According to Mr. Punch, one of the greatest authorities of the day on all
such subjects, the nearest way to Euston Station is to take a cab; but those
who are not in a hurry may take advantage of the omnibuses that start from
Gracechurch Street and Charing Cross, traversing the principal thoroughfares
and calling at the George and Blue Boar, Holborn, the Green Man and Still,
Oxford Street, and the Booking Offices in Regent Circus.
Euston, including its dependency, Camden Station, is the greatest railway
port in England, or indeed in the world. It is the principal gate through
which flows and reflows the traffic of a line which has cost more than
twenty-two millions sterling; which annually earns more than two millions and
a-half for the conveyance of passengers, and merchandise, and live stock; and
which directly employs more than ten thousand servants, beside the tens of
thousands to whom, in mills or mines, in ironworks, in steam-boats and
coasters, it gives indirect employment. What London is to the world, Euston
is to Great Britain: there is no part of the country to which railway
communication has extended, with the exception of the Dover and Southampton
lines, which may not be reached by railway conveyance from Euston station.
The Buckinghamshire lines from Bletchley open the way through Oxford to all
the Western counties, only interrupted by the break of gauge. The
Northampton and Peterborough, from Blisworth, proceeds to the Eastern coast
of Norfolk and Lincoln. At Rugby commences one of several roads to the
North, either by Leicester, Nottingham, and Lincoln, or by Derby and
Sheffield; and at Rugby, too, we may either proceed to Stafford by the direct
route of the Trent Valley, a line which is rendered classical by the memory
of Sir Robert Peel, who turned its first sod with a silver spade and honoured
its opening by a celebrated speech; or we may select the old original line
through Coventry, Birmingham, and Wolverhampton, passing through a network of
little railways leading to Warwick and Leamington, the result of unprofitable
competition. A continuation of the Trent Valley line intersects the Pottery
district, where the cheapest Delft and the most exquisite specimens of China
ware are produced with equal success; and thus we reach Liverpool and
Manchester by the straightest possible line.
At Stafford we can turn off to Shrewsbury and Chester, or again following the
original route arrive at Crewe, the great workshop and railway town of the
London and North Western. Crewe affords an ample choice of routes--1st, to
Leeds by Stockport (with a branch to Macclesfield) and Huddersfield, or from
Leeds to York, or to Harrogate, and so on by the East Coast line through
Durham, Newcastle, and Berwick, to Edinburgh; 2dly, direct to Manchester;
3rdly, to Warrington, Newton, Wigan, and the North, through the salt mining
country; and, 4thly, to Chester. At Chester we may either push on to Ireland
by way of the Holyhead Railway, crossing the famous Britannia Tubular Bridge,
or to Birkenhead, the future rival of Liverpool.
At Liverpool steamers for America warranted to reach New York in ten days are
at our command; or, leaving commerce, cotton, and wool, we may ride through
Proud Preston and Lancaster to Kendal and Windermere and the Lake district;
or, pressing forward through "Merry Carlisle," reach Gretna at a pace that
defies the competition of fathers and guardians, and enter Scotland on the
direct road to Glasgow, and, if necessary, ride on to Aberdeen and Perth.
A short line from Camden Station opens a communication with the East and West
India Docks and the coast of Essex, and another, three miles and a half in
length, from Willesden Station, will shortly form a connexion with the South
Western, and thereby with all the South and Western lines from Dover to
Southampton.
The railway system, of which the lines above enumerated form so large a part,
is barely twenty-five years old: in that space of time we have not only
supplied the home market but taught Europe and America to follow our example;
even Egypt and India will soon have their railways, and we now look with no
more surprise on the passage of a locomotive with a few hundred passengers or
tons of goods than on a wheelbarrow or Patent Hansom Cab. Grouse from
Aberdeen, fat cattle from Norfolk, piece goods from Manchester, hardwares
from Sheffield, race horses from Newmarket, coals from Leicestershire, and
schoolboys from Yorkshire, are despatched and received, for the distance of a
few hundred miles, with the most perfect regularity, as a matter of course.
We take a ticket to dine with a friend in Chester or Liverpool, or to meet
the hounds near Bletchley or Rugby, as calmly as we engage a cab to go a
mile; we consider twenty miles an hour disgustingly slow, and grumble awfully
at a delay of five minutes in a journey of a hundred miles. Millions have
been spent in order to save an hour and a half between London and Liverpool;
yet there are plenty of men not much past thirty who remember when all
respectable plain practical common sense men looked upon the project for a
railway between London and Birmingham as something very wild if not very
wicked; and who remember too, that in winter the journey from London to
Liverpool often occupied them twenty-two hours, costing 4 pounds inside and 2
pounds out, besides having to walk up the steepest hills in Derbyshire,--the
same journey which is now completed in six hours at a cost of 2 pounds 5s.,
and in twelve hours for 16s. 9d., by the Parliamentary train in an enclosed
carriage.
It may be perhaps a useful wholesome lesson to those who are in the habit of
accepting as their just due--without thought, without thankfulness--the last
best results of the industry and ingenuity of centuries, if, before entering
the massive portals of Euston Station, we dig up a few passages of the early
history of railways from dusty Blue Books and forgotten pamphlets.
In 1826, the project of a railway from Liverpool to Manchester came before a
Committee of the House of Commons, and, after a long investigation, the
principle was approved, but the bill thrown out in consequence of defects in
the survey. The promoters rested their case entirely on a goods' traffic, to
be conveyed at the rate of six or seven miles an hour. The engineer was
George Stephenson, the father of the railway system, a man of genius, who,
although he clearly foresaw the ultimate results of his project, had neither
temper nor tact enough to conciliate the ignorant obstinacy of his opponents;
in fact, he was a very bad witness and a very great man. It is curious, in
reading the evidence, to observe the little confidence the counsel for the
bill had in their engineer, and the contempt with which the counsel for the
opposition treated him. The promoters of the railway expected few
passengers, hoped to lower the rates of the canals, and had not made up their
minds whether to employ locomotives or horses; George Stephenson looked
forward confidently at that same period to conveying the greater portion of
the goods and passenger traffic by a complete railway system; but he either
would not or could not explain the grounds of his confidence, and therefore
we find Mr. Harrison, the most eminent Parliamentary counsel of that day,
speaking in the following insolent strain of a man whose genius he and his
friends were unable to appreciate:--
"Every part of this scheme shows that this man (George Stephenson) has
applied himself to a subject of which he has no knowledge, and to which he
has no science to apply. . . . . When we set out with the original
prospectus, we were to gallop at the rate of twelve miles an hour, with the
aid of the devil in the form of a locomotive, sitting as postillion on the
fore horse. But the speed of these locomotives has slackened. The learned
Sergeant would like to go seven, but he will be content with six miles an
hour. I will show that he cannot go six. Practically, or for any useful
purposes, they may go at something more than four miles an hour. The wind
will affect them: any gale of wind which would affect the traffic on the
Mersey, would render it impossible to set off a locomotive engine, either by
poking the fire, or keeping up the pressure of the steam until the boiler
burst. A shower of rain retards a railway, and snow entirely stops it."
In reply, Mr. Adams modestly observed, "I should like my learned friend to
have pointed out any part of the publication in favour of the Liverpool and
Manchester Railway, which justified his statement that we professed that
goods were to be carried at the rate of twelve miles an hour; we have proved
that they can be carried at seven miles an hour, and it was never intended
they should be conveyed at a higher rate."
In the following year the Liverpool and Manchester Bill was carried, and in
1830 the career of the civilizing locomotive commenced, but it took many more
years to convince "Practical men" that the Railway would successfully compete
with the Coach and Canal.
When, in 1831, the scheme of a Railway between London and Birmingham was made
public, a very clever pamphlet appeared under the title of "Beware the
Bubbles," in which we find the following comical prognostications of the
results of Railways:--
"After all, what advantage does the London and Birmingham Railway hold out?
Only one,--celerity of motion; and, after all, the ten miles an hour is
absolutely slower than the coaches, some of which go as fast as eleven or
twelve miles an hour; and, with the length of time that the engine and its
cumbrous train requires ere it can stop, and the other contingencies, there
would be little difference in the time of a twelve miles an hour coach and a
fifteen miles an hour engine, supposing twenty or thirty stoppages, to pick
up little parcels, between London and Birmingham. The conveyance is not so
safe as by coach."
After enumerating a series of theoretical dangers, he proceeds. "Another
consideration, which would deter invalids, ladies, and children from making
use of the Railway, would be want of accommodation along the line, unless the
Directors of the Railway chose to build inns at their own expense. But those
inns the Directors would have, in great part, to support, because they would
be out of the way of any business except that arising from the Railway, and
that would be trifling. Commercial travellers would never, by any chance, go
by the Railroad. The occasional traveller, who went the same route for
pleasure, would go by the coach-road also, because of the cheerful company
and comfortable dinner.
"Not one of the nobility, the gentry, or those who travel in their own
carriages, would really like to be drawn at the tail of a train of waggons,
in which some hundreds of bars of iron were jingling with a noise that would
drown all the bells of the district, and in momentary apprehension of having
his vehicle broken to pieces, and himself killed or crippled by the collision
of those thirty-two ton masses. Even if a man had no carriage of his own,
what inducement could he have to take so ungainly a conveyance. Three hours
is more than the maximum difference by which the ordinary speed of coaches
could be exceeded; and it is not one traveller in a thousand to whom an
arrival in London and Birmingham three hours sooner would be of the slightest
consequence.
"Then as to goods. The only goods that require velocity in coming to London,
are ribands from Coventry. Half the luggage room of a coach, on a Saturday
night, is quite adequate to the conveyance of them. The manufacturers of
Coventry will never be such fools as to send their property on an errand by
which it must travel further and fare worse. For heavy goods, the saving by
canal would be as twelve to one, beside the perfect safety. In the canal
boat there is no danger of fracture, even to the most delicate goods;
whereas, if fine China goods were to be brought by the rapid waggons, the
breakage would probably be twenty-five per cent.
"As to the profits of the undertaking let us be extravagantly liberal.
Suppose that the Railway was to get one-third of the goods, as well as one-
third of the passengers, see what they would make of it:--
One-third of the Goods . . . 96,540 pounds
One-third of the Passengers . 30,240
--------
126,780 pounds
--------
Annual expenses . . . . . 385,000 pounds
Returns. . . . . . . . 126,780
--------
Annual deficiency . . . . 258,220 pounds
--------
To meet an outlay of 7,500,000 pounds.
"But the probability is that canals would reduce their rates one-half; and
thus, competing wholesomely, extinguish the railway. The coach-masters would
do the same thing--run for twelve months at half the present fares, and then
not one man in his senses would risk his bones on the railway. The
innkeepers would follow a course precisely similar, and give nice smoking
dinners, foaming tankards and bottles of beeswing at so cheap a rate, and
meet their customers with so good humoured faces, and do so many of those
kind offices that legions would flock to the hospitable road. And while all
this was going on, and the thousands of men which the authors of this
ridiculous scheme had expected to send upon the parish were thriving, the
solitary stranger who had nobody to tell him better would go swinging at the
tail of the engine, bumping first on the iron plates on this side and then on
the iron plates on that side; and if he escaped being scalded to death by the
bursting of his engine, or having all his bones broken by collision with
another, he would be fain to rest for the night within some four bare walls
and gnaw a mouldy crust which he brought in his pocket, or, as an alternative
of luxury, wade some ten miles through the mire, and feast upon a rasher of
rusty bacon and a tankard of the smallest ale at the nearest hedge alehouse."
All this now sounds inexpressibly droll, and yet this prophet of evil was not
entirely wrong; nay, in some important particulars he was more right than the
railway promoters, whom he so heartily detested. The railway did cost nearly
seven millions instead of four millions as calculated by the projectors, and
the cost of working before the amalgamation with the Grand Junction did
amount to 380,000 pounds per annum: two figure facts which would have
effectually crushed speculation could they have been proved in 1831; but then
the per contra of traffic was equally astounding in its overflow, instead of
one-third of the existing traffic, or 126,780 pounds a-year allowed by the
pamphleteer, the London and Birmingham earned a gross revenue of nearly
900,000 pounds, while still leaving a traffic in heavy goods on the canals
sufficient to pay from 6 to 30 pounds per cent. to the proprietors, in spite
of a reduction of rates of upwards of 50 pounds per cent. Indeed this
traffic actually increased on the Grand Junction Canal, since the opening of
the Birmingham Railway, from 750,000 pounds in 1836, to 1,160,000 pounds in
1847.
Perhaps on no point would the expectation of the most sanguine among the
early projectors of railways been more satisfactorily exceeded than in regard
to safety. Swiftness, and cheapness, and power, acute intelligent engineers
foresaw; but that millions of passengers should be whirled along at a speed
varying from twenty to fifty miles an hour with more safety than they could
have secured by walking a-foot, would have seemed an anticipation of the very
wildest character. Yet such is the case. In 1850, upwards of seventy
millions of souls were conveyed by railway; when eleven passengers were
killed and fifty-four injured, or less than one to each million of passengers
conveyed.
Even at the risk of seeming trite, prosy, and common-place, it is right to
remind the young generation who consider the purchase of a railway ticket
gives them a right to grumble at a thousand imaginary defects and
deficiencies in railway management, how great are the advantages in
swiftness, economy, and safety, which they enjoy through the genius,
enterprise, and stubborn perseverance of George Stephenson and his friends
and pupils in 1825.