Railway Empire Read online

  RAILWAY EMPIRE

  By the Same Author

  The Canal Builders

  The Canal Pioneers

  The Light Railways of Great Britain and Ireland (with John Scott Morgan)

  The Railway Builders

  A Steam Engine Pilgrimage

  Thomas Telford

  THE RAILWAY EMPIRE

  How the British Gave Railways to the World

  Anthony Burton

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

  Pen & Sword Transport

  An imprint of Pen & Sword Books Ltd Yorkshire - Philadelphia

  47 Church Street

  Barnsley

  South Yorkshire

  S70 2AS

  Copyright © Anthony Burton, 2018

  ISBN 978 1 47384 369 1

  eISBN 978 1 47387 041 3

  Mobi ISBN 978 1 47387 040 6

  The right of Anthony Burton to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter One Beginnings

  Chapter Two Europe

  Chapter Three The Crimea

  Chapter Four The Americas

  Chapter Five Asia

  Chapter Six Africa

  Chapter Seven Australasia

  Chapter Eight Conclusion

  Appendix

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Preface

  The text for this edition remains substantially unchanged apart from correcting errors that slipped through in the first edition. The big difference is the great increase in the number of illustrations which will, I hope, give the reader a broader picture of the efforts and achievements of all those who left Britain to travel the world building railways. The text is mainly concerned with civil engineering, but some of the extra illustrations have been selected to show the huge range of locomotives provided by British companies for railways overseas.

  Anthony Burton

  Stroud, 2017

  CHAPTER ONE

  Beginnings

  This is a story of great adventures, of men in sola topees hacking their way through the jungles of uncharted lands. It is a tale of epic proportions, of armies of men travelling half-way round the world to shovel foreign soil into English wheelbarrows. It is also a story of high finance, of millions being raised in London for such exotic sounding enterprises as the Ferrocarril al Oeste or the Bombay, Baroda and Central Indian Railway. The crest of the latter hangs by my desk showing four Indian porters staggering up a stony path under the weight of an ornate palanquin, while a resplendent train puffs its way over a viaduct behind them, the driver leaning nonchalantly out of his cab window. Somehow it seems to sum up much of what one thinks of as the great railway empire: the old giving way to the new, the splendours of British manufacture looking down, literally and metaphorically, on the crudities of an older world. But how did all this come about? It is not difficult to imagine why British India should turn to the British engineer for help, but why should the French, the Russians, the Argentinians and the Japanese have turned in the same direction for manpower, machines and money to build their railways? It is too easy to say ‘because Britain was first’, too easy and not altogether true.

  The story begins in Germany. Georg Bauer was a mining engineer who spent his life recording the best mining techniques of the age. In 1556, a year after his death, his work appeared in print, in suitably classical guise, as Agricola’s De Re Metallica. It features superb woodcuts illustrating the machinery of the mines, among which scurry the miners themselves. If they seem mildly comical today, that is because they have comical associations. Walt Disney used these drawings as the basis for the costumes of the Seven Dwarfs: the first known illustration of a railway shows a truck being handled by a close relation of Happy, Sleepy and Dopey. The system Bauer showed is not strictly speaking a railway, as the wheels run on planks and the trucks are kept in place by a pin running in a groove on the track, but the elements of a railway were certainly there, half a century before there is a record of anything of the sort appearing in Britain. When that happened, however, the system was so evidently superior to the earlier model that it became generally accepted in the mining community, and even the Germans knew it as the ‘Englischer Kohlenweg’.

  The earliest records of this type of railway system date from the early 1600s. Huntingdon Beaumont was both colliery owner and engineer. Some time in 1603 he laid down approximately two miles of track from the pithead of his colliery at Wollaton near Nottingham. The track was still wooden, but now there was no plank and groove; this track consisted of rails on which trucks ran with double-flanged wheels, looking very similar to ordinary pulley-wheels. There were other routes in Shropshire, but the most popular area for the new ‘wagon-ways’, as they soon became known, were the coalfields of the north-east of England. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the system was already sufficiently interesting to foreign engineers for them to wish to inspect it. Among these was a Frenchman, Monsieur Jars, who came over in 1765 and wrote a description of what he saw, entitled Voyages Metallurgiques. The ‘nouvelles routes’ ran from pits near to the river bank, where the trucks could be unloaded into waiting ships that took the coal round the coast. The trucks were arranged on a gradual, steady descent so that gravity did most of the work, and they could be hauled back by horses. The system had squared-off rails, 6 or 7 inches broad by 4 or 5 inches thick, carried on parallel rows of oak sleepers, 4 to 8 inches square. The rails were held together by wooden pins, and the joints were protected by iron strips. By the time of Jars’ visit, there was already a movement towards replacing the old wooden wagon wheels by cast-iron. The wagons were fitted with a hinged bottom, which would be knocked open at the riverside staithes, allowing the whole load to be deposited into a chute. It was also not unknown for the flap to be jolted open in transit, dumping the coal on to the track resulting in what locals called a ‘cold cake’.

  Where it all began: the first “railways” were used in mines in Germany. The trucks ran on a plain wooden track, with a groove down the middle. A pin on the truck engaged with the groove keeping the truck on course. This illustration comes from Agricola’s De Re Metallica of 1557.

  By the end of the eighteenth century the simple wagon-ways were becoming increasingly sophisticated. The improvement in iron making that began with the Darbys of Coalbrookdale made it possible to improve the track by laying a metal strip over the wood and eventually to replace the wood altogether by metal. Again many of the early experiments came in the colliery districts. In 1776 the mining engineer John Curr introduced the metal plateway to the underground workings. The rails, or plates, had an L-shaped cross-section, whi
ch held the wagon to the track. Previously, coal had been moved from the face in baskets, manhandled, or rather child-handled since most of the work went to boys and girls, along the low, narrow galleries. The plateway represented such an immense improvement, and saved so much grindingly hard labour that Curr found himself celebrated in verse – with a suitably Geordie accent.

  God bless the man wi’ peace and plenty

  That first invented metal plates,

  Draw out his years to five times twenty,

  Then slide him through the heavenly gates.

  For if the human frame to spare

  Frae toil an’ pain ayont conceevin’

  Hae aught te de wi’ gettin’ there,

  Aw think he mun gan’ strite to heaven.

  The simple plateway soon became part of a complex web of railways, requiring ever more elaborate engineering works. As early as the 1720s one of these lines, the Tanfield tramway in County Durham, had to be taken across the Houghwell Burn, where it carves its way through a deep, wooded valley. The job of bridging the gap went to a local mason, Ralph Wood, who designed a bridge as a single, graceful span of 103 feet. And there it stands today, the world’s oldest surviving railway bridge. Although the plateway or tramway system was developing rapidly, the greatest changes in the field of transport came with the spread of canals from 1760 onwards. A horse pulling a boat or a barge could shift far more cargo than a horse hauling wagons on even the best made tramway. Locks conquered the problem of hills; valleys were crossed on high embankments and soaring aqueducts; hills pierced by cuttings and tunnels. The engineering skills that were to be vital in the railway age of the nineteenth century were being learned in the canal age of the eighteenth. But there were places where even the most ambitious canal engineer could never take a waterway. The valleys of South Wales, for example, run largely parallel to each other in a north-south direction, separated by high spines of hills. East-west connections brought engineers such as Benjamin Outram to construct tramways to link industry to canal and one canal to another.

  The surprise is, in some ways, that so many of these advances were occurring in Britain. An unbiased observer casting his eye over Europe at the beginning of the eighteenth century would probably have elected the French for the role of great engineering innovators. The British marvelled at the privately financed Bridgewater Canal in 1760 with its aqueduct over the River Irwell, yet a century earlier, in the 1660s, the French had already built the Languedoc Canal, 150 miles long with 100 locks, a tunnel and three major aqueducts. British engineers had, in effect, been reinventing the wheel. The work on the canal was organized with great professionalism by Pierre-Paul Riquet, and at one time 8000 men were employed in the works. Voltaire went to view the Louvre and Versailles, but he said, ‘le monument le plus glorieux par son utilité, par sa grandeur, et par ses difficultés, fut ce canal de Languedoc qui joint les deux mers’

  The French worked in a systematic and orderly way and were soon to become the first European country to put the profession of engineering on to an official footing. The Corps des Ponts et Chaussées was formed in 1716 to supervise public works. Just as importantly, the French, unlike the pragmatic British, established an engineering school to train the next generation of builders. So important were the Ecole and the Corps that British engineers who wanted to remain up to date in their field and, just as importantly, wanted to grasp the theoretic basis of their subject, had no option but to learn French. France it seemed was leading the world in engineering and science. Yet by the 1830s when two Hungarian noblemen wanted to find the best way of building a bridge across the Danube in order to unite the cities of Buda and Pest, they had no doubt that the thing to do was to go to England, ‘there consulting with men of experience and skill’, because ‘far more has been done there worth going to see, than is to be met with on the whole continent of Europe’. What had happened in the century between? The short answer is the French Revolution. While the French were preoccupied with overturning the social order which had given birth to the strict formalism of the Ponts et Chaussées, the British had been transforming the old economic order of their country in the Industrial Revolution.

  The British invented little that was new in terms of the civil engineering of railways; they did, however, rapidly come to lead the world in the development of the invention that was to combine with the railway to create a whole new transport system: the steam engine. Once again the early experimental work occurred in continental Europe, while the British led the way in finding practical applications of steam power. It all began with the discovery that the atmosphere exerted pressure, first demonstrated by Evangelista Torricelli, a pupil of Galileo in 1643, and it was soon realized that if a vacuum could be created on one side of a piston, air pressure would work on the other side to drive it into the piston. The Dutchman Christiaan Huygens produced his vacuum by the alarming device of exploding gunpowder, but it was his assistant Denis Papin who first suggested the more sensible solution of condensing steam. His little demonstration engine was a curiosity – the only practical device he came up with was the pressure cooker. It was left principally to Thomas Newcomen to use the same idea to produce a practical engine for pumping water from mines. His steam engine was soon nodding its ponderous head over mines all over Britain. This was the beam engine, where pump rods at one end of a beam dropped under their own weight, to be hauled up again by the piston attached to the other. It was a cumbersome process with steam in the cylinder being sprayed with cold water to condense it, after which air pressure worked on the open top cylinder. It was hugely expensive in terms of fuel, which was no great problem in the middle of a coal field, but which made it ruinously expensive in the coal starved areas of the metal mining regions.

  A more sophisticated version of the tracks shown in Agricola developed in the late 16th and early 17th century, also in the mining industry, but this time using a railed track, at first with wooden and later with cast iron rails. As mine trucks in north east England were known as trams, the systems became known as tramways The illustration shows a typical horse drawn tram: it was on such tracks hat the first railway locomotive was to run.

  The development of steam engines, such as this early Boulton & Watt, paved the way for the development of the locomotive.

  A solution was found by James Watt, who realized that the steam could be condensed in a separate condenser outside the cylinder. This meant it was no longer necessary to alternately heat and cool the main cylinder. It also meant that he could use the steam on either side of the piston. The atmospheric pressure engine had become a steam engine proper, but was still using the notion of condensing the steam rather than using the pressure of the steam itself. But James Watt firmly believed that high-pressure steam was a dangerous monster – he would have none of it. And since he had acquired a patent that virtually excluded everyone else from making any kind of steam engine whatsoever, he ensured that the monster was kept caged until the patent expired in 1800. The Watt engine, however, was already a versatile machine, and the closed cylinder meant that the piston could be made to work in two directions, not just in one as in the Newcomen engine. It was not much of an imaginative leap to see that if you attached a crank you could turn a wheel: you could use it to work machinery in a factory, to turn the paddle wheels of a boat on water or even to turn the wheels of a vehicle on land.

  The first vehicle to be moved over land by steam power was demonstrated in Paris in 1769 by its inventor Nicholas Cugnot. It was an extraordinary looking object with three wheels and a huge boiler that hung over the solitary front wheel. It was a masterpiece of instability as it proved after a few tottering metres of movement when it tumbled over amidst much hissing of steam and showering of sparks. Monsieur Cugnot was not encouraged to continue with his experiment. James Watt himself contemplated a steam carriage, but his nervousness about the dangers of high-pressure steam prevented him from holding any trials. His bolder employee, William Murdock, was less reluctant and his model bowled che
erily down an English lane in 1784. The only acknowledgement he received was a prompt warning that any more tampering with such devices would see him out of a job. Matters had reached an impasse, but if the road engine was temporarily stymied, steam was beginning to find its place on the infant railway system of Britain.

  The tramways serving the canals often included quite steep inclines on which the descent was controlled by a brake-man, in theory at least. The Duke of Rutland visited South Wales in the first decade of the nineteenth century and described the system he found at work on the tramway linking the Brecon and Abergavenny Canal to a local iron works.

  This rail-road is adapted to the size of the waggons, or carts, which convey the coal to the canal. On each side is an iron groove, which extends the whole length of the road, and on which the wheels (four or six in number) run. They are so contrived as to run downwards the whole way (sometimes for the extent of some miles) from the works; so that when laden, they require no horses to draw them down. Indeed they acquire so great a degree of velocity in their descent, that a man is forced to walk or run behind the cart, with a kind of rudder or pole affixed to the hind-wheel, which he locks up when it proceeds too fast. Should this pole break (which it sometimes does) the waggon flies away, and overturns everything it meets. Of course, any one who is coming up the road, is in imminent danger, unless he can by any means get out of the way; which is very difficult, as the road is narrow, and runs along a precipice. Last year, Mr. Frere, the proprietor of the iron works, was returning from London, and going along the rail-road in a post-chaise, when about a hundred yards from him, he saw one of those waggons coming down upon him with astonishing velocity. He could not possibly get out of the way, and must have been crushed to pieces, if fortunately the waggon had not broken over the iron groove, which had hitherto kept it in the track, and run forcibly up an ash-tree by the side of the road, in the branches of which it literally stuck, and thus saved him from immediate destruction.