An Encyclopedia of the History of Technology part 59 pps

PART THREE: TRANSPORT
562
Evidently Seguin quickly discovered their inadequacy, for he too was soon
using exhaust steam to draw the fire.
Americans, too, were at this stage closely observing railway development in
Britain. In 1829, Horatio Allen obtained the locomotive Stourbridge Lion from
Foster, Rastrick & Co. of Stourbridge. (Her sister locomotive Agenoria is now
the oldest locomotive in Britain’s National Railway Museum.) She was
intended for a railway belonging to the Delaware & Hudson Canal Co., but on
trial she caused excessive damage to light track laid with wooden rails and iron
straps, and was not put into regular service.
The mainstream of locomotive development continued to be that of the
Stephensons in Britain. Rocket’s cylinders were originally inclined at about 45°,
which enabled her to be carried on springs, but she was still cumbersome at
speed. The cylinders were soon lowered so as to be nearer horizontal. Then, in
1830, Robert Stephenson designed the locomotive Planet for the L&MR with
cylinders positioned horizontally beneath the smokebox, and drive from the
connecting rods to a crank axle. In its layout, Planet was the ancestor of all later
conventional steam locomotives.
THE RAILWAY AT WORK
The Liverpool & Manchester Railway was opened on 15 September 1830. It had
been promoted to carry freight between the growing port of Liverpool and the
growing industrial town of Manchester, but it was in fact as a passenger carrier
that it saw great and near-instant success. Britain at this period was crisscrossed
with a highly developed network of horse-drawn coach services—over the
previous fifty years improvements to the roads, and in administration of coaches,
had halved journey times (see Chapter 8). Coaching was an effective and
admired means of transport for passengers and mails. Yet however good the
administration, however smooth the roads, coaches could never exceed the
speed of galloping horses, which in practice, allowing for halts to change horses
every ten miles or so, meant overall speeds of about 16kph (10mph).

Rocket demonstrated at Rainhill for the first time the superiority of the steam
railway over all other known forms of land transport. This was confirmed as
soon as the Liverpool & Manchester was opened. A journey of four and a half
hours by coach was reduced to one of two hours or less by train. Furthermore,
the fare often shillings for the best coach accommodation was reduced to seven
shillings for first class rail. Train speeds were subsequently increased, and fares
reduced. By 1832 there was but one road coach left between Liverpool and
Manchester, where formerly there had been 26. This effect was to be repeated
wherever main line railways were built in Britain.
The actual vehicles in which the L&M passengers were carried cannot have
seemed too unfamiliar. In the absence of a precedent the first class railway
RAIL
563
coaches were made up of three road coach bodies of the period mounted upon
a single four-wheeled railway wagon underframe. When, later, railway coach
bodies were built as a unit, the practice of dividing the accommodation into
separate compartments continued. Those wealthy enough to travel by road in
their own carriages took advantage of railway speed: private carriages, with
their occupants, were carried on flat wagons wherever the railway coincided
with a traveller’s intended route, or part of it. For those accustomed to travel
outside on road coaches, second class railway coaches, simple but roofed, were
provided, third class coaches, for the poor, were little more than open boxes on
wheels, but to occupants whose only other option was travel at walking pace,
whether on their own feet or by road carrier’s wagon, the speed alone must
have seemed miraculous. Third class passengers were to be entitled by law
from 1844 to be carried in carriages provided with seats and protected from
the weather, in trains which ran at least once a day over each line.
Railway coaches were coupled together by chains; dumb buffers, that is,
extensions of the wooden frames, were soon made slightly resilient by leather
padding. Spring buffers and screw couplings minimized the jerks of starting

and stopping: they were invented by Henry Booth and introduced in the early
1830s. For goods traffic, which began nearly three months after passenger
traffic, the L&MR provided four-wheeled open and flat wagons; for cattle and
pigs, open wagons with slatted sides, and for sheep double-deck vans. Coal
was carried in open wagons, and also in small containers, the practice of canals
in the vicinity.
The track of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway was made of malleable
iron rails, weighing 35lb/yd (17.4kg/m) and 15ft (4.5m) long, carried in castiron
chairs mounted on stone blocks or, in places where subsidence was possible,
on oak sleepers. As for the gauge of the track, wagonways of north-east
England had always been laid to gauges between four and five feet, convenient
for a wagon to be hauled by a single horse, and George Stephenson adopted
the gauge of 4ft 8in. (142cm) for the Stockton & Darlington Railway and then
the Liverpool & Manchester. Later it was found necessary to add half an inch,
to produce the British standard gauge of 4ft 8 1/2in. (1.435m). The rails soon
proved too weak for locomotives and from 1833 rails weighing 50lb/yd
(24.8kg/m) were substituted. The track was double, each track being used for
trains in one direction: this was an early and important advance on the
Stockton & Darlington, which was single track with passing sidings, an
arrangement which would scarcely have been practicable with the much higher
speeds of the L&M. Policemen were stationed at intervals of a mile or so along
the route and indicated to drivers whether the road was clear or obstructed,
using hand signals, or swinging lamps at night. From 1833, flagpoles were
installed at junctions and crossings, from which flags were displayed to warn of
obstructions, and the following year the first fixed signals were erected.
Vertically pivoted boards were positioned at right angles to the track to indicate
PART THREE: TRANSPORT
564
danger or parallel to it for ‘clear’. The practice arose of allowing one train to
follow another only after a fixed minimum interval of time had elapsed—the

time interval system.
Apart from its western extremity, where tunnels operated by cable haulage
led down to the docks and up to the passenger terminus, the route was for the
most part easily graded and without sharp curves. To achieve this, there were
substantial cuttings, embankments and viaducts. In these and other civil
engineering works such as a skew bridge at Rainhill, and construction of that
part of the line which lay across the Chat Moss peat bog on a foundation of
hurdles and branches of trees, the builders of the railway used established
techniques developed for canal and road construction.
Locomotive development continued swiftly. The Stephensons had shown
the way, but other engineers were quick to develop their own ideas and
establish locomotive building works. Notable among them was Edward Bury,
whose locomotive Liverpool, built in 1830, anticipated Planet in the use of near-
horizontal cylinders driving a crank axle, but did not at first have a
multitubular boiler: not until one was fitted did she perform satisfactorily. The
frames of Liverpool and subsequent Bury locomotives were positioned ‘inside’,
or between the wheels, and made from iron bar, giving them a deceptively
insubstantial appearance. Planet, by contrast, had substantial outside frames of
the ‘sandwich’ type—timber strengthened on both sides by iron plates, and
additional inside frames which supported the crank axle. Sandwich frames
became for many years a feature of Stephenson locomotives.
The original Planet had her four wheels uncoupled: she was a 2–2–0. (The
usual Whyte notation used to describe locomotive wheel arrangements gives
the number of leading wheels, followed by the number of driving wheels,
coupled together in groups where this applies, followed in turn by the number
of trailing wheels.) In 1831, Robert Stephenson & Co. built two modified
Planet-type locomotives, for the L&MR’s goods trains, as 0–4–0s, with the two
pairs of wheels coupled by rods. Then, because four-wheeled locomotives were
damaging the L&MR’s light track, they developed the 2–2–0 Planet into the 2–
2–2 Patentee. Locomotives with this wheel arrangement were to be familiar on

British passenger trains for the rest of the nineteenth century. The 0–4–0 type
was similarly developed into the 0–4–2 and the 0–6–0, which became the
standard British goods locomotive.
The first locomotives with horizontal cylinders positioned outside the
frames were 2–2–0s built in 1834 by George Forrester of Liverpool for the
L&MR and for the Dublin & Kingstown Railway, and subsequently for the
London & Greenwich Railway. The latter two, opened in 1834 and 1836–8
respectively, were the first steam railways to reach the capitals of Ireland and
England. Neither was very long, and to that extent they were typical of many
railways opened in the early and mid-1830s. Some of these lines adopted the
steam locomotive technology of the L&MR, and branch lines, built by separate
RAIL
565
companies, had linked the L&MR with Warrington to the south (1831) and
Wigan to the north (1832), subsequently extended to Preston. Others still
continued in the earlier horse-railway tradition. Such was the Festiniog
Railway, opened as a horse-and-gravity tramroad with an exceptionally narrow
gauge of less than two feet (61cm) as late as 1836.
THE FIRST TRUNK LINES
Far more important than the short railways were the great trunk railways
incorporated and built during the 1830s. Even before the Liverpool &
Manchester Railway had been built there had been unrealized schemes for
extensive long-distance horse railways: now the L&MR had demonstrated that
long-distance steam railways were not merely practicable but highly desirable.
None the less, it was only after considerable opposition in Parliament (from
landowners, and those whose business lay with road or canal transport) that
Acts were passed in 1833, on the same day, for the London & Birmingham
Railway 180km (112 miles) long and the Grand Junction Railway 125km (78
miles). The latter was indeed to provide a grand junction line, from
Birmingham to Warrington, whence Liverpool and Manchester were already

accessible by rail, so that it would join three of the most important provincial
towns in England. It was built, for the most part, under the supervision of the
engineer Joseph Locke; the contractor for construction of its viaduct at
Penkridge, Staffordshire, was Thomas Brassey, at the start of a career which
was to make him the most famous of all Victorian railway contractors.
Robert Stephenson, engineer of the London & Birmingham, had a harder
task than Locke, for his route lay across the grain of the land: deep cuttings
through the ridges had to be excavated at Tring and Roade, and tunnels at
Watford and (famous for its length of over 2km (1.25 miles)) Kilsby. By these
means the ruling gradient on the line was kept to 1 in 330, for as long before
as 1818, George Stephenson had carried out experiments which had shown
that a gradient as easy as 1 in 100 would reduce the load which could be
hauled by a locomotive by half compared with a level line. Where the line left
its London terminus, Euston, there was almost a mile of 1 in 70: on this
inclined plane. stationary engines and cable haulage were at first used.
Other long-distance lines were also being authorized. The London &
Southampton Railway received its Act of Parliament in 1834, and much of it
was built by Locke and Brassey. The Great Western Railway, from London to
Bristol, was authorized in 1835, and the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel
successfully convinced his directors that the track should in due course be laid
to the broad gauge of 7ft 0 1/4in (2.14m). In the same year the Newcastle &
Carlisle Railway, which had been authorized, pre-Rainhill, in 1829 as the
longest British horse railway at 101km (63 miles) opened its first section, with
PART THREE: TRANSPORT
566
locomotives. An injunction was served on it to prevent their use, and the
company had to obtain a further Act to permit them.
In the following year, 1836, Acts of Parliament were passed for a whole
series of railways to form a cross-country route between Gloucester,
Birmingham, Derby, Leeds, York and Newcastle; and also for the Manchester

& Leeds Railway and (to extend the Great Western route) the Bristol & Exeter.
In 1837 a second cross-Pennine route was authorized, the Sheffield, Ashton-
under-Lyne & Manchester Railway, and so was the Lancaster & Preston
Junction Railway, to extend the line of the London & Birmingham and Grand
Junction Railways further northwards.
Also in 1837 came the first fruits of this period of railway promotion and
construction, with the opening of the Grand Junction Railway on 4 July. Part
of it was laid with a form of track developed by Locke—double-headed rails, of
84lb/yd (41.7kg/m), held in chairs mounted on wooden sleepers. It was the
prototype of the track, using bullhead rails, which was to be conventional in
Britain for a century. Over Locke’s track, Stephenson-built 2–2–2s hauled
trains of coaches similar to those on the L&MR, and took four and a half
hours for the 15 6km (97 miles) from Manchester to Birmingham: that is to
say, an average speed of 34.75kph (21.6mph) including stops.
The first section of the London & Birmingham was opened later the same
month, but extreme difficulties with the engineering works delayed completion.
At one stage Robert Stephenson had no less than thirteen steam engines at
work attempting to pump dry the quicksands encountered during construction
of Kilsby tunnel. They were, eventually, successful, and the London &
Birmingham was fully open throughout in September 1838. Intending
passengers approached its station at Euston by a magnificent Doric arch, and
at Birmingham Curzon Street the station building had a massive Ionic portico:
the start of a world-wide custom that city stations were to receive the grandest
architectural treatment of their day (see Chapter 18).
Opening of the L&B meant that there was through railway communication
not only between London, Liverpool and Manchester, but also, within a
month, as far north as Preston. One immediate consequence was that the
travelling post office, in which letters were sorted on the move, became a
permanent institution between London and Preston. The system had first been
tried experimentally earlier in the year on the GJR.

Allied with this was the development of mail-bag exchange apparatus, with
which bags could be dropped from, and picked up by, a train travelling at
speed It was first installed at Boxmoor on the London & Birmingham in 1837.
Edward Bury was appointed locomotive superintendent of the L&BR, and
supplied it with locomotives to his design.
The London & Southampton Railway was completed in 1840, having first
changed its name to London & South Western Railway. The London &
Croydon Railway, authorized in 1835 and in effect a branch of the London &
RAIL
567
Greenwich, was opened in 1839, and the route extended to Brighton by the
London & Brighton Railway opened in 1841. The Great Western opened its
first section, at the London end, in 1838, and reached Bristol in 1841: Box
tunnel, by which the line pierced a spur of the Cotswolds on a gradient of 1 in
100, had taken five years to make. By 1841 the Bristol & Exeter was already
open to Bridgwater, and reached Exeter in 1844. The broad gauge Bristol &
Gloucester Railway was opened the same year, and at Gloucester for the first
time broad gauge met standard gauge, for the Birmingham & Gloucester had
been opened in 1840. Most of the other railways authorized in 1836 to make a
south-west to north-east route were completed between 1839 and 1844; the
Manchester & Leeds was opened in 1840 and the Sheffield, Ashton-under-
Lyne & Manchester in 1845. The first trunk railway in Scotland was the
Edinburgh & Glasgow authorized in 1838 and opened in 1842.
RAILWAY PROMOTION
The early 1840s were a period of consolidation, when the railways authorized
during the latter part of the previous decade were built and opened. Then, as
the early main lines started to demonstrate how successful railways could be,
not only as public utilities but also in their return to investors, interest in
railway promotion re-awoke and soon, as speculators replaced investors,
inflated rapidly into a vast financial bubble, the railway mania of 1845.

Speculators would have covered Britain with a dense network of lines, but
many of these railways were paper schemes which vanished with the collapse
of the mania in 1846. Nevertheless there were sound substantial projects
among them, and from this period there date many railways which were to
form important components of the British railway network. From a little over
2570km (1600 miles) in 1842, the distance covered had grown to 9790km
(6084 miles) in 1850, and by 1860 the basic railway network of lowland
Britain was in existence. There remained to be built lines through the upland
areas of Wales and Scotland, branch lines in country districts elsewhere,
suburban lines, and main lines which would provide alternative routes to some
of those already in existence and would be built, in accordance with the spirit
of Victorian Britain, by competing companies. In this way most of the
remainder of the railway system was built up over the ensuing sixty years.
Brunel’s broad gauge had enabled the Great Western to run trains which
were faster, steadier and more comfortable than those of the standard gauge
railways: the disadvantage was the need to transfer passengers, freight and
frightened livestock between trains wherever there was a break of gauge. It first
became apparent at Gloucester and the supposed chaos of transfer at that point
was probably exaggerated by protagonists of the standard gauge companies
established in the Midlands and the North of England, which did not wish to
PART THREE: TRANSPORT
568
see the Great Western authorized to extend into their territory. The outcome
was the government-appointed Gauge Commission of 1845 which heard
evidence from both sides, competitive trials of broad and standard gauge trains
(suggested to the commission by Brunel) in which the broad gauge trains
proved vastly superior, and the Gauge of Railways Act 1846, which
nevertheless made the 4ft 8 1/2in gauge the legal standard, to which all new
passenger railways in Britain must be built unless they extended existing broad
gauge lines. The greater extent of standard gauge railways, 3600km (2236

miles) in 1844 compared with 375km (223 miles) of broad, had carried the
day. Most broad gauge lines were eventually either made mixed gauge, by the
addition of an extra rail, or narrowed; the last broad gauge sections were
eventually converted in 1892. In the mid-1840s there was nevertheless a
general feeling among engineers that, purely from an engineering viewpoint, a
broader gauge than 4ft 8 1/2in was desirable, even though Brunel’s 7ft was
excessive; and for Ireland, where the length of railways completed was still
comparatively small, the Gauge of Railways Act set the standard gauge at 5ft
3in (1.60m), existing railways being altered to suit.
MAIN LINE MOTIVE POWER AND OPERATION
Locomotive developments, 1840–50
Perhaps the most important general consequence of Brunel’s broad gauge was
the inducement it provided for designers of standard gauge locomotives to
improve the breed. During the early 1840s the principal passenger trains on
the Great Western were being hauled by 2–2–2s with 2.13m (7ft) diameter
driving wheels; sixty-two of these had been built to a design which locomotive
superintendent Daniel Gooch had developed from North Star, the GWR’s first
successful locomotive which Robert Stephenson & Co had built in 1837.
During the gauge trials, one of these averaged nearly 87kph (54mph) from
Didcot to London with an 80-tonne train. An enlarged and improved version,
the 4–2–2 Iron Duke class of 1846, had 2.4m (8ft) diameter driving wheels
and a boiler which provided 431.8m
3
(4647.4ft
2
) of heating surface. Such
locomotives ran until the end of the broad gauge.
The broad gauge allowed ample space in which to arrange the components
of a locomotive. The standard gauge, it seemed, did not, particularly in view
of the opinion of the period that, for stability, the centre of gravity must be

kept low. In an attempt to increase boiler size and power, Robert Stephenson
introduced the long boiler type of locomotive in 1841: the wheelbase was
short, the boiler long, with the firebox overhanging the rear axle. Such
locomotives not unnaturally proved unsteady at speed, particularly when built
with outside cylinders. During the gauge trials, one of them overturned. It was
RAIL
569
to a long-boiler locomotive, however, that R.Stephenson & Co. in 1842 first
fitted link motion valve gear in place of the gab gear used previously.
T.R.Crampton believed that a locomotive would ride steadily if its centre of
gravity lay as near as possible to the horizontal line of the drawbar, and in
1842 patented two types of locomotive to achieve this. In one of them, the type
which is generally associated with his name, the driving axle was situated to
the rear of the firebox: this not only enabled a large boiler to be positioned low
down, but meant that the cylinders, though outside, could be brought back to
a position about mid-way along the locomotive and minimize any tendency for
it to nose from side to side. Locomotives of this type were built from 1846
onwards; the London & North Western Railway (which had been formed from
the London & Birmingham, Grand Junction and Liverpool & Manchester
Railways) was an early user.
In 1848 an exceptionally large Crampton locomotive, the Liverpool, was
built for the LNWR with 2.4m (8ft) diameter driving wheels and a total
heating surface of 212.75m
2
(2290ft
2
) Liverpool had three pairs of carrying
wheels and a total wheelbase of 5.6m (18ft 6in). She was on view at the Great
Exhibition of 1851 where the public could compare her with the latest GWR
broad gauge 4–2–2, Lord of the Isles. But whereas the Great Western locomotive

was an example of a type already proven and highly successful, Liverpool
damaged the track and was not perpetuated. She remained something of a
freak, though Cramptons of lesser size did enjoy some popularity for several
years on British railways and considerably more abroad. A much greater freak
was the single locomotive built to Crampton’s other patented type, in which
the boiler was located below the driving axle. This locomotive, Cornwall, was
built by the LNWR at the same time that it built the first of its rear-driving-
wheel Cramptons; her driving wheels were 2.6m (8ft 6in) in diameter and
their axle passed through a recess in the top of the boiler. In 1858, by which
date concern for a low centre of gravity had largely passed, Cornwall was rebuilt
with a new boiler mounted in the normal location.
Before that, indeed, during a period when many strange and curious
designs for standard gauge locomotives were attempted, some engineers had
already shown the way ahead: that it was wholly possible to design standard
gauge locomotives which were simple and well-proportioned, rode well and
had ample power for the work to be done. Notable among them was David
Joy. As chief draughtsman for E.B.Wilson’s Railway Foundry, Leeds, Joy
designed the Jenny Lind class 2–2–2 of which the first example was built for the
London & Brighton Railway in 1847 (see Figure 11.2). The boiler was long
and low, but the inside frames on which cylinders and driving axle were
mounted stopped short at the firebox; leading and trailing wheels were
mounted on outside frames, which meant that the firebox could be wide and
the total heating surface was over 75m
2
(800ft
2
): this, and a steam pressure of
8.3 bar (in a period when around 6 bar was usual) produced a machine of
PART THREE: TRANSPORT
570

adequate power which, in the words of her designer, ‘at high speeds, always
rolled softly, and did not jump and kick at a curve’.
Many comparable designs of 2–2–2s were introduced, and 2–4–0s
developed from them. There had been isolated instances in the 1830s and
1840s of locomotives with four wheels coupled, but they began to come into
general use in the 1840s. The same applied to tank locomotives, and (to a
lesser extent) locomotives with pivoted bogies on which two pairs of carrying
wheels were mounted.
Atmospheric traction
During the 1840s there was a period when it seemed to many people that
steam locomotives might be wholly superseded by atmospheric traction. In this
system, patented by Clegg and the Samuda brothers in 1839, a large diameter
iron tube was laid between the rails, with a continuous longitudinal slot along
its top. This was sealed by a leather flap. A piston within the pipe was
connected by a bracket through the slot to the leading vehicle of a train; the
flap was opened ahead of the bracket and re-sealed behind it. When the pipe
ahead of the train was exhausted by a stationary steam pump, atmospheric
Figure 11.2: Jenny Lind, simple and well-proportioned, was the first of a highly
successful class of passenger locomotives designed by David Joy and built from
1847 onwards.
RAIL
571
pressure propelled the train forwards. On trial, it did so remarkably effectively.
The system was installed on a one-mile extension of the Dublin & Kingstown
Railway, with an average gradient of 1 in 128, and trains ran at 48kph
(30mph) in service and considerably faster on test. It was then installed on part
of the London & Croydon Railway, and Brunel began to install it on the
steeply graded South Devon Railway. But in practice there were numerous
problems—not least that of keeping the long leather flap airtight. The Croydon
and Devon installations were never fully operational, the Irish one was

discontinued in 1855. There was one feature of the Croydon line, however,
which was a true forerunner of future developments: because of the difficulty
of installing points and crossings on a line with an atmospheric tube, the single
Croydon track equipped for atmospheric traction was, near Norwood, carried
up and over the steam tracks by the first flyover.
Signalling
The London & Croydon, or rather its engineer C.H.Gregory, was responsible
at this period for another development of lasting importance. This was the
semaphore signal. By the early 1840s railways such as the Grand Junction and
the Great Western were using disc signals, pivoted discs of various shapes
which faced the driver of an oncoming train to indicate danger and were
turned edgeways to indicate clear. Oil lamps displayed various colours to give
equivalent signals by night. Gregory’s signal was an adaptation of the visual
semaphore telegraph apparatus of the period (see p. 711ff.). Two arms, one for
each direction of traffic, were mounted at the top of the post and operated by
handles at the foot: an arm when horizontal indicated ‘danger’, one lowered to
45° ‘caution’, and a vertical arm (which was hidden within a slot in the post)
‘clear’. The first such signal was installed at New Cross, London, in 1841; they
were installed on the London & Brighton Railway shortly afterwards and
eventually came into general use. In 1843, at Bricklayers Arms Junction,
Gregory introduced a simple form of interlocking to prevent signals for
conflicting routes showing clear simultaneously, achieved by actuating the
signals by foot-operated stirrups which were linked together. A lever frame
operated the points.
Gradually, levers to work signals and points were brought together in lever
frames housed in signal boxes, and the signals positioned above the box. The
first signalling installation in which points and signals were fully interlocked
was designed by Austin Chambers and made at Kentish Town Junction, North
London Railway, in 1859. Eventually, signal arms for different directions of
travel came to be mounted separately; two indications only were given, ‘stop’

(horizontal) and ‘line clear’ (lowered to 45°), and signal posts were positioned
at the place which, when ‘stop’ was shown, trains must not pass.