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Recognizable railways existed in Britain at least as early as the
16th century. In the era before modern road-building, most long
distance transportation was by water, even where the two ends of
the journey were in the same country. Where an area of industrial
production was close to a sea or river port, then goods could simply
be loaded onto a ship. Where there was no sea or river nearby, canals
were constructed. Where it was not feasible to build a canal,
some alernative was required. Most mining in Britain was, and still is,
carried out in hilly regions of the country, which did not favour
canals. In such regions, a practical approach to transportation was
to lay rails over existing roads and tracks. The rails smoothed out the
journey, and made it easier to guide the wagon. Early railways of
this sort were powered by people or horses, as well as gravity.
Some railways even included carriages for the horses - the wagons
would roll downhill under the force of gravity, carrying their goods
and the horses, then the horses would pull the wagons back uphill.
In short, by the time steam power rose to prominence, rail transportation
was already well established in certain areas.
Steam power started to become economically important in Britain during
the mid-18th century. The new centres of mass production - textiles and
mining, for example - required huge volumes of water, and steam power
was an effective way of pumping it. Early innovators in steam technology,
like James Watt and Matthew Boulton, became very wealthy by exploiting
the patents they held. By the 1760s people started to
realize that it might be feasible to construct a steam-powered vehicle.
The main development in this respect was the
use of high-pressure steam, rather than the low-pressure systems developed
by Watt and Boulton. In a low-pressure steam engine, steam at atmospheric
pressure is admitted into a cylinder housing a piston,
where it is rapidly
cooled by cold water. This cooling has the effect of condensing the
steam, generating a partial vacuum. The vacuum draws the piston, which
can do mechanical work. Watt's main contribution was to realise that the
steam could be condensed, not in the cylinder chamber itself, but in a
separate condenser connected to the cylinder. Separate-condenser engines
were much smaller and more efficient than their predecessors, but were
still huge and wasteful by any modern standard.
Mining engineer Richard Trevithick realized that better efficiency
could be obtained by using the pressure of superheated steam to
operate the piston directly, with or without a condenser.
Of course, high-pressure engines were
more dangerous, as the metallurgical technology of the day was not
capable of making sufficiently robust boilers. Holders of patents
on low-pressure steam systems used this fact to prevent the commercial
exploitation of high-pressure engines. Consequently Trevithick
had to wait until Watt and Boultons' patents expired before he could
raise the funding for development of a steam-powered vehicle.
In the end, the first public demonstration of a steam carriage
was by Cugnot in Paris, in 1769. Trevithick's first vehicle, affectionately
known as `Captain Dick's Puffer' was demonstrated in 1802.
None of these early steam carriages ran on rails.
It appears that Trevithick was well aware of the benefits that would
accrue from linking steam power to railways, but most other people
were sceptical. Trevithick did eventually manage to demonstrate
practical steam railways. His most famous demonstration was probably his
Catch-Me-Who-Can locomotive, which ran on a circular track
in Euston Square in 1808. Realistically, this was little more
than a sideshow exhibit,
but the demonstration at Pennydarren ironworks in 1804 was more compelling.
This railway could transport ten tons of iron and 70 passengers on a
nine-mile track.
One of the main problems for the early railway designers lay
in constructing rails
sufficiently sturdy that they could carry the considerable weight of
a steam engine. Trevithick's railways repeatedly fractured under
the weight of the locomotive, and this problem was not solved in his
lifetime. Even when it was solved, it was still by no means obvious that
steam power would be more economically worthwhile than horse power.
The first commercially successful railway in Britain was the
Stockton & Darlington, built by George Stephenson and opened in
1825. This used wrought iron rails, rolled out in short sections.
Because these rails were malleable, although they deformed under
the weight of the locomotive, they did not break.
Despite the successes of innovators like Trevithick and Stephenson,
the capital cost of steam engines and railways still prevented
their widespread uptake. It required two economic changes to tip the
balance from favouring horse power to favouring steam power. The first
was Britain's incessant warring against France. Wars consumed a great
many horses, and a great deal of fodder. The demand for horses
outstripped supply, and eventually the cost of
horses and horse feed simply got too high for civilian use, however
important. The second factor was the realisation that railways did
not have to charge for their services the same was as canals
and roads did.
The canal operator made the initial capital investment in the
infrastructure, then made money by charging users per boat
or per ton. Road builders charged tolls for use of their roads,
again per vehicle or per ton.
Companies that used canals and road transport often maintained
their own boats and horses, but this was clearly not going to
be feasible for steam railways, at least not for some time. Early
horse-drawn railways were funded the same way as canals. The railway
builder provided the infrasructure, and the users paid to transport
their own goods using their own horses and wagons. When steam power
first started to become practicable, a railway
locomotive represented a massive investment. The
Stockton & Darlington ran to a fixed timetable, using its own
locomotive, and charged
per journey. It was thus the first recognizable modern railway
service.
The success of the Stockton & Darlington railway, among others,
led to the decision to built the much longer
Liverpool & Manchester railway. Even then it wasn't a foregone
conclusion that steam locomotives would be used, or even steam
power. Horses were still seriously under consideration. Even if
steam power was the best choice, the designers could still have
opted for stationery engines drawing the carriages on chains, as
had been tried on other railways. In the end, a competition was
held at Rainhill to find the best locomotive. The winner was the
famous Rocket, built by George and Robert Stephenson. The
trial was to find the most robust and reliable locomotive, not the
fastest. In the days when horses were the predominant means of
long-distance land transport, a locomotive only had to be as fast
as a horse-drawn wagon.
The Liverpool & Manchester railway opened in 1830. Over the
next twenty years or so, most of England's major cities were
gradually linked up to the emerging railway network.
From then on, the railway network expanded explosively, until
by the start of the 20th century there were about 5000 miles of
railways in Britain. Few English
villiages were more than ten miles or so from the nearest railway
station. The railways were all privately owned,
and competition between the operators was intense. This competition
was clearly inefficient - railway travel was expensive, with
operators running competing services in the same region on their
own tracks, and huge amounts of money being spent on legal battles.
There were about a hundred different operators, most of whom were
bitter rivals.
All this came to an end with the outbreak of war in 1915, when the army
took over the running of the entire system. At the end of the war,
it was obvious that national control of the railway system was hugely
more efficient. However, nationalization was not seriously considered
(this would have smacked of Bolshevism; the emerging Labour movement
was less than ten years old at this time). So Parliament acted
to create four giant companies out of the hundred or so railway operators.
This situation continued until 1948, when the railways were eventually
nationalized, and British Railways was created.
BR inherited a fleet of about 30,000 steam locomotives, some of which
were capable of speeds in excess of 100 mph, and of travelling from
London to Scotland non-stop. Impressive as this was, it was obvious
even in the 1940s that the great days of steam were past.
The first factor that mitigated against the continued development of
the steam railway was electricity. Even in the early 20th century
it was possible to run railways on electical power, and by the 1930s
a large part of the London metropolitan area was electrified.
Electric locomotives were cleaner,
easier to prepare, quieter, and smoother to ride.
What limited the
expansion of electric railways in the 1930s was the immature state
of elctrical distribution; in the 1940s and 1950s, distribution
technology improved to the extent that it was possible to envisage
an electric main line railway.
The second factor was the improvement in road quality. The first world
war had shown the importance of a decent road system, and large numbers
of new roads and road vehicles had been constructed. When the war finished,
there was a surplus of heavy lorries, along with people who knew how to
drive them. This led to the development of a road haulage industry
with a capacity to rival the railways.
The third factor, and the most insiduous, was the general poor state of
repair of the steam locomotive fleet, and the general lack of interest
in doing anything about it. In the railway boom between 1850 and 1920,
locomotives had been built and put into service far faster than
repair and maintenance facilities could be assembled.
By the 1950s, a large proportion of
the national locomotive fleet was falling apart. Some of the locomotives
were over thirty years old. Often essential repairs had to be carried
out in the open air, with inadequate tools and materials. Where there
were service yards, the sheds were dark, dirty, and ill-equipped.
There was a general feeling in the industry that it was time for a fresh
start. Of course, it would have been possible to build maintenance
facilities and bring the steamers back to tip-top condition, but the
political will just wasn't there. So when it became economically and
technologically feasible to switch to diesel and eletric traction,
BR jumped at the chance. BR's last steamer, the aptly-named
Evening Star, was built in 1960, and withdrawn from
service for preservation in 1965. Steam locos and depots were left to go
to ruin. BR's last public steam-hauled service ran in 1968.
Most of the country's vast fleet of steam locos was broken up for scrap. It is thanks to the efforts of a dedicated group of steam enthusiasts that there are any steam locomotives left at all. Ironically, it is thanks to Dr Beeching that we have anywhere to run them. Beeching oversaw the closure of about 30% of the national railway system, most of it in rurual areas, in the 1960s. Some of the disused lines have been taken over by preservation societies, and steam locomotives can now regularly be observed chuffing around the British countryside.
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