Blood, Iron and Gold

How the Railways Transformed the World

Christian Wolmar

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781848874343
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The birth of the railways and their rapid spread across the world triggered economic growth and social change on an unprecedented scale.

From Panama to the Punjab, Tasmania to Turin, Blood, Iron and Gold describes the vision and determination of the pioneers who developed railways that would link cities that had hitherto been isolated, and would one day span continents. Christian Wolmar reveals how the rise of the train stimulated daring feats of engineering, architectural innovation and the rapid movement of people and goods around the world. He shows how cultures were enriched - and destroyed - by the unrelenting construction and how the railways played a vital role in civil conflict, as well as in two world wars. Blood, Iron and Gold tells the dramatic story of how the railways changed the world.

ONE

THE FIRST RAILWAYS

It was the world's first global news story. In September 1830, just fifteen years after the Battle of Waterloo, the inaugural train chugged along the tracks at the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway. This sumptuous event, attended by the victor at Waterloo, the prime minister the Duke of Wellington, and a host of notables, attracted hundreds of thousands of onlookers. Memorabilia, ranging from penny handkerchiefs and snuffboxes to dinner sets and framed artists’ impressions, were on sale and the whole world seemed to be watching. Newspapers as far afield as America and India covered the occasion with an awareness that this was an epoch-making event that would change the world. However, not even the most far-sighted and imaginative reporter of the day could possibly have predicted just how fast this transformation would take place and how widely the impact of this new invention would be felt.

The event's significance had not been missed. The Liverpool & Manchester was far more advanced than any of its predecessors or any other line being considered elsewhere in the world. It was double tracked, powered entirely by steam and connected two of the world's most important cities of the day. It was not, of course, the world's first railway, but while its predecessors had been created principally for the transport of coal or other minerals from a mine to navigable water, the Liverpool & Manchester carried traffic, including passengers, in both directions. Thanks to Britain's place as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, not only was British technology the most advanced in the world but its application was far more widespread and developed than elsewhere. Consequently, many foreign dignitaries and, more important, engineers eager to reproduce the technology back home, were among the thousands of people who lined the tracks watching the proceedings.

There was, for example, William Archibald Bake,¹ a Dutch artillery officer, who would return home to press for a railway to link Amsterdam with a proposed network of Prussian railways in the Rhineland. Rumours spread through the city that several Americans and Russians were at the opening on fact-finding missions, and xenophobia bubbled under the surface with dark talk of spies and agents from potentially hostile countries intent on stealing the technology. Indeed, a pair of Americans, Horatio Allen, chief engineer of the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company, and his companion, E.L. Miller, had already dropped in to the Rainhill Trials the previous year. All these people and many more were ready to become proselytizers for railways, taking the message back home that the iron horse had arrived and was here to stay.

Without the development of the cheap transport enabled by the railways, the economic development stimulated by the Industrial Revolution would have stalled or remained localized for far longer. Instead, the railways were the catalyst for the spread of technology and would initiate the process of globalization that culminated with the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web. From its isolation in small communities, the human race was brought together by the railway, for better or worse. Within a decade of the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, trains pulled by steam locomotives had spread across Europe and started running in North America. Within a quarter of a century, railways had sprung up in the most unlikely places, ranging from Cuba and Peru to Egypt and India. While these new opportunities to travel had huge beneficial effects, they also facilitated the fighting of wars and hastened the decline of many industries.

Britain's role in this process was seminal. While jingoistic writers are apt to exaggerate its importance in world history, with regard to the history of the railways it is almost impossible to do so. British technology formed the basis of so many different railways that the British tradition was dominant for decades, and its capital helped to fund projects not only in the large part of the world that was pink on the map, but also in Europe and Latin America. The locomotives of George Stephenson, who was largely responsible for the engineering of the Liverpool & Manchester, for example, would provide the basic design for many railways. A prominent part of the British legacy is the gauge of 4ft 8½ins – the distance between the rails that Stephenson chose for the Liverpool & Manchester – which would rightly become known as ‘standard’ because it is the most widely used gauge around the world.

Arguments about gauge cannot, unfortunately, be dismissed as a mere technical matter that is outside the scope of this book. Quite the opposite. Gauge plays an all too important role in this story because disputes over that crucial distance between the rails encompass a diverse range of other issues such as cost and speed, and making the wrong choice often resulted not only in massive sums of money being wasted but also in jeopardizing the profitability of whole railway networks. Gauge was a compromise between cost and practicality and Stephenson got it about right, which explains the popularity of his choice. Wider railways obviously cost far more to build and take up much more land, but could offer greater standards of comfort. Narrower railways were cheaper, slower and not able to accommodate as many people. The width between the rails is not, however, the only aspect of gauge. There is the ‘loading gauge’, the size of the ‘envelope’ required to accommodate trains which determines the size of tunnels, and the location of platforms and lineside equipment, and this is normally larger on standard gauge lines in Europe than for those in Britain. Stephenson did not always succeed in persuading the various foreign railways he advised to adopt his gauge and the legacy of that failure still proves costly today. In Spain, for example, which the ageing Stephenson visited in the 1840s, the nascent RENFE (Reo Nacional de los Ferrocariles Españoles²) rejected his pleas to adopt the standard gauge and, instead, chose 5ft 6ins,³ which was later used in several other countries, notably India and parts of Latin America.

Debate over gauge occurred in every country with a railway, even in Britain where the standard gauge was adopted relatively early following a Royal Commission on this vexed issue in 1845. That was already too late for the Great Western Railway which by then had built over 200 miles of line using Isambard Kingdom Brunel's favoured 7ft gauge and would not fully convert until the end of the century, causing great inconvenience, not least to Queen Victoria who was forced to change trains on her journeys from Windsor to Scotland, and enormous expense. This brief reference to gauge, a subject that comes up all too often, demonstrates why it is necessary to start this brief international history with an account of the prehistory and early history of the railways in Britain. While that story has been widely covered elsewhere,⁴ a short recap is essential for an understanding of the full account of the global spread of the railways.

The railways were made possible by a series of technical inventions over the space of a couple of centuries involving the development of steam engines, locomotives and rails. Railways were the answer to the long-established problem of how to transport heavy loads of coal and other minerals to rivers or the sea, and later to canals, where they could be transported for far greater distances. There is some evidence that putting goods in wagons to be hauled by people or animals along tracks predates Jesus Christ, and the earliest surviving representation of such a scene, dating from 1350, can be found in the minster at Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany. There were enough such lines to be discussed in a book published in 1556, and certainly by the sixteenth century in Britain there were numerous wagonways⁵ using crude wooden rails to help haul heavy wagons out of mines. Horses had begun to replace manpower to boost efficiency and combining the two ideas, horses and rails, which allowed far greater loads to be pulled, was the obvious next step. By the early eighteenth century in the principal German coal-producing area of the Ruhr, rather more sophisticated wooden wagonways were developed which guided the trucks to prevent them becoming derailed using a type of flange – an extra lip on the wheels to keep them on the track. These precursors of the railway had an important economic impact in the early days of the Industrial Revolution as coal consumption in Britain increased tenfold between 1700 and the early 1800s,⁶ serving both industrial and domestic needs.

In Britain, the network of wagonways that emerged in the northeast was so extensive that they became known as ‘Newcastle Roads’. By 1660, on Tyneside alone⁷ there were nine such wagonways, which became increasingly necessary as pits were extended deeper as the more accessible coal near the surface was extracted. In 1726 a group of coal owners, the Grand Allies, developed the idea further by agreeing to use a shared wagonway to link up their collieries which allowed them to rationalize coal movements. They even created a ‘main line’, a joint route, much of it double tracked, from several mines to the water which included the Causey Arch, a bridge with a 100ft span that lays claim to being the world's first railway bridge and survives today. These railways made extensive use of gravity since most of them led down to a waterway and therefore the horses had the relatively easy task of hauling the empty wagons back up the hills. As the putative railways increased in sophistication and length, wagons were coupled together to improve efficiency and by the 1750s, iron rails were introduced which proved far more durable than the wooden ones.

The other major technical development required for the establishment of the railways was, of course, the steam engine and, later, the development of self-propelled locomotives, a far more complex and difficult process. Again, the idea of steam power dated to classical times but the first working steam engines were probably those of John Newcomen, an ironmaster from Devon who built them in the early years of the eighteenth century. Applying principles which had been observed by a French scientist, Denis Papin, who had noticed that a piston contained within a cylinder was a potential way of exploiting the power of steam, Newcomen developed the idea to produce engines to pump water from the mines. He created something of a cottage industry, making sixty engines himself and, after his patents ran out, a further three hundred were built by other engineers over the next half-century, many for export to countries such as the USA, the German states and the Austrian Empire where one was even used to drive the fountains for Prinz von Schwarzenberg's palace in Vienna.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, it was James Watt who made steam power commercially viable by improving the efficiency of steam engines, and adapting them for a wide variety of purposes. The engines manufactured by the company he formed with Matthew Boulton were used to provide power for everything from ships and looms to sugar mills in the West Indies and cotton mills in the USA, but not for developing steam locomotives. Other inventors did try to put steam engines on wheels. The first to do so was the Frenchman Nicholas Cugnot whose fardier was intended to be used as an artillery tractor. On a test run in Paris, it reached a speed of 2.5 mph but hit a wall, overturned and was declared a public danger by the city authorities. It would never have run far anyway, since there was no way of replenishing the steam once it ran out. Various other inventors in England, Scotland and the USA built similar steam road locomotives but a historian of the railways dismissed these early efforts: ‘None of these pioneers made any contribution to the design or development of the steam locomotive.’⁸ Their problem, which explains why railways were developed more than fifty years before road vehicles, was that the roads, poorly built and little-maintained, were simply too bad to support their weight.

It was when Richard Trevithick, who had a short but crucial role in the history of the railways, hit upon the idea of putting steam engines on rails that a workable form of transport was developed. Trevithick, a Cornishman, has the best claim to the much disputed title of ‘father of the locomotive’. Whereas Watt and Boulton had insisted on only building low-powered engines, Trevithick developed the concept of using high-pressure steam, enabling him to obtain more power for a given weight. In 1801 he produced the world's first successful steam ‘road carriage’, which drove into a ditch because there was no steering mechanism and then exploded because he and his colleagues went off to the pub, forgetting to extinguish the fire under the boiler. When Trevithick developed an improved model the following year at Coalbrookdale, an ironworks in Shropshire, he had the brainwave of putting it on rails⁹ which not only dispensed with the need for steering but also gave it a firmer base than the muddy lanes which, at the time, passed for roads. In 1803, a Trevithick engine hauled wagons weighing 9 tons at a speed of 5 mph at Pen-y-Darren in Wales, another ironworks, which was certainly a world first. However, the primitive rails were not up to the task as the locomotive was too heavy, and consequently it was soon converted into a stationary engine powering cables to haul the wagons.

While steam engines proliferated, with 30,000 being in use in Manchester alone by 1830, the development of locomotives was slow, not only because of the technical difficulties but also as a result of doubts about whether they would ever justify the large amount of investment required to perfect them. When Trevithick built a locomotive with the playful name Catch Me Who Can and demonstrated it successfully on a circular track near the present site of Euston Station in London, there was no interest in producing it commercially. Poor Trevithick gave up and went to South America to develop stationary steam engines for use in the gold and silver mines of Peru.

Other engineers attempted to build locomotives with little success and it was not until 1814 when George Stephenson, a self-taught engineer from Northumberland, produced his first one that the idea began to be seen as viable. Stephenson is often wrongly referred to as the inventor of the steam locomotive, but he has the best claim to being the ‘father of the railway’, because it was his drive and energy, together with his skill in making use of available technology and, indeed, improving on it, that ensured railways came into being. Born into a poor background in 1781, he received no formal education but learned on the job from the age of twelve when he started working as an assistant to his father, who was a fireman on colliery steam-pumping engines. His talents were soon recognized, and he became an enginewright, in charge of all the stationary engines at Killingworth, a large mine in Northumberland. Stephenson soon realized that engines that could run on rails and haul loads would be far more flexible than the traditional stationary ones. After his first one, Blücher, proved reasonably successful though not very reliable, over the next seven years he built a further sixteen both for Killingworth and for the Kilmarnock & Troon, the first Scottish railway whose tracks, again, were not strong enough to support the weight of the locomotives which were quickly converted into stationary engines. He then formed a locomotive construction company, with his son, Robert, who would also have a career as a great railwayman, notably as the engineer for the London & Birmingham Railway, and who, at the remarkable age of nineteen, became responsible for locomotive development.

In the early 1820s, Stephenson was asked to advise on the construction of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, later becoming both its surveyor and engineer, and was able to ensure that his engines would be used on the railway. Though it has a claim to be the first steam-hauled public railway, the Stockton & Darlington was really only a logical extension of the mining tramways that had been developed over the previous couple of centuries. As mentioned above, the Stockton & Darlington was a single-track local line whose principal purpose was hauling coal, and the railway carried few passengers. Most of the trains on the line, including all the early passenger services, were horse-hauled and the single track meant not only that speeds had to be kept low, but also resulted in fierce arguments about who should give way and reverse to the nearest crossing point when trains met. Moreover, when the line opened in 1825, only one of Stephenson's locomotives was available for use and even when more were delivered, they were notoriously unreliable. Indeed, at one point the directors contemplated turning the railway back to horse-haulage and only relented after desperate pleas from Stephenson.

Stephenson was to play an equally vital role in the construction and development of the Liverpool & Manchester, and his company's locomotives were to become far more reliable thanks to the efforts of his son. Stephenson père was again the surveyor and later the engineer, and, crucially, when the promoters hesitated over whether to use horse or locomotive power, he was able to convince them that steam engines were the future. In 1829, the year that public mass transport started in London with the introduction of the horse omnibus, the remarkable Rainhill Trials were organized by the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester to find the best locomotive for the line. The event proved to be a virtual walkover, as Stephenson's Rocket was the only entrant to complete the course without mishap. His locomotive covered the one and a half mile course repeatedly at an average speed of 14 mph without problem while the three other entrants all suffered breakdowns, and on the final run he opened the valve to let the engine go far faster, reaching 30 mph to the amazement of the assorted crowd of the great, good and merely curious. Stephenson, therefore, not only won the prize of £500 and the contract to build four more locomotives for the line over the next three months, but, more important, the performance of the Rocket persuaded the promoters to use only steam locomotives for traction, except on a section of the line where stationary engines had been mandated by the Parliamentary Act which had given permission for its construction.

Obtaining the right to build the line was not the only difficulty facing the directors. Technically, the railway was far more sophisticated than any of its predecessors and George Stephenson, who for a period had been shunned by the directors in favour of another engineer, Charles Vignoles, was recalled to ascertain the most suitable alignment. This involved the crossing of Chat Moss, a damp marshy plain whose crossing required the innovation of ‘floating’ the railway embankme...