Reviews Railway Books Essay Research Paper Steamed

Reviews: Railway Books Essay, Research Paper

Steamed up Locomotives of the LNWR Southern Division Harry Jack 300pp, RCTS The Railway King: A Biography of George Hudson, Railway Pioneer and Fraudster Robert Beaumont 274pp, Review Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel Angus Buchanan 294pp, Hambledon & London Harry Jack’s brother, Ian, the editor of Granta , is a railway enthusiast who has wondered if his passion for railways and steam locomotives is a healthy one. Ian Jack hides copies of railway magazines inside important literary reviews, he says, when travelling by train, in case he is taken for a nutter or pervert. I know exactly how he feels. Admit to a love of railways in knowing, ironic, privatise-or-bust, celebrity-obsessed Britain, and you might as well strap yourself into a straitjacket and wait for the arrival of the men in white coats. And yet, for all the media’s condescension, there are millions of railway enthusiasts (a few, believe it or not, still work for the railways themselves) and any number of people for whom a steam locomotive, simple or compound, Single or Consolidation, superheated or condensing, Stirling or Churchward (don’t ask me to explain), is a thing of sulphurous beauty, a mechanical joy for ever. Harry Jack’s meticulously researched book – at least 30 years in the making – goes some way to demonstrate that an understanding of railway history is one perfectly useful and often enthralling way of interpreting and making sense of our past. There was, of course, never anything dry or dusty in the sight or sound of a “Bloomer” or a “Crampton” thundering along the world’s first trunk line from London to Birmingham, with coachloads of crinolined ladies and top-hatted gentlemen taking part in an adventure that would encompass the globe and change it for ever. Jack’s story is that of the creation, naming and running of the world’s first long-distance mainline engines. It is a story of professional rivalries, of engineering reputations won and sometimes unfairly forgotten, of cylinder diameters, boiler pressure settings and smoky adventure. It is a sober account written for railway historians and enthusiasts, who will nevertheless get a genuine buzz from watching this early and often confusingly documented railway history come into sharp focus. They will also enjoy the rainy-day lists, diagrams, engineering drawings and Victorian photographs. The importance of the London and Birmingham Railway (L&B), opened in 1838, can hardly be exaggerated. It connected the capital not just to the “workshop of the world”, but beyond its own boundaries, via the Grand Junction Railway, to the “Cottonopolis” of Manchester and the great port of Liverpool. Engineered by the Stephensons, it was intended principally for express passenger traffic. The first public train was pulled up by rope from Euston to Camden at 8.10am on September 17 1838. Off from Camden at 8.25, the 20-coach train with its 200 passen gers arrived in Birmingham Moor Street to great cheers and a lineside “rural feast” at 1.58pm after stops at Watford, Tring, Wolverton, Roade, Weedon, Rugby and Coventry. The journey time of the fastest trains was down to four hours for the 113 miles between Euston and Moor Street in 1844, and under three the following year. Early trains were not nearly as slow as most people imagine. The sturdy 2-2-0 designs of Edward Bury (1794-1858), first manager of the L&B’s locomotive department, could run safely at 50mph. Just before the line opened, the Duke of Wellington treated Marshal Soult, a former adversary in the battlefield and now the French ambassador, to a run up to Liverpool from Birmingham on the Grand Junction Railway: as thrilling as any Peninsular or Napoleonic cavalry charge, the train maintained a speed of 64mph for 10 faster-than-fairies, faster-than-witches minutes. No wonder that the great racing track of the L&B was described as “unquestionably the greatest public work ever executed, either in ancient or in modern times”. Edward Bury, a Georgian in an early-Victorian world, erred on the side of caution and reliability in the design of his stubby L&B locomotives. He suffered much from the machinations of his engineering rivals, the canny Stephensons, and resigned, exhausted, from the L&B when just 54. Because his was not the rags-to-riches story beloved by Samuel Smiles of Self Help fame, he has been all but written out of history; Jack has happily reinstated him. Bury’s is not the only ghost revived in this great adventure. Others include those of the dashing (and slightly slapdash) Irish-born James Edward McConnell (1815-83), Bury’s successor. McConnell designed the “Bloomers”. These were not highly engineered Victorian ladies’ undergarments, but high-stepping and graceful locomotives that took to the rails in 1851. They got their name from the sudden fashion for bloomers, named after Mrs Amelia Bloomer, the American feminist who invented the eye-popping garment in the year of the Great Exhibition. McConnell was forced to resign when the locomotive works at Crewe in Cheshire took precedence over the L&B’s Wolverton works, Buckinghamshire, under the direction of his rival, John Ramsbottom. Heavy British manufacturing was, from this moment, increasingly concentrated in the north. Since then, Wolverton, the first railway town, has all but shrugged off its Victorian ancestry. Locomotive production ceased here as early as 1863. The