob’ they have cut in the tree. This initial cut dictates the direction in which the tree will fall.

The creation of the permanent way involved building bridges, boring tunnels, digging cuttings and compiling embankments. As the navvies constructed the permanent way across a landscape that had not been significantly altered since the time of James I, they encountered many obstacles that either had to be avoided or demolished.

Often the navvies would have to remove trees that could be used as sleepers. Hardwoods such as oak were the most sought after for this purpose. At navvy camp, we felled an oak tree in order to cut it into sleepers. When felling a tree you must first look at the landscape and decide which way you want the tree to fall. You need to consider other trees and whether the branches will catch them as the felled tree falls down. The wind will always be a factor, and when we felled our oak, the wind speed was high. However, due to the size of the tree, we could fell it directly into the wind.

Once you have decided on the direction in which you want the tree to fall, you need to cut a notch known as a ‘gob’. I have always been taught, when felling with a two-man saw, to cut the horizontal bottom cut first. This is a very important cut and worth taking the time to get right, as this will determine the way in which the tree falls. It is essential to keep the saw level and have the perpendicular line formed by the cut to be in the direction you wish the tree to fall. Then, using a felling axe, the gob can be cut out by chopping down onto the cut you have made in the tree.

Once the gob has been created, a cut from the other side of the tree is made in order to fell it. It is important to establish lines of safety. Anywhere in front of the tree is a no-go area and directly behind the tree is also dangerous – both because a tree can fall the wrong way, but also because a tree when falling can kick backwards. The accepted safe paths are on each side of a tree at 120 degrees to the direction of the intended fall. The safest place to stand is behind the nearest big tree.

Cutting a tree down to make way for a railway is only half the story. The real problem is the stump. Victorian stumps were usually a lot higher than modern tree stumps, because of how a two-man saw was used. However, even if the stump was cut down to ground level, laying track over the top of it would only result in serious problems later on, when the stump rotted out or the tree tried to grow back (often from the roots).

In market gardening, tree stumps were often removed mechanically or by the use of an explosive such as stumping powder or dynamite. The navvies working on the permanent way were more likely to dig down into the ground around the stump, set a fire and smother the whole thing in leaf litter and earth. The result would be a clamp that would burn the remaining stump into charcoal. This could then be used as fuel for blacksmithing or simply for domestic fires. Although many trees were cut down to meet the demands of the railways, no part of the tree was ever wasted.

Once our tree was on the ground, we could get round to processing it. The first job is to remove the branches and is known as ‘snedding’. The trunk can then be cut into sections, with the objective of obtaining as many nine-foot sleepers as possible firmly in mind. To cut the trunk sections into sleepers, we used Britain’s only working water-powered saw mill, on the Gunton estate in Norfolk, just outside Cromer.

“IN MARKET GARDENING, TREE STUMPS WERE OFTEN REMOVED MECHANICALLY OR BY THE USE OF AN EXPLOSIVE SUCH AS STUMPING POWDER.”

Peter and Alex stand over the felled tree. A two-man saw necessarily leaves quite a high stump. This then needs to be removed.

The beautiful rural setting of Gunton saw mill near Cromer, Norfolk, which is still in operation to this day.

Built in 1824, just before Britain’s railway bonanza, by the third Lord Suffield, the saw mill is a remarkable building housing a remarkable piece of kit. It was originally intended to be used as a processing plant for all of the estate’s timber, and just outside the doors of the building are the remnants of hastily poured concrete that represented the additional two circular saw pits made by the allies during the Second World War.

However, by the mid-1970s the building had completely fallen into disrepair. The thatch had started to rot, there had been a fire, and the two-and-a-half ton cast-iron flywheel had fallen from its mountings. The Norfolk county council, the local windmill trust and industrial archaeology society collectively drew up plans. With the help of the last remaining tenanted Harbord family member, Doris – and after her passing, the estate’s new owner Mr Kit Martin – the water-powered saw mill was saved.

When Alex and I first entered the building, he noted the recently thatched roof. Between the thatch and the rafters was a layer of woven reeds – known as ‘fleeking’ – that Alex commented upon. I told him that I had once lived in a thatched building and it too had been f-ing leaking…!

An ancient rural water wheel and mill with a substantial water source in the foreground.

One of the notable aspects of the Gunton saw mill was just how dry the building was inside considering that there were two huge water wheels at the back. The sides of the building are wooden slatted panels that can be removed to increase light and more importantly to create an opening through which the tree trunk to be processed can be passed. I found the hardest aspect of the whole process to be moving the trunk from the yard outside to the saw bench. We used block and tackle, which through a series of pulleys gives the rope being pulled a mechanical advantage. We hauled the log in and got it set on the bench. After that, the saw mill did all the work.

The water power for the saw mill comes from a man-made lake that covers close to forty acres. We lifted the sluice gate and filled the headrace that channels the water onto the wheels inside. There are two wheels, one to drive our saw and one to power a grain crusher. They idly turn just on the water that leaks through the gaps. The benefit of this is that it stops the paddles of the wheel drying out and splitting and prevents an imbalance in the wheel between a wet and a dry side. A sluice gate for each wheel that regulates the flow of water is operated from inside. These effectively act as throttles for the wheels, but even when we fully opened the gates and had the wheels turning at full pelt, there was very little noise.

A powered frame saw of the type that would have been used for cutting wooden railway sleepers in the nineteenth century.

The wheels are ‘breast-shot’, which means that the water hits the paddles of the wheel at about the height of the axle and runs underneath the wheel. Early water wheels tended to be ‘undershot’ wheels, which sat on a stream or a river and utilized the kinetic energy. The most powerful water wheels are ‘overshot’ wheels, which use both the kinetic and gravitational potential energy of water flowing into them. Breast-shot wheels are found in places like Gunton, where the landscape does not naturally provide a height advantage. However, the funnelling of a huge millpond into a narrow millrace changes the pressure created by the weight of the water into velocity.

The saw itself was exactly the same as a pit saw, except instead of being worked by two people – one standing at the top and the other at the bottom – this saw was fitted to a large frame that moved up and down. We only had one saw in place, but when cutting planks it was possible to fix multiple saws at set distances. The key was to make sure that they were all exactly aligned.

As the saw moved up and down, the gearing designed by a clock maker could be engaged. Similar to an escapement mechanism in a pendulum clock, this periodically turns an axle attached to two pinion gears, which moved two racks attached to the underside of the frame upon which the log to be cut was chained. This moved the log through the saw a fraction of an inch at a time. As the log passed through the saw, the chains and the cross-struts of the frame were removed and re-attached so that the saw only cut the log. This was relatively straightforward, but nevertheless we set the saw at the lowest speed. I was told it was frightening when the saw was going at full pelt.

Just as with a pit saw, as the log went through we tapped thin wedges into the cut to open it up and stop the wood biting the saw. However, unlike a pit saw, we did not need to chalk a line for the cut. Instead, plumb bobs were used to eye up the cut of the saw, but once the log was strapped in their was no deviation to the cutting line. When a log is first put on the frame to be cut, it is strapped to a plank to give it some stability. Once a face has been cut, the log can be turned onto it and it becomes steady.

These water-powered frame saws were reasonably common throughout Europe and there were a number in Norfolk. However, pit saw workers did not welcome them, because they rendered many men redundant. They were also short lived, because circular saws took over and steam power followed by diesel and electricity became the power sources of choice. The mill at Gunton survived because of its position on an estate isolating it from the outside world and because it was never taken over commercially.