The Railway

British Track Since 1804

Andrew Dow

• Publisher: Wharncliffe Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781473841079
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Eisenbahnverkehr

Never before has a comprehensive history been written of the track used by railways of all gauges, tramways, and cliff railways, in Great Britain. And yet it was the development of track, every bit as much as the development of the locomotive, that has allowed our railways to provide an extraordinarily wide range of services. Without the track of today, with its laser-guided maintenance machines, the TGV and the Eurostar could not cruise smoothly at 272 feet per second, nor could 2, 000-ton freight trains carry a wide range of materials, or suburban railways, over and under the ground, serve our great cities in a way that roads never could. Andrew Dow's account of the development of track, involving deep research in the papers of professional institutions as well as rare books, company records and personal accounts, paints a vivid picture of development from primitive beginnings to modernity. The book contains nearly 200 specially-commissioned drawings as well as many photographs of track in its very many forms since the appearance of the steam locomotive in 1804. Included are chapters on electrified railways, and on the development of mechanised maintenance, which revolutionised the world of the platelayer.

Chapter One

Before Steam

The essential and unique thing about a railroad is the track. There were tracks long before there were locomotive steam engines, or even stationary steam engines, and no matter what may be the locomotive power of the future, still there will be tracks.

Robert Selph Henry

When Richard Trevithick’s pioneering steam locomotive ran for the first time on Monday 13 February 1804, it did so on a plateway that had been built a mere four years earlier, but which owed its origins to the first railway in the kingdom, laid two hundred years earlier, in 1603.¹ That line, between Wollaton and Strelley, west of Nottingham, was two miles long and was laid with wood rails. In the following 164 years, about fifty tramroads had been built with track made almost entirely of wood, before the first iron rails appeared in 1767. Even then, railways continued to be built with wood rails, and relatively few with iron, until there were probably about two hundred of them on the eve of the appearance of Trevithick’s first locomotive.²

These tramroads, with an average length of a little under three miles, probably had an aggregate route mileage of about 600. However, with sidings, passing loops, and occasional double track taken into account, the total track mileage may well have been nearer, say, 800.

Most of the tramroads were built for the carriage of coal. There was an increase in coal mining activity after the dissolution of the monasteries, when much land went into private ownership. Many new owners sought to exploit coal-bearing land, and the resulting activity brought not only a development of mining techniques but also a dissatisfaction with the state of the roads over which the coal had to be carried. The principal carrier of heavy goods was then the river, but the coal had to be taken to the river by some means. Roads were, of course, unsurfaced, and were pretty impassable in winter once a few heavy carts had churned up the mud. As far as is known, the first person to do something about this, by way of finding a better way of carrying coal overland, whether to market or transhipment point on a river, was Huntingdon Beaumont, a member of a coal-owning family from Coleorton in Leicestershire. He it was who brought about the construction of the earliest recorded railway in Great Britain, at Wollaton, west of Nottingham, and it is believed that he also built two or three coal-carrying lines in Northumberland, in the area immediately north of the Tyne.

These railways, and a handful of others built in the 1600s, were all constructed of wood. That is, both the track and the vehicles were constructed almost wholly of wood, although iron pins may have been used in their assembly. Wood was locally available in the counties in which they were built, as were carpenters’ skills in forming and assembling the component parts.

The track was very simple. What was needed was a means of supporting and guiding the waggons that were to carry the coal.³ Supporting the wagons on a way with a clean surface, clear of mud came first, with planked ways in mines in mainland Europe. Such ways dated back to the 16th century, and often were laid with a small gap between two planks, with the planks supporting the waggon and the gap between them accommodating a vertical pin at the front of the wagon, to provide guidance. In the dark confines of a mine such a device was no doubt a boon, and its principle was to be used again on a tramway three hundred years later, in Salford in 1862.⁴ For surface railways, a pair of rails separated by three or four feet was the norm.

The waggons were hauled by a horse, usually one at a time, but sometimes in trains of two. The weight of such waggons was limited by the strength of the horse, as were their dimensions, and the speed at which they could travel. Typically an early waggon, fully loaded, weighed up to three tons, on two axles, and thus it had an axle load of up to one and a half tons. The whole of the weight was unsprung. Springs on road carriages were known from 1768, but there was little chance that such devices could be made strong enough for coal waggons, and it is doubted that their benefits for increasing the durability of the track were realised at that time.

The track to carry such vehicles, therefore, had to provide support and guidance for such weights, operated at walking pace to suit the horse and the driver, who walked alongside him. Gradients were kept to a minimum, particularly as most coal railways ran loaded down hill to rivers, and brakes on the waggons were primitive. The track had to be laid in such a way that provided for a path for the horse.

In this the railway was unlike the canal, which commonly had a towpath alongside, and which permitted the horse towing the barge to walk along a path that was dead level, except at the approaches to locks. The horse knew where to walk, and the barge could easily be steered to keep it away from the bank. Guidance therefore was simple, if not entirely automatic.

The towpath had an equivalent on the railway, where of course there were no locks. The structure of the track was buried except for the tops of the rails, and the horse walked between the rails. Below the surface on which the horse walked were transverse sleepers, two to three feet apart, usually not projecting far outside the rails. The rails were laid on them at a variety of gauges between three feet and about four feet ten inches. This allowed the rails to carry a waggon which, when loaded with coal, was within the capacity of the horse, not only on the straight, but also around curves on which the resistance of the waggon was higher. This was probably the reason for the avoidance of sharp curves of the kind that road waggons encountered at a common crossroads, quite apart from the expense of forming the curved rails which would undoubtedly have been necessary. The rails were beams of wood, rectangular in cross-section, about four inches broad and five inches high. They were cut variously in lengths of three to six feet, or occasionally more. The actual dimensions varied very much from place to place: there were no industry standards, and until railways started to join each other, no need for any. The rails appear to have been laid with joints opposite each other, not staggered.

The rails were oak, if possible, but also of other kinds, including particularly beech, which earned a reputation for gaining a polished surface, with consequent ease of haulage: what today we call low rolling resistance. The rails were held to the sleepers with iron nails or wood treenails, and the whole assembly was laid on levelled ground before being buried close to the rail-tops in ballast of gravel or small stones.

The wood was not treated, and various means of preservation were not to be developed until later years. As a result, the wood eventually succumbed to rot, and had to be replaced if it had not already been removed because of wear.

The rails were not joined together at the ends, but were affixed to sleepers that they shared. In this way the skill of the joiner ensured that the rails were in a good line, and the common height of the rails ensured that the top line was even. It was difficult to lay lines in curves, although curves were an inevitable part of tracklaying. The shortness of the rails, about three feet, allowed curves to be established by means of a number of short straights. At the speeds operated, this no doubt was acceptable for relatively smooth operation, and was unquestionably better than running carts on muddy and rutted roads.

Accompanying long stretches of plain track were points. These were fundamental to the utility of any railway, for they allowed one track to be split into two or more, and also allowed waggons to be switched from one track to another. Without such devices, the single track would have been so limited in its use that the railway, as a system, would probably have never been developed.

1.1 Typical single wood rail (above) and doubled wood rail (below), with a plan of both. From Plate I in Nicholas Wood’s Practical Treatise on Railroads, 3rd edition, 1838.

Acceptance of the uneven progress around curves made the early points equally acceptable. Such drawings as survive from three hundred or more years ago show the use of a single moving rail, hinged from the point at which one crossed the other, and operated by the drivers, at what was once quaintly called “ye parting of ye ways”. There was little effort to introduce curved switch rails, although some drawings suggest that they were made occasionally, and it is probable that many thought that the effort to do so was not worth while. The drivers had to keep a close eye on keeping the waggons on the rails at points, for once they had set the switch rail, they had to watch it to ensure that it did not move while the waggon was passing over it.

1.2 Early plateway points, 1808, showing the single switch blade used for facing traffic, check rails on the outside, and checks on the leads from switch to crossing. From The Evolution of Permanent Way, Charles E Lee, 1937.

It is from the 1808 drawing that an early indication of thoughts on the layout of junctions, whether for loops or branch lines, can be seen. The drawing was produced by the Tredegar Iron Company for the plateway to be laid for the Oystermouth Tramroad, later to become the Swansea and Mumbles Railway. Whether for plateway or railway, junctions involved some means of selecting the route that vehicles should follow, and another means of crossing one running surface over another. A refinement to follow later was the addition of checks, to ensure that at the crossing, wheels did not go down the wrong route.

The primitive nature of the cast components seen in John Curr’s book in 1797 was improved upon by the use of a single switch blade: it was not a rail because it did not carry the vehicle, but just guided it. The blade is hinged on a vertical pin at the trailing end, and one face is tapered down, so that it could lie flush with the vertical leg of the plate. This may be the earliest example of what was later achieved by planing or milling. In this case, however, it was undoubtedly cast in that form.

Also to be seen in the drawing of 1808 are checks, which suggests that eleven years after the junction shown by John Curr, their use was now accepted. It seems that they were cast integrally with the plates. All of the plates were cast with half a notch at each end, to allow a vertical pin or spike, driven into the sleeper, to hold them down. The presence of studs, or perhaps rivet heads on the outside of the vertical flange, at each end, is not explained in either of the books by Charles E Lee in which this drawing has appeared.⁵ The drawing refers to the assembly as a “tramroad parting” and is set at a crossing angle of about 1 in 5.

1.3 Typical short switch rail on a plateway. NRM archival photograph of item 2012-7010.

There is little doubt that from the earliest days, the wheels of many coal waggons were flanged. The flange was more often carried on the inner edge of the wheel, rather than the outer, and this feature influenced the design of early points. The first written evidence of flanged wheels dates from 1676, and such wheels were first illustrated in 1734, on Ralph Allen’s line at Prior Park, Bath. In the following year, the first cast iron wheels were made; their significance will be discussed later. There were to be other forms of flange. A very few of the early mineral tramroads used a very narrow rail that demanded a double flange, one on each side of the head of the rail. And a few street tramways used a wide rail with a groove down the middle, requiring a centre-flanged wheel. These exceptions will be noted in due course: in all other cases, reference to a flange means a flange on the inner edge of the wheel.

The track demanded maintenance. When wood rails were worn it became the practice to turn them upside down, to gain use of the underside for a running surface, although it is clear that the worn surface, now underneath, had to be even and undamaged to provide a good base upon which to sit the inverted rail. In the eighteenth century it became practice to lay a second rail above the old one. This had the effect of strengthening the rail, of course, but it also required that the old one underneath be evenly worn to act as a firm base for the new one. It is recorded that the increased height of the pair of rails was ...