The GWR Handbook

The Great Western Railway 1923-47

David Wragg

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780750967525
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750985420
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Rail Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

For many the GWR was synonymous with holidays by the sea in the West Country, but it was built to serve as a fast railway line to London, especially for the merchants and financiers of Bristol. Its operations stretched as far as Merseyside, it provided most services in Wales, and it was the main line to Cardiff, Bristol, Cornwall and Birmingham. This book, a classic first published in 2006, reveals the equipment, stations, network, shipping and air services, bus operations including Western National, and overall reach and history of the GWR. Forming part of a series, along with The LMS Handbook, The LNER Handbook and The Southern Railway Handbook, this new edition provides an authoritative and highly detailed reference of information about the GWR.

Chapter One

The Ancestors and the Neighbours

Although the Great Western has been widely acclaimed as the railway company with the longest history and the only one to survive the grouping of 1923, the railway company that emerged on 1 January 1923 was a different company from that which had been formed in the 1830s. The famous grouping imposed by the Railways Act 1921 did not create new railway companies by name, but instead described them as ‘groups’, of which the Great Western re-emerged from the ‘Western Group’. In each case, the new groups consisted of larger companies, known as constituent companies, and smaller companies that were described simply as subsidiary companies, as indeed some already were. It is important to bear in mind that the original Great Western Railway was just one of the constituent companies, but through being by far the largest and the only one with a true main-line network and access to London, it was the one that prevailed.

Under the terms of the Act, the Western Group constituent companies numbered seven. These were the original Great Western Railway; Barry Railway; Cambrian Railway; Cardiff Railway; Rhymney Railway; Taff Vale Railway; and the Alexandra (Newport & South Wales) Docks & Railway. One important difference between these and the subsidiary companies was that all were entitled to have a representative on the board of the merged entity. This stipulation was not always well received by the Great Western Railway directors. The Taff Vale they could accept, as there had been close links between the two companies, but the Cambrian, with the largest route mileage, was something of a disaster financially and operationally, while the Cardiff was a financial liability.

Subsidiary companies within the Western Group, of which there were twenty-seven, included the Brecon & Merthyr Tydfil Junction Railway; Burry Port & Gwendraeth Valley Railway; Cleobury Mortimer & Ditton Priors Light Railway; Didcot, Newbury & Southampton Railway; Exeter Railway; Forest of Dean Central Railway; Gwendraeth Valleys Railway; Lampeter, Aberaeron & New Quay Light Railway; Liskeard & Looe Railway; Llanelly & Mynydd Mawr Railway; Mawddwy Railway; Midland & South Western Junction Railway; Neath & Brecon Railway; Penarth Extension Railway; Penarth Harbour Dock & Railway; Port Talbot Railway & Docks; Princetown Railway; Rhondda & Swansea Bay Railway; Ross & Monmouth Railway; South Wales Mineral Railway; Teign Valley Railway; Vale of Glamorgan Railway; Van Railway; Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway; West Somerset Railway; and Wrexham & Ellesmere Railway. Of these, all but one were absorbed on 1 January 1923, with the sole exception being the Midland & South Western Junction Railway because of prolonged negotiations over the terms of its transfer to the GWR. Eventually, agreement was reached and the MSWJ was taken into GWR ownership in September 1923. Some of these companies were effectively within the Great Western fold already, being operated by it, while others were part of other railways, with the Van Railway being operated by the Cambrian.

Most of the constituent subsidiary companies had their own history but the Great Western dominated the group, and therefore managed to avoid the infighting between the London & North Western and the Midland Railway that so afflicted the London, Midland & Scottish, or what became almost effectively a continuance of the pre-grouping situation on the Southern. However, each company deserves some consideration here, starting with the constituent companies and then the subsidiary companies.

The ‘old’ GWR was to be represented for many years after the grouping by its locomotives and carriages, with the former including this 0–6–0 Dean goods locomotive, seen in Swindon shed in 1930. (HMRS AAC029)

Apart from prolonged negotiations ensuring that the Midland & South Western Junction Railway did not become part of the ‘new’ Great Western until September 1923, other companies not mentioned in the legislation later passed to the Great Western Railway. These included the Weston, Clevedon & Portishead Light Railway and the Corris Railway, while the Hammersmith & City Railway, the underground line that was the joint property of the Great Western Railway and the Metropolitan Railway, did not need to be covered in the legislation.

In this chapter the constituent companies of the grouped Great Western Railway are all covered along with the significant subsidiaries, while to give a complete picture the Hammersmith & City Railway and the many independent railways that survived alongside the Great Western are also covered.

Constituent Companies

The Great Western Railway

By the early nineteenth century Bristol had long been one of the most important cities in the United Kingdom, and it was not surprising that a number of proposals for a railway between London and Bristol were promoted from 1824 onwards. The first of these to have any impact was that of the Great Western Railway in 1832, which originated in a desire among the merchants and financiers of Bristol for a fast railway line to London. Their first attempt to gain parliamentary sanction in 1834 failed, but in 1835 authorisation was obtained and the GWR was able to raise capital of £2.5 million, equal to about £140 million today, and a further £830,000 (£45 million today) in loans. The new company had as its engineer the young Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who convinced the directors of the merits of his scheme for a broad gauge railway, which he judged, rightly, to offer the prospect of higher speeds. To the objection that this would result in difficulties in through operation with other companies, he suggested that in areas where company boundaries met, the issue could be resolved through laying mixed gauge track, something that did not work easily or effectively in practice.

Managed by the company secretary, Charles Saunders, the GWR and Brunel wasted little time, and in 1838 operations began between London and a station close to Maidenhead in Berkshire. Brunel ordered locomotives true to his vision of a high-speed railway, but the first locomotives had, of course, to operate what was in effect an outer-suburban service, although it would not have been recognised as such at the time. The locomotives became the responsibility of the first locomotive superintendent, Daniel Gooch.

The entire 116-mile line from London to Bristol via Bath was opened in 1841, but costs had risen from a projected £3.3 million to more than £6 million. Many shareholders blamed Brunel for the slow completion and the high price, regarding his broad gauge as a mistake, and had even tried to get rid of him in 1839. Undoubtedly, broad gauge was more expensive to build than standard gauge, but given the fact that civil engineering technology was in its infancy, the trustworthiness of any estimate of completion costs at the time would seem to have been doubtful.

From what might be regarded as its trunk route, the GWR soon expanded, with branches to Basingstoke, Gloucester, Hungerford, Oxford and Windsor opened by 1849, while other companies supported by the GWR had also extended the line from Bristol to Plymouth using the same broad gauge. Gloucester had been reached in 1845, and the worst nightmares of the sceptics came true as the GWR met the standard gauge Birmingham & Gloucester Railway. The confusion only became worse when the Midland Railway leased the broad gauge Bristol & Gloucester, intending to link it into the standard gauge, so that in 1854 standard gauge trains were able to reach Bristol using mixed gauge track.

The considerable amount of space at track level that was the legacy of the broad gauge can be seen clearly in this splendid photograph of 4-6-0 60XX No. 6003 King Henry IV heading an express while still in ‘as new’ condition. (HMRS/J. Tatchell ADG035)

Meanwhile, the GWR was racing ahead of its competitors, almost literally, with the introduction of express trains between London and Exeter in 1845 that covered the 194 miles of the route via Bristol at 43mph, including three stops, making these the world’s fastest expresses at the time. Expansion included the opening of a mixed gauge line from London to Birmingham in 1852, bringing the GWR into direct competition with the London & North Western Railway. Two years later, the GWR purchased the Shrewsbury & Birmingham and Shrewsbury & Chester companies, and with running powers to Birkenhead found itself with a route network that extended as far north as Merseyside. When the Cornwall Railway opened in 1859, this proved to be a satellite of the GWR and its allies, who had subscribed a fifth of its capital, and by 1867 through trains were running from London to Penzance.

Not content with the West, the Great Western had already ventured into Wales well before this time. In 1845 the GWR’s satellite South Wales Railway obtained parliamentary approval for a broad gauge line from the GWR near Gloucester through to the coast at Fishguard. It opened to Carmarthen in 1852, but never reached Fishguard, being diverted instead to Milford Haven, which it reached in 1856, and from which steamers plied to Waterford in Ireland. The broad gauge of the SWR meant that through trains could run from South Wales to London and the Midlands, but all of the valley lines bringing coal to the SWR were built to standard gauge, and so costly transshipment was necessary. The SWR and the West Midland Railway were both absorbed into the Great Western in 1865, giving it a total route mileage of 1,105 miles. By this time the mixed gauge had been extended from Oxford to London, the work being carried out between 1856 and 1861.

The broad gauge was especially unpopular in South Wales, as it inhibited efficient movement of coal and iron ore. It took strong pressure from industrialists and mine owners to persuade the GWR to convert the SWR to standard gauge, but when the argument was won and the decision taken, the entire 300 miles was switched, with completion taking just one weekend in 1872. By 1876, the only substantial remaining broad-gauge operation was that from Penzance to London.

The railway insolvency crisis of 1866 had forced considerable economies on the company, by this time under the chairmanship of its one-time locomotive superintendent Daniel Gooch. Nevertheless, investors had great confidence in the GWR, which was just as well since the average dividend between 1841 and 1879 amounted to just 3.8 per cent. There were also heavy investments still to be made, of which the most significant by far was the Severn Tunnel, built between 1873 and 1886, at which time it was the longest underwater tunnel in the world. The need for economy and the demands of the Severn Tunnel may have been behind the lack of further significant route extensions during the years up to 1900, although the system did in fact grow owing to the absorption of other companies, so that by 1900 the GWR had 2,526 route miles, the longest of any of Britain’s railways. Financial difficulty certainly lay behind the limitations on investment in rolling stock, although innovation was not completely lacking, with the first insulated vans for frozen meat being introduced during the 1870s. To its credit, the company also operated safely, having just one fatal accident between 1874 and 1936.

Daniel Gooch died in office in 1889 at the age of seventy-three, being given the credit for saving the company, but blamed by many for economies that were excessive and in the end counter-productive. His successors returned to developing the company, with successive superintendents of the line reshaping the passenger services, while first William Dean and then later, after 1902, George Churchward, started to produce a line of worthy locomotives.

Progress was aided by the abolition of the broad gauge by 1892, so that through carriages could be offered between Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds to the fast-growing resort of Torquay. Restaurant cars were introduced in 1896, the company having freed itself of the compulsory refreshment stop at Swindon the previous year by offering the owners of the refreshment rooms £100,000 (£8,450,000 at today’s prices) in compensation. By 1899 there were quadruple tracks over the entire 53 miles between London and Didcot.

A pre-grouping photograph of the first King George, this time 4–6–0 40XX No. 4014, in 1910. It is interesting to note the different forms of putting the company’s name on locomotive tenders over the years. (HMRS/J. Tatchell ADB403)

The early years of the twentieth century saw a renewed vigour in the GWR. The last three decades of the previous century had seen limited attention paid to development of its own route network, and much traffic had passed to competitors offering more direct services – so much so that many wags described the GWR as the ‘Great Way Round’. Competition alone did not inspire all of the ‘cut-off’ routes built in the period between 1903 and 1910, however, as the most significant was the new direct route from London to Cardiff, on which the company had a monopoly, bypassing Bath and Bristol, and at a distance of 145 miles saving 10 miles over the route via Bath and 35 miles compared with that via Gloucester. London to Exeter received a new direct route of 174 miles, instead of the previous 194 miles that had compared so badly with the London & South Western’s 172 miles. In conjunction with the Great Central, a more direct route was opened between London and Birmingham, cutting the distance from 129 miles to 111 miles, making it more competitive with the London & North Western’s 113 miles. These routes required considerable new construction, with 30 miles of new track for the Cardiff line, 33 for Exeter and no fewer than 58 for the Birmingham route.

The new routes were accompanied by new carriages hauled by Churchward’s excellent new locomotives, so that journey times started to fall considerably, while from 1906 onwards the company became pioneer of automatic train protection. That same year the company built a large new harbour at Fishguard and introduced three turbine-powered packet steamers for the Irish market, while between 1909 and 1914 it provided boat trains for passengers off Cunard transatlantic liners, taking them to London from Fishguard (261 miles) in 4½ hours, after building a line into the harbour.

The GWR had a relatively quiet First World War, but afterwards tried first to fight off the proposed grouping, and then fought to have the six other constituent companies regarded as subsidiary companies so as not to have to provide a seat for a representative of each on the parent board. In both confrontations it was unsuccessful.

Alexandra (Newport & South Wales) Docks & Railway

As the name implies, this was originally a dock company, formed in 1865 to build a new dock at Newport. It took ten years to complete the work because of the company’s financial weakness, but once it was finished local business interests argued that a railway connection with the Rhondda would enable it to attract a share of the booming South Wales coal traffic. In 1878 the Pontypridd, Caerphilly & Newport Railway was established, with running powers over the lines of five other railways to bring coal to Newport docks, and this opened in 1884. In preparation for the opening of the new railways, the Alexandra changed from being a ‘docks’ company to a ‘docks and railway’ in 1882, and in 1887 it purchased the Pontypridd, Caerphilly & Newport Railway. While freight, and especially coal, was the predominant traffic, a passenger service between Pontypridd and Newport was introduced, but this passed to the Great Western in 1899, leaving the Alexandra’s passenger services confined to a service between Pontypridd and Caerphilly. Meanwhile, the docks prospered and grew, with further expansion in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War, when the company managed to pay a dividend of 5 per cent. The actual railway route mileage owned by the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the 2016 Edition – Britain’s Oldest Railway
• Introduction – Railways in the West and Wales
• 1. The Ancestors and the Neighbours
• 2. Paddington – A Temple to Steam
• 3. Great Western Destinations
• 4. A New Great Western
• 5. The Managers
• 6. Steam on the Great Western
• 7. Diesels and Gas Turbines
• 8. Carrying the Goods
• 9. Travelling Great Western
• 10. Riviera and Flyer – The Named Expresses
• 11. Go Great Western
• 12. Shipping
• 13. Road Transport
• 14. Air Services
• 15. Accidents and the ‘Safety Movement’
• 16. Developing the Infrastructure
• 17. Railways at War
• 18. Railways under Attack
• 19. Peace and Nationalisation
• 20. What Might Have Been
• Appendix I Locomotive Headcodes and Destination Codes
• Appendix II Station Name Changes Post-Grouping
• Appendix III Locomotive Shed Codes
• Appendix IV GWR Locomotives
• Appendix V Diesel Railcars and Shunters
• Appendix VI Absorbed Locomotives at the Grouping
• Great Western in Preservation
• Bibliography