Tremendous Machines Part 3

In the second post in this series, I covered the Rainhill Trials, an event that forms a part of A Dangerous Connection. We had left things off with the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, and in this post I'm going to cover the railway mania that followed.

The Liverpool and Manchester, and the Stockton and Darlington before it, showed that railways could be viable for passengers as well as freight. It was followed by a succession of major railways, including:

• Grand Junction Railway: 1837
• London and Birmingham Railway: 1838
• London and South Western Railway (LSWR): 1840 
• Great Western Railway (GWR): 1841

By the mid 1840s, a significant portion of Britain's current mainline rail network was built. This boggles my mind every time I think about it. The golden age of (horsed) coach travel was from 1824 to 1838, and within about a decade, that form of travel was completely disrupted. I think there's a tendency to always believe that the age we're currently living in is the one of greatest change, and certainly our AI world of today is a good candidate for this. But I think Britain's complete transportation revolution in this time holds a strong claim as well.

For our Pride and Prejudice characters, the way they would travel from London to Derbyshire in 1835 is completely different than the way they would do it in 1845. So what was that 1845 passenger experience like?

For a very long time, the railway carriages themselves (at least for first class) were very similar to the ones inside a horse carriage. Indeed, they look very much like stagecoaches that have been put on a railway frame:

 

National Railway Museum, York

 

National Railway Museum, York

Locomotion Museum, Shildon

Locomotion Museum, Shildon

York Railway Museum

Hopetown Darlington

Here's a video showing more details of that railway carriage from Hopetown Darlington:

 As you can see in these photos and video, first class was a fairly consistent offering, while second class varied a bit more. You might have poorer fittings there, or seats with little or no padding.

Third class could be even more dicey. It might be a carriage with a roof but nothing in the way of creature comforts, but it could also be a completely open carriage. Not a great experience when you're rolling along faster than you've ever gone on a stagecoach and bits of burning cinder are flying at you. (And oh by the way, there's straw on the floor!)

"From a colour print by M.B. Cotsworth, Holgate, York", Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Hopetown Darlington

Hopetown Darlington

Contrast that with Queen Adelaide's carriage, built for the dowager queen (Queen Victoria's aunt) who was the first member of the royal family to travel by rail. This was as fancy as it got:

 

Queen Adelaide's Carriage, National Railway Museum

One thing that all of these railway carriages have in common is that you enter them through a door on the side, very similar to the way you would a horse-drawn carriage. I am so used to corridor trains where you can move from one car to another that it was surprising to learn this took a very long time to actually come into place in Britain. 

Isle of Wight Railway

The corridor coach was patented in 1865, but not rolled out to any extent until closer to the beginning of the 20th century. While on modern trains the aisleway is up the middle, between sets of seats, in earlier times (and still on many sleeper trains today) it was on one side of the train, with compartments located off of the aisle.

Severn Valley Railway

 Passengers and goods weren't the only thing travelling on the new railways. Any time a new railway opened, the Royal Mail was quick to transfer to this faster means of getting the post around Britain.

Replica Royal Mail Carriage, National Railway Museum

 

Another view of the replica Royal Mail Carriage

Meanwhile, stations in the beginning were non-existent; you would just wait on the platform for the train. That changed pretty quickly, however, and there are still many extant Victorian era stations in England. 

 

North Road Railway Station, Darlington, built 1842

Interior of North Road Railway Station

In London, each railway company had a different station terminus (this is why there are so many different railway stations in London today), and they began to build impressive structures. 

 

Birmingham Curzon Street Station

The most noteworthy of these is Euston Station. The removal of its grand neoclassical arch in the 1960s was an architectural travesty, but I like to think about what it must have been like to pull up to this structure in a hackney carriage sometime after it was built in 1837, feeling all the excitement and perhaps also trepidation of this new form of travel ahead of you.

Edward Radclyffe (1809–1863), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 Euston also had the first railway hotel, a feature that would begin cropping up near major railway stations to give people a place to stay before or after their journey. You would want to ensure you were on time to catch your train, and trains actually changed time itself.

Before the railways, time was based on the position of the sun wherever you were. Nothing travelled fast enough to require any sort of standardized time until the railways. With standardized time also came timetables: the London and Birmingham Railway coined the term "timetable" in 1838, and the first book of timetables was published in 1840.

Bradshaw's Railway Companion, 1840

What about the locomotives? Rocket paved the way for the multi-tube steam engine, and they also evolved rapidly. This locomotive from 1845 shows huge changes from the little locomotives of the Rainhill Trials.

 

Derwent locomotive, Hopetown Darlington

It's another locomotive I want to talk about to close out this series, but we will save that for part four. I hope you've enjoyed this installment, and if the coaching age that came before it is of interest to you, I've got good news! I will be doing a presentation on "Travel and Hospitality in Jane Austen's World" at this year's JAFF Con. There was so much to cover in this that it will be my longest presentation yet, and I'm very excited to give it. If you want to see it "live," there's still opportunity to do that. But I will also be making a version available to newsletter subscribers after the conference as I have with my other talks.