Railway Empire Read online

  They have been in the habit of applying to one of their masters for everything, finding out nothing for themselves; and the consequence is, that they are children, and they cannot form a judgment. It is the same in the North of Germany; the great difficulty is, that you cannot get them to come to a decision. They want always to enquire and to investigate, and they never come to a result.

  It was generally agreed that if the British navvy was the king of workers, then, in the early days at least, the British engineer was also internationally acknowledged as king of his profession. Even on lines where it might have been thought that national pride would have dictated the choice, the British were often still preferred. Cherbourg, facing across the Channel towards the old enemy, Britain, was in the 1850s being fortified as a naval base. A railway company was set up to build a strategically important line through to Nantes, and the president was to be the resoundingly entitled Count Chasseloup Laubet. The engineering work, however, went to Joseph Locke. It was not to be a happy line for Locke in one sense. Scaffolding collapsed under him while he was inspecting tunnel workings, leaving him with a fractured knee and a permanent limp. Perhaps he received some consolation from the grandeur of the royal opening, attended by Louis Napoleon and his Empress and by Queen Victoria.

  The great engineers were themselves treated like royalty, albeit minor royalty. Belgium was in some ways like Britain: a small country with important mineral resources, a rapidly developing industrial base and the need to link mines, industries and seaports together. When Leopold I came to the throne in 1831, he proved to be an enthusiastic promoter of railways, and had the foresight to see that there was more sense in planning and building the basic network as a rational whole rather than letting it come together in piecemeal fashion. Given the inter-company rivalries, not to mention the gauge wars, that were to plague Britain, his arguments were irrefutable. Leopold turned to the men of the day, George and Robert Stephenson. Robert was to supply Belgium with their first locomotive from his Newcastle works in 1834, and the following year they both went to meet the King to discuss his grand schemes. George Stephenson, his early set-backs on the Liverpool & Manchester now behind him, clearly enjoyed the feting and the compliments. He wrote home in high good spirits: ‘King Leopold stated he was very glad to have the honour of my acquaintance. He seemed quite delighted with what had taken place in Belgium about the railways.’ To the Belgian people he was a hero, invited to every important official opening and even made a Knight of the Order of Leopold, an honour which was surely never envisaged by the ten-year-old lad who went to work at the local colliery. Robert was to receive the same honour.

  A train at St. Cenis: the line was originally worked over the Pass, using the Fell system, with a third rail

  George Stephenson’s work in Europe was to be limited by ill-health. In 1845 he followed Mackenzie on the difficult journey over the Pyrenees and developed pleurisy. He struggled back to England, and his doctor took 20 ounces of blood from him during the crossing, which he said, not surprisingly, left him ‘very weak’. After that he returned to his home, Tapton House, near Chesterfield, where he concentrated on the intriguing problem of trying to grow straight cucumbers. Robert continued to work, and the Newcastle factory was kept busy providing locomotives for railways throughout Europe. The roll-call of railways supplied with Stephenson engines even as early as 1840 is an impressive one: three lines in France, the state railways of Belgium, Austria, Italy and Russia, and a whole clutch of lines in Germany. Inevitably, countries would soon be building their own locomotives: engines designed for British terrain were by no means always as well suited for topography as varied as the Alps or the great plains of Central Europe, but in the 1840s Stephenson & Co. could proudly claim to be the world’s leading manufacturer.

  The route over the St. Cenis Pass was eventually replaced by this tunnel.

  The pre-eminence of the Stephensons in Britain was rapidly challenged by other engineers who in turn found themselves in demand for European schemes. Brunel was Stephenson’s great competitor in Britain, pitting his broad gauge against the latter’s standard gauge, but in the field of overseas railways, he was at best a half-hearted player. After the completion of the Great Western Railway, his interest began to turn towards steamships and the Atlantic crossing. Nevertheless, he did become involved in railway building in Italy, though from his surviving letters it does not seem to have been much to his taste. Brunel the individualist never took kindly to interference from anyone, least of all government officials. In 1845 he went to Turin with his assistants to survey a line to Genoa, but that was as far as proceedings went. In November he wrote to Count Pollin to explain precisely why he wanted nothing more to do with the line. Problems had begun when two engineers appeared at the office of his assistant, Herschel Babbage, son of an old friend, the mathematician and inventor of the first computer, Charles Babbage. The two men tried to tell Babbage what to do and one of them, Brunel declared, was ‘not even of the Sardinian Govt, but a foreigner’. Now this was more than a little provocative on Brunei’s part as he must have been aware that by then the area was Piedmont, and its rulers were fired with new-born nationalist fervour. But this was only the start of his complaints. He was just getting up a full head of steam.

  The unexpected difficulties I find to exist by the (to me) extraordinary complicated forms to be gone through, the detailed reports to be made upon each separate piece of work were enough to deter me from proceeding, but these difficulties I felt bound to meet. I do not feel bound to attempt the impossibility of satisfactorily conducting the work when the principal & most essential condition of entire confidence & absence of interference is not carried out.

  In spite of this experience, a month later he was accepting the role of consultant engineer on the Marie Antonie Railway from Florence to Pistoia and cheerfully proposing that the hapless Babbage stay on in Italy to oversee the works. He was in – for Brunel – a remarkably expansive and conciliatory mood at this time. Back in England, he was experimenting with the disastrous atmospheric railway out of Exeter. Brunel tentatively proposed the same system for Italy but added, almost as an afterthought, that as all the rest of the Italian railway system was to be built for conventional steam locomotives, it might be as well to fit in. Quite so! The Italians wisely rejected the atmospheric. Troubles, however, were soon mounting. In March Brunel wrote to Babbage:

  It is very difficult to send you out positive instructions on any one point while every thing seems so liable to be reversed by the deception of others. If arbitrary rules are to be laid down for the construction of railways which are to overrule all consideration of traffic & which we in this country consider the great points on which judgement can be exercised – of course such rules can be followed but I would rather leave such mechanical work as that to others.

  He agreed, however, to go on with the work, in spite of the bizarre notions of the government engineers, who appeared to doubt the ability of trains to go round corners and wanted only straight-line routes, even if this entailed steeper gradients, extra earthworks and routes that failed to go anywhere near towns along the way: ‘I really believe you may as well take the whole line perfectly straight as I suppose would be preferred by the Government engineer.’ Brunel also proposed using a construction technique which was proving very successful in south-west England: building the bridges out of timber. He had offered to build one as a demonstration, but again the government engineers would have none of it. They wanted iron, and iron they would have, in spite of the huge expense of having everything imported into the country. This meek acquiescence was shortlived and one month later Brunel wrote to F.I. Vanzeller, whose son was working as Babbage’s assistant and wished to leave:

  A Crampton locomotive, built in the 1850s for the Compagnie de Chemin de Fer de l’Est.

  I cannot be surprised at anybody’s becoming tired of waiting for ‘progress’ on Italian business – I am sick of it – and were no English interests involved would decl
ine having anything more to do with them.

  He did continue, and was probably the only engineer in Britain who having declared that he did ‘not wish to propose rules for Florentine Architects’ could then proceed to consign their designs to the dustbin. Florence might boast some of the greatest architecture in the world, but Brunel had his own standards. He advised the Italians on everything from rails to locomotives to stations. He suggested ordering locomotives from the London & South Western and involving the locomotive superintendent in their design, so that he could give his best; though he suggested carriages would be better supplied to the Great Western pattern.

  Brunel was not destined to be one of the great railway builders of continental Europe, but that did not stop railway companies writing to him for advice. His answers were invariably forthright and blunt. The French, for instance, wanted to know his views on speed limits. The gist of the answer was simple: speed limits on a well-maintained track should depend on one factor only: how fast the engine could go. On the Great Western Railway, he declared, speeds of 100 km. per hour were by no means uncommon.

  I trust for the sake of the commercial prosperity of France that no restriction will be placed on the speed – public opinion and the interests of the Railway Companies will keep that within safe speeds. The only fear is that the want of competition on your great lines will lead them to be slow; but for the credit of France & French Engineers I trust that a speed of 32 kilometres will not even be talked of – that you will not allow it to be said all over Europe that your works are so badly constructed that your maximum speed is to be considerably below that of the slowest Railways in England – and not one half that of the average speed on our good railways, and not one third of that which we already attain with many of our Express Trains.

  He had one last blow to deliver: ‘a line which does not admit generally of a velocity of 40 Kilometres is not fit to open at all as a passenger line.’ The correspondence was not continued and the idea of speed limits was quietly dropped.

  If Brunel cursed the time spent in Italy, then he would have been apoplectic if faced by the intrigues and manoeuvrings that beset Charles Blacker Vignoles when he went to Wurtemberg, now part of modern Germany. In 1843 the Crown Prince came to Bristol and was taken by Vignoles to see a number of railways, including the Taff Vale. Vignoles noted, somewhat snootily:

  Found him less arrière [backward] than I expected. Signs of much intelligence, and he evinced a good deal of interest in the objects of his visit.

  In September 1843, he set off for Wurtemberg, pausing en route to look at various railway sites, including the incline at Liège where the resident engineer, Hudson, showed off the four stationary engines, each of which was rated at 80 horse power. The route from Liège to Verviers was a daunting introduction to European construction problems, for as well as the incline, there were eleven tunnels and sixteen river crossings. At Cologne he met Monsieur Beyser, who had already been working in Wurtemberg for a rival engineer, the German Baron von Bühler. The next part of the journey was by aged river steamer – ‘so shaky that I found it impossible to write’ – after which he continued by rail to Heidelberg. It was then that he got his first view of the country through which the railway was supposed to pass: it was not very encouraging. Wurtemberg was divided from Baden by a high ridge with no obvious gaps. He continued by road and a week later reached his base at Stuttgart. If the sight of the hills must have been depressing, it could hardly have been any more encouraging to be faced by a deputation of no fewer than seven ministers, ranging from Finance to War, only one of which had anything to do with railways. The scope for political machinations must already have seemed immense, though if Vignoles could have foreseen the devious manoeuvrings that lay ahead, he would have packed his bags and headed back for his bone-shaking river steamer. There was one more official meeting, an audience with the King, and then he got down to serious work.

  The beginning was not propitious. First he sat down to inspect the plans drawn up by Bühler: ‘Went particularly through the portfolio of working drawings prepared by Mr. B., none of which appeared to be the least use!’ Next day he discussed with a Stuttgart councillor the advisability of using English contractors, and then received a deputation of three engineers, Bühler, Kostlin and Etzel. They ‘appeared quite staggered at the formidable series of questions I have proposed but I insisted on having them answered.’ He also looked at possible sites for Stuttgart station, a subject that was to recur time and again over the coming months and which was destined to become a major source of disagreement. After that it was time to set out and marry up the plans with the actual terrain.

  If he was unimpressed by the working drawings, he was even less impressed by the chosen route. The first section was ‘up and down both sides of the Fils Valley, which is too absurd; the other an oblique inclined plane with gradient of 1 in 30, which is absurd.’ From this double absurdity he went on to Ulm and the Kiesenthal Valley where things were worse – ‘preposterous!’ The first good news came at the Schussen valley where he grudgingly admitted there was a ‘good line’ – or at any rate, it would be, ‘with some modifications’. The good view did not last, for he then discovered that in wet weather the Schussen regularly flooded and the proposed line would in fact be regularly submerged. And so Vignoles went on, grumbling at Bühler’s work while looking for better routes of his own.

  On a brief return to Stuttgart where Bühler and his friends tried to impress Vignoles with a new type of rail: it ‘turned out to be an alteration (for the worse) in the form of rail originally proposed by me in 1830 and which is well known in Germany as the Vignolesche Rail’. Matters were not improved when Bühler took Vignoles to show him a proposed line in the Enz valley. The result was as before: the route was too mountainous and there were too many ravines crossing the line. Vignoles blithely noted, ‘Explained all this as genially as I could to the Baron, who took his engineering disappointment very quietly’. This was to say the least a little naive. Ever since his arrival, Vignoles had been flaying Bühler, Etzel and their colleagues unmercifully: they could hardly be expected to enjoy the experience of being treated as fools in their own backyards. And worse was to come. Vignoles was being urged by another faction to see the King, speak to him ‘very freely’ and, in short, propose throwing out everything that had been done before and start again with his own designs. This was too much for the German engineers.

  A McIntosh Caledonian Railway locomotive built by North British for the Belgian State Railway c.1908

  Over the next few weeks he was busy drawing up plans and setting out proposals and was told by his supporters that he had the King’s support. But there seemed to be an increasingly large number of delays and irritations – including being provided with a translator who spent more time with a bottle in his hand than a pen. He went to see the King at the end of December.

  I made a formal complaint of the delays and difficulties that had been thrown in my way; and I also spoke strongly of the folly and absurdity of all that had hitherto been done by the Government engineers … I then pressed on the King the necessity for an entire and radical change in the management of the railway concerns … The King heard me with the utmost attention and several times addressed me as ‘Mon cher Vignoles’!

  His detractors continued to throw up obstacles, however. The Minister of War objected to the line passing too close to the cavalry barracks. Vignoles promptly arranged for the building of a wooden mock-up of a colonnade he proposed should screen the barracks. He invited his critics to a viewing and, to his great delight, the King himself appeared and approved the design. On another occasion Vignoles was conspicuously cold-shouldered by the Minister of the Interior at a state ball. Letters in the press attacking him were clearly emanating from the German engineers, but Vignoles declared it was beneath his dignity to reply. In March the King was taken ill and rumours multiplied. Vignoles recorded in horror in his diary: ‘It was whispered at the Palace that the King had decided about th
e Stuttgart station, against my plans, and in favour of ETZEL’S!’ Ten days later, the glum news was confirmed: he heard that ‘his Majesty’s decision and signature were obtained by Madame Stanberrautz, the actress, who had great influence with the King, and who patronised Etzel.’ Defeated by an actress! He left for home on 1 April, grumbling of backstairs intrigues and wasted time. He did not, however, come away quite empty-handed. His seven months’ work was rewarded with a fee of 2500 guineas and the King made him a present of a gold snuff box, studded with diamonds. In the end, many of his routes were used. After that it must have been a relief to turn to lines where the sole difficulties were such mundane details as mountain ridges, broad rivers and deep ravines.

  The port of Santander on Spain’s Atlantic coast established a railway, leading south towards the interior, of which the first section of approximately twenty miles had been opened as far as Corrales in 1858. It was not a happy event. The engineer for the line was Alfred Jee, who had worked in England as assistant to Joseph Locke. He was riding on the locomotive when the embankment slipped, the train was derailed and both Jee and his brother were killed. However, the line itself proved a success – sufficiently so for the citizens of Bilbao to have uncomfortable visions of their neighbouring port stealing an increasingly large share of international trade. What Bilbao needed was a railway of its own that would head south for the provincial capital of Rioja, through Logrono, Tudela and into the interior. As anyone who has ever ground along behind a convoy of lorries on the tortuous roads of the region can testify, this is a far from ideal country for road or railway building. Thus a major task faced Vignoles when he was appointed chief engineer for the Bilbao and Tudela Railway.