Early railways

A renewed interest in 19th century railways led me to request L T C Rolt’s biography of George and Robert Stephenson from the British Library. His wonderful writing resulted in a decision to order a copy of the book on line, only to discover not half an hour later that I already had a copy on my shelves... I was unable to cancel the order but the book when it came was a much better copy that my original, so I was not unhappy.
 
Reading about the early days of the Stockton and Darlington railway, 1825, I was overcome with the romance of the period, rose-tinted of course by Rolt’s erudite style. It was just ten years since Waterloo, the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, and in the national census a few years later in 1831, for the first time ever more people were being employed in industry than on the land. For the record, the S & D R was the very first public railway in the world to be operated by locomotives.
 
I grew up in the age of steam, and the smoke and steam from the trains was as familiar then as the smell of aviation fuel in airports is today. Some years ago I found myself driving behind a traction engine slowly negotiating a roundabout in Chelmsford. It was emitting evil looking yellow-black smoke from burning coal, but the smell of the sulphurous coal-smoke, mixed with wet steam and hot oil was easily as evocative as the fragrance of warm madeleines was to Marcel Proust. Of course it was the burning of all that coal that has led us into the climate crisis we are now facing, but that was then, and that was the way we lived.
 
Anyway, it was a chapter from Rolt’s book, entitled The First Railwaymen, that engaged my amused interest. The Stockton and Darlington Railway was designed to transport coal from the County Durham collieries to the River Tees at Stockton. It was a public railway, and operated pretty much like a public road functions today, in that any traffic could use it. That meant that as well as steam locomotives hauling coal, it could accommodate horse-drawn coal trains, and up to six different firms offering passenger travel in coaches—also horse-drawn—on regular timetables. The railway was only single track with no signals or any control of trains, although there were some rules and it was provided with passing loops, four to the mile. Passenger coaches had right of way, and horse-drawn coal trains had to give way to locomotives. Robert Stephenson commented that the drivers of the locomotives hauling coal were ‘not the most manageable class of beings’; Rolt adds: ‘the horse leaders were a tough and truculent gang, not infrequently tipsy...’ Some parts of the line were on an incline, and the horse-drawn trains had a ‘Dandy Cart’, a special truck where the horse could ride when the train was coasting downhill.
 
The ensuing chaos can only be imagined. A few incidents from the book:
 
“Two horse-drivers refused to allow a steam train to pass them by ... [and] forced it to follow them for four miles.”
 
“[a] driver shunted some wagons so violently that the horse was pitched out of the dandy cart and fell down the Myers Flat embankment.”
 
“Three horse-drivers left their trains blocking the line ... [and] went to a neighbouring pub for a two-hour drinking session.”
 
“One foggy morning, Thomas Sanderson ... suffering from a hangover, left his horse while it was hauling a train of empties and retired to the dandy cart behind to sleep it off. He was rudely awakened when a locomotive ran into the rear of the dandy cart and was derailed. The line was blocked for two hours.”
 
“William Ogle and George Hodgson left Shildon is such a roaring state of [drunkenness] that Ogle continued to drive his horse at a gallop regardless of the fact that the dandy cart had jumped the rails and was tearing up the track. They forced another horse-driver whom they met to go back into a loop and overturned his empty wagons. Finally this precious pair met a steam train and, refusing to give way, tore up a rail, threatening to throw the engine off the line.”

It is interesting to reflect how Mick lynch would have dealt with the issues arising... While perhaps being not entirely reliable, rail travel then certainly sounds interesting—provided that you were not in a hurry.
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