Day 334: The Subterranean Railway

Underground railways were invented by a man born in the eighteenth century. Charles Pearson, who first set out the idea of running railways under cities, took his first breath in October 1793, at the height of the worst excesses of the French Revolution and more than two decades before Napoleon met his Waterloo.

As ever with history, there are various theories about who really was the first to conceive of an underground railway with the aim of alleviating the growing problems of congestion on London’s streets. But Pearson has by far the best claim. It was Pearson, the City of London solicitor, who first set out his notion in a pamphlet in 1845, suggesting a railway running down the Fleet valley to Farringdon that would be protected by a glass envelope making it ‘as lofty, light and dry… as the West End arcades’. The trains were to be drawn by atmospheric power so that smoke from steam engines would not cloud the glass. This, of course, was not the scheme that was eventually built, but Pearson’s concept was certainly the kernel of the idea that was to become the Metropolitan Railway two decades later along broadly the same route.

And it was Pearson who masterminded the financing of the Metropolitan which saved the scheme at the eleventh hour. Indeed, Pearson was a serial promoter of such undertakings, supporting several similar projects in the 1850s, and thanks to his perseverance eventually got his way. While the importance of Pearson’s role is open to debate, it is difficult to argue against the proposition that without him, London might not have pioneered a transport system that transformed urban living. One could go further. Without Pearson metro systems might never have been developed, because the advent of the motor car in the late nineteenth century, followed quickly by electric tramways and the motor bus, could have resulted in the bypassing of the underground railways as a solution to city traffic problems given the expense and disruption of their construction as happened in most cities in the US. Paris, after all, was not to get its first Métro line until 1900 and the New York system did not open until 1904. Both learned much from the mistakes and tribulations of London’s pioneers.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, London metamorphosed from a busy commercial centre into the world’s first megalopolis. It was not surprising, therefore, that it would be the first to have underground railways, but it is, perhaps, remarkable that it beat its French counterpart by thirty-seven years. Whereas previously London’s rural surroundings had never seemed very far away, now the sprawling slums were interspersed with elegant Georgian squares and swathes of little factories and warehouses which had sprung up in the capital as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace. Greater London’s population in 1850 had grown to 2.5 million from just under 1 million in 1800. The Georgian enclaves which had sprouted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on fields, snapped up cheaply by eager speculative developers, had enabled the relatively well-off to enjoy a new type of suburban living, away from the throng of the city. These areas, such as Camberwell, Kennington, Islington and Mile End – all fashionable again now as they were built by what Simon Jenkins calls ‘men of taste and discrimination’ to high standards – were within a mere hour’s walk of the City in those days before traffic lights, congestion and pedestrian barriers.

Picture, for a moment, the London when Pearson’s idea for underground railways first emerged. As one historian, Hugh Douglas, eloquently put it, ‘towards the middle of the [nineteenth] century, London was dying – slowly, painfully and with a great deal of protest. No physician had to be called in to diagnose the trouble; it was all too apparent to those who lived there, for, wherever they went, they encountered the great thrombosis of traffic which clogged the highways that were the veins and arteries carrying the city’s blood.’ The cause of the clogging of the arteries was too much affluence and good living. London – indeed, the whole country – was prospering mightily. Britain was becoming the hub of an empire and her capital was emerging as the richest city in the world. With the huge increase in population, nearly a quarter of a million people were daily coming into the City to work.

The turmoil on the roads was, however, more like a Third World, than a Western, city today. There were wagons whose drivers walked beside the horses, blocking a large part of the roadway; and large advertising vans pulled by horses whose very purpose – to be seen by as many passers-by as possible – meant their progress was sloth-like. Costermongers with carts and animals being driven to market ensured that speeds in the central area rarely rose above walking pace. The bridges were particular bottlenecks and rain would add to the chaos by turning the roads into muddy quagmires.

More and more housing was needed as increasing numbers of jobs were created in the burgeoning factories and workshops, and, most important, in the offices of the City where the demand for clerks, before the days of typewriters, was almost unlimited. Demand for transport soared. No longer did people work within the district where they lived. The first commuters were hardy souls who had walked from areas of low rent to commercial districts, but as London spread, this was no longer possible. Successive new transport methods were introduced throughout the Victorian era in attempts to cope with the demand, starting in 1829 with the omnibus. George Shillibeer opened the first service using twenty-seater carriages from Paddington to the Bank of England, anticipating the same route that the first Underground railway would take thirty-four years later. Although Shillibeer’s pioneering status can be questioned, as his omnibus service was little more than a stagecoach which made a shorter journey with more stops, the introduction of his service was a momentous event in the history of London’s transport. However, it was not for the masses. The fare of one shilling to travel from Paddington to Bank was expensive and would have deterred all but the wealthiest of potential commuters – in contrast the workmen’s trains of the Metropolitan Railway would, three and a half decades later, offer a whole week’s travel for just one shilling.

Horses, which from 1870 also pulled trams along iron rails, remained the mainstay of much of the transport system until the turn of the century; oats and hay were as important a source of energy as coal. The rich had their own horses and carriages, a phenomenon which, rather like the growth of the private car a century later, was a major contributor to the congestion problem, but it was damned expensive as the horses required looking after, feeding and grooming. And what came out of the rear end of horses remained a major problem: ‘The best estimate is that by the 1830s, English towns had to cope with something like three million tons of droppings every year’ and three times that by the end of the Victorian era. And, contrary to those nostalgic pictures of old crones rushing after carriages to pick up fresh manure, the stuff was virtually worthless, barely five shillings a ton to the farmer. Therefore it was dumped in vast dung heaps in the poorer areas of town, contributing greatly to the squalor, stench and unhealthiness of Victorian London.

~~The Subterranean Railway -by- Christian Wolmar

Day 186: Railroads in the Heartland

During the formative years of the railroad industry, the desire for the iron horse and a grasp of the realities of finance and politics prompted states in the Old Northwest to launch ambitious systems of public works (canals and railroads in particular), unded and built by "the people." But the crippling economic impact of the Panic of 1837, which devastated the region, eventually prompted the sale of state-sponsored railroads to risk-taking capitalists. The time seemed auspicious for private enterprise to open this transportation frontier.   

It would be a combination of individual investors, syndicates, and the continued financial backing from units of government (federal, state, and local) that made possible the completion of the rail network in the Midwest. And it was an impressive accomplishment. At midcentury, Ohio counted 575 miles of railroad; Michigan, 342; Indiana, 228; Illinois, 111; and Wisconsin, 20. Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri, however, had none. On the eve of the Civil War, the Ohio mileage, largest in the nation, had soared to 2,946; Illinois, 2,790; Indiana, 2,163; Wisconsin, 905; and Michigan, 779. Even though Minnesota continued to await the iron horse, Iowa's mileage stood at 655, and Missouri's was 817. Expansion continued before and after the Panic of 1873 triggered several years of severe depression and again after the hard times of the 1890s interrupted track laying.   

Sections of the Midwest saw some construction following the return of prosperity with the Spanish-American War and up until World War I. Unlike railroad building on the Great Plains and in parts of the West, which was considerable during the 1920s, by 1917 the railroad map of the Midwest had jelled. Most of the new lines between 1898 and 1917 were feeders, branches primarily created to haul agricultural, lumber, or mineral traffic, although some cut-offs, designed to speed the flow of goods and people, were installed. In 1911 the Interstate Commerce Commission, which Congress created twenty-four years earlier to regulate the rail enterprise in the public interest, made its annual enumeration of the mileage in the Midwest. Illinois ranked in the top position regionally with 11,980 miles (only Texas, with 14,777 miles, could claim a greater intrastate network); Iowa, 9,855; Ohio, 9,128; Michigan, 8,943; Minnesota, 8,931; Missouri, 8,108; Indiana, 7,447; and Wisconsin, 7,399. Such impressive figures were hardly surprising considering these states' economic strengths and population levels.   
The vast natural and human wealth and potential of the Midwest caused it to attract ''smart money." Investments poured into farms, businesses, and factories and continued for decades, interrupted only by the occasional depression and eventually by the "rust bowl" years of the 1970s and 1980s. This growth prompted railroad promoters in the antebellum years to recognize that the iron horse must link more than "inland" communities to a waterway: lake, river, or canal. It did not take long for a broken and scattered pattern of rail lines to give way to what economic historian Alfred D. Chandler has correctly labeled "system building." The thrust of railroading after the Civil War was to fuse together smaller, independent roads into larger, unified ones. A combination of mergers, leases, and stock controls made possible a sophisticated railroad structure. These consolidated roads, flying their own corporate banners, undertook their own programs of line construction.
   
By the dawn of the twentieth century the Midwest could not claim to be the sole place served by affiliated rail systems, often allied with the nation's premier banking and investment houses. Yet a regional review suggests that the East and especially the South still had substantial numbers of small and medium-sized carriers, although even there the loss of corporate independence was accelerating. On the other hand, great railways already dominated the West. The Southern Pacific, for one, had gained "octopus" status in the minds of Californians, owing to its size, economic prowess, and the literary skills of novelist Frank Norris. Again, the Midwest took on more of a balanced, mixed position. Here a combination of systems, notably the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy; Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul; Chicago & North Western; Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific; and Illinois Central; lesser carriers like the Chicago Great Western; Detroit, Toledo & Ironton; Minneapolis & St. Louis; Monon; Pere Marquette; and Wisconsin Central; and a number of autonomous short lines, including the Kalamazoo, Lake Shore & Chicago; La Crosse & Southeastern; and Muscatine North & South, predominated.   

Regional differences did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. In a 1903 interview for a Twin Cities newspaper, A.B. Stickney, the driving force behind the Chicago Great Western, which recently had completed a strategic extension into the Omaha Gateway from Fort Dodge, Iowa, told the reporter that "we in the richest farm and factory belt of our country have created a mixture of large and not so large railroads. . . . The Maple Leaf Route [Chicago Great Western] faces the task of continuing to provide the best service to its many loyal patrons in Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri where there are so many David and Goliath contests."   

By the turn of the twentieth century the railroad map of the Midwest was unequaled. Anyone who examined it would quickly sense that this was the vital center of America's massive and far-flung network of steel rails. Most striking were those principal east-west arteries the "high-iron" speedways from eastern metropolises to Chicago and St. Louis and the equally significant transcontinental roads or their connectors to western destinations. Moreover, there were other important lines and the many miles of branches and twigs that sprang from the sturdy stems.

~~ Railroads in the Heartland : Steam and Traction in the Golden Age of Postcards -by- H. Roger Grant

Day 137: Book Excerpt: Engines Of Change

Railroads for India were proposed initially in the mid-1830s. Fifteen years of promotion and debate ensued until key decisions in favor of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (hereafter GIPR) and the East Indian Railway (hereafter EIR) were made in March 1849. Thus, finally, railroad building in Britain’s largest imperial possession began in 1850. The ceremonial turning of the first sod for the GIPR occurred at Bombay on October 31, 1850. Work on what became the main railroad in Bengal and in the Gangetic Valley, the EIR, began near Calcutta in 1851.

In 1853, the governor-general of India, Lord Dalhousie (in office 1848–1856) laid out a comprehensive plan for the development of the trunk lines. The capable, hard-working, and assertive Dalhousie was a committed technological modernizer. His political responsibilities before he went to India had made him familiar with British railroads. Dalhousie later claimed he had unleashed in India the “great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations—I mean Railways, uniform Postage, and the Electric Telegraph.”

Dalhousie’s influential, lengthy (216 pages handwritten in a sprawling, bold hand) memorandum—a “minute” in the language of the day—deserves close study. It provided justifications and guidelines for the system of railroads that was developed in South Asia under British auspices in the third quarter of the 19th century. The governor-general emphasized the political and military benefits railroads would provide. “Immeasurable” advantages would accrue to a colonial administration composed of a “comparative handful” of British administrators and soldiers scattered over the subcontinent. Railroads would enable Britain “to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point in as many days as it would now require months, and to an extent which at present is physically impossible.”

Dalhousie also noted the “commercial and social advantages” of railroads. These advantages included an increase in trade between India and Britain: more Indian “produce,” including raw cotton, would be transported to Britain, and more manufactured British goods would be sold in India. Railroads would encourage enterprise, multiply production, facilitate the discovery of latent resources, increase national wealth, and encourage “progress in social improvement” similar to that which occurred in Europe and the United States of America.

The hardheaded Dalhousie stressed the political, military, and economic benefits accruing largely to Britain, to the Anglo-Indian connection, and to the colonial regime. He sought to influence calculating decision makers in London: his political masters, and also potential British investors from whom the bulk of the financing for India’s railroads had to be obtained. Thus, in the 1850s and for many decades, India’s railroads were conceived and executed as a colonial project. British authorities, with little input from Indians, decided when and where lines would be built—and a good deal more. India’s railroads were meant to serve British interests first and foremost, among which military and administrative security and economic benefits were central. The interests of Indians were incidental although, as represented in the writings of Dalhousie and many Britons, the progressive consequences for India of the railroads was a self-evident truth: an assertion accepted then as later by many Indians even though Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj (1921) about the railroads’ contribution to the British control of India. Gandhi, in fact, went further. He denounced railroads as “evil” since “good travels at a snail’s pace.”

Gandhi was a central figure in the Indian struggle for independence from 1919 to his assassination in 1948. His views on railroads, however, were not widely accepted—and he himself used railroads to travel across India in the nationalist cause. Most nationalists’ denunciation of the railroads came to focus on the ways in which the system operated and on the British dominance of the upper echelons of the workforce: railroads per se and their progressive presence were not questioned. More typical of Indian views held in the 1870s (and in the 1970s) were those of Framjee Vicajee who published a forty-four page pamphlet titled Political and Social Effects of Railways in India (1875). The pamphlet praised the many interconnected, progressive changes railroads had set in motion across South Asia, “the great economical and social changes, due partly to railways and partly to other instruments of civilization” through which India was “silently passing.”

~~Engines Of Change: The Railroads That Made India -by- Ian J. Kerr

Day 113: Book Excerpt: Blood On The Tracks

The Murder of Thomas Briggs

Where better to start than with the first murder on a moving train in Britain? This provoked what – up to then – was the greatest manhunt in British legal history.

You have to imagine Mr Thomas Briggs. He was an aldermanic figure, the epitome of Victorian middle-class respectability. In 1864 he was sixty-nine years of age, tallish, silver-haired, immaculately dressed and sporting a flowing white beard. Altogether, he was a most distinguished-looking gentleman. He was the chief clerk of Robarts, Lubbock & Co., a banking house in the City of London, a position which he had only obtained through a long career of diligent duty and unassailable probity.

He was wearing the kind of clothes he normally wore when travelling to and from work. These included a distinctive high silk hat. He also had an expensive-looking gold chain stretched across his capacious midriff, the chain being attached to a fine gold watch in his waistcoat pocket. He carried a bag in one hand, and a stout walking stick in the other.

On 9 July 1864, a Saturday, he left the office around half-past four and travelled to Peckham, south of the Thames, for dinner with his niece and her husband. Briggs was a widower and he made the pilgrimage to No.23 Nelson Square, now Furley Road, every week. They ate well. They always did. It was still light at half-past eight when he left, his bag now empty because its contents had consisted of little presents for the niece of whom he was very fond. He boarded a horse-bus back to King William Street in the City. He then walked briskly (that was his way; he was very fit and strong for his age), to Fenchurch Street station where he climbed into a first-class compartment on a train of the North London Railway.

He caught the train with a couple of minutes to spare but no one else joined him in the compartment at Fenchurch Street. The train pulled out five minutes late at 9.50p.m. to start the roundabout route to his destination at Hackney via Shadwell, Stepney and Bow. Much of the route ran on low viaducts which gave a bird’s eye view of the rooftops of poor inner-city housing and the myriad of small, often rather noxious, industrial premises and workshops then so characteristic of that part of London’s East End. Hackney, however, was a cut above, boasting a respectable gentility.

The North London Railway had only just over thirteen miles of its own line, but its trains also ran on over fifty miles of line belonging to other companies. The North London Railway had an importance out of all proportion to its size because its small network linked the main lines coming into London from the north and west with the City and with the docks in the east. Its first London terminus was at Fenchurch Street via the circuitous route taken by the train conveying Briggs, but later it opened up services running more directly into the Broad Street terminus. This was a substantial station adjacent to Liverpool Street and which stood where the Broadgate development now is.

It may have been a small company but it was a proud one, and it had little time for the lower end of the travel market. Until 1875 it only catered for first and second-class passengers. It possessed a fleet of small but powerful 4-4-0 tank engines and its four-wheeled carriages were quite luxurious by the standards of the time.

It was a warm evening and almost totally dark as the train trundled along. A weak light in the ceiling provided only partial illumination. Briggs had worked all day, had eaten well, and was dozing fitfully. At Bow he exchanged brief pleasantries through his open carriage window with an acquaintance called Lee, who later averred that there were two other passengers in the compartment. One he described as thin and dark, the other as stoutish, thickset and lightly whiskered. Lee remembered being mildly surprised to see Briggs travelling at such a late hour. He was also surprised by the appearance of the other occupants of the carriage; they did not look like first-class passengers. Later, when he was in the witness box, he admitted that he had had a drink or two in a local pub. The general feeling in court was that ‘a drink or two’ actually meant several, or even many, drinks.

The train pulled out of Bow, being due to arrive at the next stopping place, Victoria Park, Hackney Wick, in a few minutes. The train was now four minutes behind time. The next compartment to that occupied by Briggs was also first class and was occupied by a draper called Withall and a female traveller. They were not together. As the train was approaching Hackney, Withall described how he heard a sudden and strange howling noise, reminiscent of a dog in distress. His unknown female companion made a remark to the same effect. In another compartment close by, a female passenger had the unpleasant experience of being spattered with drops of blood that came in through the open window. She later said that she had heard no untoward noises.

When the train arrived at Hackney, two young men-about-town, Henry Verney and Sydney Jones, were waiting to join the train to travel to Highbury, and they stepped into the compartment in which Briggs had started his journey. It was empty but, although it was very poorly lit, they soon realised that a lot of blood was scattered around the compartment. A number of personal items could be seen. These were a black leather bag and a walking stick. Under the seat lay a black beaver hat, so squashed that it looked as if someone had stood on it. Thoroughly alarmed, they managed to get the attention of the guard who directed them to another compartment.

The guard was intensely irritated by this turn of events. The train was already late and the North London Railway prided itself on the punctuality of its trains. He gave the compartment a quick visual going-over, enough to make it obvious to him that it had very recently witnessed foul play. He locked the compartment and gave instructions for a telegraph message to be sent to the superintendent at Chalk Farm, the station where the train terminated. There the carriage was uncoupled and shunted into a siding to await examination by the police.

Meanwhile the driver of a train proceeding in the opposite direction saw a dark object lying close to the track near the bridge over the ‘Duckett Cut’. This waterway, more correctly known as Sir George Duckett’s Canal, joined the Lea Navigation to the Regents Canal at Old Ford. It had opened in 1830. The train was brought to a halt and the guard, engine driver and firemen all descended to track level to investigate. They found that the object was the body of a man, battered, bloodied and still alive, although only just.

With considerable difficulty, they carried him down to the street where they were fortunate to encounter a police officer going around his beat. He summoned assistance and a doctor was soon on the scene. His initial impression was that the injuries on the left-hand side of the man’s head had probably been sustained by his fall from a train. However, two violent blows had fractured his skull. Briggs’s inert body was first of all taken to a nearby pub which did unusually good trade as the news got around. It was later transported to his home in Clapton Square where he died late the next evening. He never regained consciousness.

This horrible murder stirred up a hornets’ nest of outraged headlines and articles in the newspapers. ‘Murder on the Iron Way’ thundered one newspaper truthfully, while another, tending more to hyperbole asked, ‘Who is safe? If we may be murdered thus we may be slain in our pew at church, or assassinated at our dinner table’. This first railway murder emphasised just how vulnerable passengers in compartments could be to the depredations of malefactors, even in the biggest city in the world.

~~Blood On The Tracks: A History Of Railway Crime In Britain -by- David Brandon And Alan Brooke