The Rest Is History - 140. The Birth of the Railways

Episode Date: January 20, 2022

Today Tom and Dominic are joined by historian Dan Jackson to talk about one of the greatest inventions known to man - the railways. Where were they first created? When did they arrive in England? And how did they relate to the standardisation of GMT in Britain? From Eric Hobsbawm to cucumber straighteners, this pod has it all!  Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History. In the hundreds to which Middlemarch belonged, railways were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of cholera, and those who held the most decided views on the subject were women and landholders. Women, both old and young, regarded travelling by steam as presumptuous and dangerous, and argued against it by saying that nothing should induce them to

get into a railway carriage. While proprietors were unanimous in the opinion that in selling land, whether to the enemy of mankind or to a company obliged to purchase, these pernicious agencies must be made to pay a very high price to landowners for permission to injure mankind. Now that is George Eliot in Middlemarch, first published in 1870, but looking back 30 or 40 years earlier to the arrival of the railways in Middle England. Tom Holland, the railways, what an amazing subject.

I mean, transformative moment in victorian history and indeed in well in all modern history you might say well i mean there are times where um you find that uh there's been some accident or a train's been cancelled or there's a strike and a replacement bus has been laid on and um all the all the toilets are shut. They're the worst words in the English language, rail replacement bus. And it's just miserable. And you curse the railways. But then you think about the romance of it

and just the sheer kind of excitement of this. So Eric Hobsbawm compared the invention of the railways to the harnessing of the atom that this was a you know these were comparable kind of explosions of human ingenuity and what it opened up in terms of industry and ability to to kind of transform the world it's fair um and we had a we had a question about that. Olioko was the birth of the railways, the most significant development in ushering in the modern world. And, you know,

it's, it's definitely up there with, I mean, obviously the printing press a few centuries earlier, maybe later the telegraph. Yeah. Do you not think Tom? Well,

I do. I do. And of course, one of the, one of the things that gets any British heart swelling is that this is a great British invention. But one might almost say a Northumbrian invention. And so in the awareness of that, there was really only the one guest that we could ask to come on and talk about it for us. And he is sitting in Newcastle as we speak, wearing a Victorian capitalist's hat.

So he looks like Isambard King for now. It's the one and only Dan Jackson. Good evening, Dan. Good evening, gentlemen. How are you? Very well. Very well. I think all our guests from now on should wear hats.

Appropriate hats. It's such a shame the listeners don't get to see this hat. You really do look like the absolute image of a sort of, to be honest, you look a bit more to me, US railroad robber baron. Yes. Yes, that's a good point. I was thinking Brunel, but I'll go with that.

Yeah. Abraham Lincoln. Stovepipe. Stovepipe top hat. Well, do you know, I've just taken a screenshot, so I'll put that up as part of our Twitter advertisement. But so Dan, author of the Northumbrians, brilliant, brilliant local history of the history of the Northeast. And Dan came on pretty much this time last year, wasn't it, to talk about the regions in England.

So Dan, when I asked you, I thought that we were going to be focusing very much on the Northumbrian angle. And I said to you, you know, how far do you want to go with the history of the railways? And you replied, I think it would be fun to do the origins of antiquity. You see, I didn't know that. I should have known that perhaps, but I didn't know that the origins of the railways lay in antiquity. Then the of coal then something on the cultural impact maybe then the 20th century so what's left nothing if not ambitious which is obviously why you're wearing your victorian capitalist hat yeah well it's a great story it's a great romantic story isn't it and it's a it's a it's something that changed the world but obviously inevitably, inevitably, I argue that some of its key, most important developments took place in the northeast of England. That's a stunning development.

Who'd have thought it? Okay, well, listen. So that question that I asked, do its origins lie in antiquity? I had no idea. combined with, we've got a question from Warren Allison, who asked, surely the birth of railways was when German miners in the mid 1500s brought over wooden wagonways used underground in the lead and copper mines. So is it antiquity or is it early modern Germany? Or is it neither of those?

Well, I think there's multiple origins of this story. I think what people tend to focus on in the birth of the railway story is the steam engine, and we'll come on to that, definitely. But obviously the rails, the tracks themselves, were a key part of this story, and there are some key developments in the 19th century around wrought iron technology and so on, which are absolutely crucial.

But the first use of a sort of trackway that you could say was the precursor of the railway was in ancient Greece. 600 BC, there was something called a diolkos, a paved trackway, which transported boats across the Isthmus of Khorinzida. Of course, yes, of course. Khorinz. So this people have been wrestling with the challenge of how do you move heavy objects across difficult terrain for hundreds of years? And then a lot of this story is related to mining and German miners. where miners in Germany are using similar sort of trackways, even proto-finicular railways, uphills and so on, to transport heavy mined goods, coal, stone, etc., across difficult terrain.

And then we start to see this appear in England and around the later 16th century, where some German miners come over to caldbeck in um in cumberland and they're working as miners there so that's probably one of the first records of what became known as wagon ways which were the grooves initially and then they moved on to become um kind of wooden rails that kind of that guided pretty primitive trucks across them to carry heavy goods. And even in my part of the world, southeast Northumberland, you see very, very early wagonways around 1605 outside Blythe

inevitably transporting coal. And by the early 18th century, these have proliferated to such an extent that they're well known around the country, and they're known as Newcastle Roads. Dan, I hate to do this to you. 1605. But in 1604, there is a funicular...

Something happening in Shropshire, Dominic. There is a funicular railway in Shropshire. Oh, no. So, I was rosely, which carries coal for James Clifford from his mines down to the river seven so i think shropshire i don't think wiltshire contributed to this at all well tom i i read online tom if this will cheer you up that there is some kind of trackway a very prehistoric trackway

in the somerset levels oh good oh good in Oh, good. In the Valley of the River Brew. Have you been researching in the Bodleian again? This is my close research that I do in the Bodleian Library five minutes before the podcast. Oh, the River Brew, as in Bruton. As in Bruton, exactly. So anyway, Shropshire, clearly the place where the railways began, steeped in railway history.

But I suspect, Dan, you may have a different take on um because obviously well shropshire they also have plates metal plates they use in coalbrookdale which is obviously the birthplace of the industrial revolution in shropshire in the 1760s but dan i suspect you may have, I mean, I think probably maybe the fairest, the sensible thing to say, I guess, is that all across coal producing areas of the British Isles, people are experimenting with different kinds of trackways and they're using, first, what, wooden? Yeah. What are we, in the 18th century? I suppose in the 16th, 17th century, they're using wooden. And then at what point did they move towards metal?

Well, I think the first recorded iron rails were laid in bath, actually, in the 1760s. That's wonderful. I thought I was going to be completely left out of this as a sudden. Bruton and Bath? Yes, yes. And as I said, the story of the rails themselves is sometimes overlooked. And I think you get a lot of technological developments starting to come to a head in the early 19th century, which I think is arguably the key moment.

Several places claim to have the first railways. We've explored some of them. But then it's this alignment of the railway technology itself with steam engine technology. You know, Newcomen pioneered it in the early 18th century, then James Watt in the later 18th century. And the combination of steam engines and rails is when this story really starts to come. Because, Dan, you mentioned um ancient greece and railways but of course the ancient greeks also had steam engines which they in alexandria they

developed the principle of the steam engine and used it basically for for kind of exotic gimmicks in temples but there's a famous counterfactual written by arnold toynbee in his you know multi-volume history of the world where he imagines what would have happened had the Macedonians developed the steam engine. And he has a kind of vision, obviously influenced by the time he was writing what was happening with the British, of Macedonian steam engines. Yeah. Armoured trains. Armoured trains going across Mesopotamia to suppress rebellions in babylon so i anyway i this is kind of you know it's a what if but i just throw that out that once again because it's very

in our time isn't it everything begins with the greeks oh i think it began in each greece so anyway i sorry i've interrupted there so so the steam engine so yeah so that's cornwall as well isn't it yeah well if you think about trevithick but again you mentioned not the word novelty there tom and i think with with the work of trevithick you've got um uh his i think it's called catch me if you can uh one of his one of his early steam engines this is very early uh 19th century 1804 um But it's seen as a novelty. People go on rides on it in London and so on, and it goes around a circular loop. But we're still waiting for that technological breakthrough

to really combine the rails and the steam engine in a really practical and commercially viable way. And where did that happen? Well, I think the spur for this is war, an interesting name. Oh, okay. Napoleonic Wars causes a shortage of horses and causes a shortage, a rise in the price of horse fodder. So people are looking for alternatives to horsepower

because all these wagonways we've discussed were horse-drawn. That's how they worked. You even have things called, we'll come on to George Stevenson in a moment, but he invented the dandy wagon where you could, in places like the northeast, you could utilize railways, just you could utilize gravity on railways to kind of go downhill. And he invented a dandy wagon to put the horse in a little cabin, into freewheel down the hill, and then the horse would be kind of harnessed up

to pull the thing back up the hill on the other side. But it's the spur of war. So you get some real breakthroughs around 1812. There's a locomotive engine invented by a Newcastle man actually called Matthew Murray, but he's working in Leeds at the time. And this engine's called the Salamanca, named after the battle that was just taking place in the War. And then you get Puffing Billy, which is a further development by William Headley on the banks of the Tyne at Killingworth. Again, it's connected to a colliery. How can we get this coal from the pit head out for export in the River Tyne? So, Dan, just to quickly clarify, these things are generally driven by coal.

Yes. Is that right? Yes. So that's why you need, I mean, almost all the instances we talked about, so the Trevithick, I mean, he was Cornish, but his thing was developed for a colliery, I think, in Merthyr Tydfil.

Yeah. So basically, had it not been, I mean, that's why it's Britain, right? Because of the coal, I guess. Is that right? Yeah, just the sheer volumes of coal that are being produced in Britain at the time and the challenge of moving this stuff around.

I mean, there's some, the developments of canals in other parts of the country were part of that solution. It really takes off in the northeast because the topography in the northeast doesn't lend itself to canals very easily. We've got these navigable rivers, the Tyne and the Weir, where pretty much you could roll the coal down the hill uh in most places and get it out for export to uh the rest of the country and around the world but the sheer volume of coal the challenge of shifting that

stuff led to these led to these developments in in locomotion and because he had the plentiful supply of the the fuel source uh on hand and this is when when george stevenson enters the scene i think who is one of them well he's i think he's one of the great figures of um of british history and he's an almost entirely self-made man in fact samuel smiles the only great proponent of victorian self-help wrote an incredibly um popular biography of him in the 1850s. Because he did a whole series of Lives of the Engineers, didn't he? Yes.

And Stevenson's seen as a bit of a paragon because he's born in a coal mining village called Wylam in the Tyne Valley. But usually his parents were illiterate, and he was himself until he taught himself to read and write at the age of 18. It was quite an illiterate area, actually. But nonetheless, George Stevenson he entered the mining trade like his father at a very early age and one of Stevenson's first jobs in the pit is that almost laughably dangerous job which is sometimes known as a fireman or it was sometimes also described as a penitent which was because coal mines are extraordinarily dangerous with flammable gases

and there was always explosions killing people. Stevenson's job was to dress himself in damp rags and damp clothing, go in with a lighted torch and ignite pockets of flammable gas. That was his job. How old was he then? He's in his teens doing this.

Oh my God. So health and safety is not there. Absolutely not. But he got interested in steam engines because they were often used to pump out water. Pits were often flooding. And he's just one of these guys that's sort of intuitively good at fixing stuff. He became known as an engine doctor because he had this kind of instinct on how to repair and fix. He was like a tinkerer.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. He reminded me a bit of my father. You know, he kind of instinct on how to repair and fix like a tinkerer yes exactly exactly yeah you reminded me a bit of my father you know he kind of turned his hand to anything that sort of one of those sorts of guys so he wasn't taught anywhere how to do this he just kind of had this intuition to do it and inevitably he got interested in locomotive engines and his first was in 1814 and it was called the blucher named after the prussian field marshal so another link to warfare yeah yeah so this is when he starts the end turns out late so setting yeah yeah that's how it would carry on but your point dominic's absolutely right the tinkering aspect.

And a lot of his early work on these locomotive engines was on what was the best weight distribution to ensure that the thing travelled along the rails. What was the best method of adhesion, you know, with the engine and the trucks. Because that's been seriously proposed as a reason why britain is the center of the industrial revolution is that it had a culture of tinkering kind of messing around fiddling with stuff um and you said contraptions and things

so it's appropriate that we're meeting uh discussing this in um 2022 because it's the 200th anniversary of what was probably his major breakthrough in in locomotive history is um the hetton railway which was just outside sunderland it's the birthplace of bob paisley actually and on the um paisley gates at anfield they've got the the shield of hetton which is a small town in County Durham and on the shield is a locomotive from that from that period and it's one of it's one of Stevenson's and what's unique about the the Hetton railway is it's the first track it's eight miles long it's basically built to get coal to the river Weir from the pit head but it's the first one that uses entirely

locomotive power rather than horsepower. Does it still exist? Parts of it still exist, yeah. And there's a number of bicentenary events taking place this year to record that. So it was a real breakthrough. But of course, Stevenson and his son, Robert, were involved in some of the mining engineering at the same time to penetrate beyond the magnesium layer underneath Hetton to get at the riches of the coal underneath, which that alone was seen as an amazing engineering breakthrough.

And then they invented the locomotive and the railway line to go with it as well. So they were real pioneers. And so at what point does he start doing the stuff that he's really famous? You know, the sort of Lady Bird book. The Rocket. The Rocket. Exactly.

That's what I was thinking. The Liverpool-Manchester line. And the sort of, well, we're going to, so first you have the Stockton and Darlington Railways. Does that come before Liverpool-Manchester? It does, doesn't it? Yes. 1825.

So what's the story there, Dan? Well, it's a similar one they want they need to get the coal out of the fairly isolated uh part of southwest durham around bishop walkman shill's and that sort of area and they want to export it out of the teas uh the river teas so they construct a railway uh between they call it stockton and darling but it goes a bit further than that inland towards the the collieryy District. And Stevenson's given the job. He builds the famous locomotive called Locomotion. Is that why, here's the question,

is that why all locomotives are called locomotives from that name or were they already called locomotives? That's a good question. I'm going to go to the Bodleian and research that. I'll have to look that up in the Bodleian. Yeah. No, I mean, they must be called locomotive engines because they're generating locomotion.

Yes, indeed. And what's unique about this one, it wasn't just pulling freight, which previous colliery railways had done this one they attached a um a passenger carriage which they called the experiment and so people rode along uh you would all aboard the experiment what could possibly go wrong but did anything go wrong no no it was all fine and so that's what is that what then gives him the idea for well it's what makes his name because it's such a um uh a successful um and it's the

longest i'm trying to remember the exact distance of the stockton and darlington it's it's um maybe i should really google that while we're talking. But it's a number of miles between. I think it's around about 20 miles distance. And I would locate this in, I think I talked when we were last on about the Northumbrian Enlightenment, which takes place roughly the same time as the Scottish Enlightenment. And in a moment that I think you could only describe as sacral. Oh, damn.

That was shameless. The engine. I thought we were safe from that in a Railways podcast. The fire in the engine of locomotion is lit from the rays of the sun. Oh, yes. By the engine driver's pipe glass, which is a little sort of magnifying glass that people used to light their pipes. I love that.

That's great. How romantic is that? That's fabulous, isn't it? So he makes his name on the Stockton and Darlington, and then we're heading into the Rainhill Trials and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. So they've set up that railway, and they're what? They're running trials to find out the best engine?

Is that basically what that is the one an efficient commercially viable means they it's the it's the the the business community you might say of manchester manchester and liverpool which is the real kind of cockpit of and so they in the 19th century so they they they have been looking at what Stevenson's been doing, have they? And thinking, we can carry passengers as well as freight from Manchester to Liverpool. I mean, particularly the freight

aspect, again, because of the textile industry, you know, the raw material comes to Liverpool. But the passenger element of it is important as well, right? I mean, that's... Yeah. It's sometimes overlooked, but actually by the early 19th century,

the road network in Britain is pretty advanced. You know, you had the advances of the invention of tarmac and tarmac-macadamised roads and all that sort of thing. But they were increasingly congested they were still pretty slow because again it's horse-drawn carriages and so on so they're looking for a mass transit system i suppose you'd call it uh between these two vitally important in uh industrial and economic centers and hence the uh the rainhill trials, which Stevenson submits and enters an engine called the Rocket, which is actually designed by his son, Robert, who is just, in fact, an even more impressive engineer in many respects.

And that wins the trial. This is 1829. And Rocket reaches a top speed of 29 miles an hour, which is just, no one had ever. Nobody. So nobody had ever gone that fast. Never. No human had ever gone that fast. No, no, you know,

horse can't gallop that fast. It's just incredible. You read the, um, the accounts of it and, and people are kind of blown away, aren't they? Yeah.

They're kind of swooning, aren't they? They can't comprehend it. I mean, so even, uhbert louis stevenson i mean much much later and he has his famous phrase faster than fairies faster than witches just kind of a sense of the almost supernatural or yeah dare i say sacral we've had it already it's not sacral it's it's lost you might as well just say it it's an eeriness quality of the eerie isn't it

yeah so that's why presumably I mean the sense of excitement at the speed is presumably one reason

why the opening of that railway which is a year later in 1830 is this colossal public occasion I mean one of the great

Victorian public occasions in some ways and who comes to that opening event well I mean Dan will know this so the prime minister i mean it's big enough that the prime minister goes right the duke of wellington yeah i mean going back we talked about the polio yeah we've got the hero of the wars who is now you know a very sort of reactionary prime minister he pitches up doesn't he and you have this amazing scene which enshrines the railways i think i i would say more than anything else in the public imagination is you've got the very first

trial of this passenger railway and somebody dies dan do you want to tell the story i think you know the gory details don't you dominic about the the mp for liverpool i i enjoy i enjoy stories about i think they're very good stories for children and of course you know if I enjoy stories about... Naming. Yeah, I enjoy that. I think they're very good stories for children. And, of course, you know, in all good bookshops, you will find excellent history books these days for children, which we don't need to go into. So there's a fellow called...

His name is Huskisson. It's William Huskisson, isn't it? And he is a... He's been a sort of frontline politician, but he wasn't a great ally of the Duke of Wellington. So he stepped back a bit since the Duke of Wellington became PM. And he's been ill. And his doctors actually say to him,

don't go to the opening of this railway. He just had surgery, hadn't he? He just had surgery for a kidney. And he's a very clumsy man. He's always falling over and losing his balance, which is an important aspect of the story. So he goes specially because he wants to get in with... He's the MP for Liverpool as well. I mean, that's a crucial part of it.

So it's expected that he's there. So he goes and he goes in this special train that's been built for the Duke of Wellington and all his guests. And that train is pulled by... You'll enjoy this, Dan, if you don't know it already, by a locomotive called... The Northumbrian. The Northumbrian. How good's that?

So that's been driven by Stevenson himself, by George Stevenson. Could there be anything more Northumbrian than George Stevenson driving a train called the Northumbrian? It's chugging along and it stops at a place called Parkside, which is a station called

Parkside, which is near St. Helens. And there Huskisson gets out and lots of people kind of go down the track to shake hands with the Duke of Wellington. Presumably he's leaning out of his compartment or they're kind of leaning in or something. And

Huskisson goes and does this. It's very important to him that he can shake hands with Wellington and kind of bury the hatchet or whatever. It's like if Jeremy Hunt was on a train with Boris Johnson. He goes on the train to shake hands with him or something. And then they see the rocket coming the other way. And the tracks are quite close together, aren't they? I think there's about four or five feet between the tracks.

So the rocket is coming the other way. And somebody says, an engine is approaching. Take care, gentlemen. Mind the gap. Yeah, basically between the tracks. So the rocket is coming the other way, and somebody says, an engine is approaching. Take care, gentlemen. Mind the gap. Yeah, basically mind the gap. And most of the people who are sort of loitering about immediately get off the track. But Huskisson, and this is where you're clumsy, he's clumsy.

So unaccountably, rather like sort of Inspector Clouseau style or something, he keeps falling over. I read Bodleian Library. He made two attempts to get off the track, but kept kind of falling back onto it. So the rocket is getting closer and closer, and people are sort of saying, for God's sake, man, get off the tracks.

And he's just falling over and shambling about and eventually there's this terrible scene where he decides that the the way to he could have flattened himself against the duke of wellington's train and there was enough space to to for the other train the rocket to pass but what he ends up doing is sort of trying to get into the duke of wellington's carriage and then it turns into something from almost like a bond film so he's he grabs the um people sort of trying to drag him in but duke well it actually says to him we seem to be going on you'd better step in so so this sort of great meeting with the prime minister hasn't quite you know at this point going to plan not not really going to plan he's sort of embarrassing himself in front of the prime minister huskisson tries

to clamber into the carriage but but he doesn't make it and some people he's going to falls backwards again somebody shouts to him for god's sake mr huskisson be firm and at that point huskisson grabs the door of the carriage and just as the rocket reaches him the door swings open with him on it into the path of the rocket and he falls down on the track and the rocket runs over his legs

and you know what he says he says they run and pick him up and he says very sort of Shakespearean you know I am slain. He says, uh, it's all over with me. Bring my wife and I may die.

And he does. And well, he does eventually. The weird thing is that people said that he, he, he didn't seem that hurt at first. And the train did less damage to his legs than people thought was likely. That's kind of weird thing,

isn't it? With the Duke of Wellington and people losing their legs. Lord. Oxbridge, isn't it with the duke of wellington and people losing their legs lord again oxbridge isn't it yeah lord oxbridge my god sir i've lost my leg good god sir so you have yeah yeah basically the lesson of this story is never stand next to the duke of wellington because you're going to lose your legs but the new is it right dominic that the impact of this is so huge that weirdly it acts as a kind of amazing advert? So you would think, this is the weird thing about this story, you would think people wouldn't want to get on the train after this.

But no, the railway is absolutely deluged with people afterwards. Isn't that right, Dan? Yeah, yeah. It's an enormous success. It's a sensation, isn't it? Because it's so exciting. It's attracting all these VIPs right from the very start. You too could lose your legs.

I know I mentioned this, I think, in the Industrial Revolution episode we did. But have either of you seen a documentary called The Day the World Took Off? No. It's about the day the rocket goes on its first journey along the the mantis liverpool railway and it it it pin it kind of identifies it as the the key moment when you know industrial world gets lift off and it has these

wonderfully kind of formalized scenes of the rocket going past horses people throwing their toppers in the air tom you've played it's so good it's so good that you could you played william of normandy on screen haven't you i think you'd be an excellent duke of wellington oh thanks i think if you were that we could reenact it you could be wellington yeah i think dan is yeah i i've played and dan would be... Isn't Barton Brunel? Well, no, Dan... He'd be George Stevenson. George Stevenson, yes, okay. Yeah, he'd be George Stevenson.

I think it would be absolutely splendid. I think once the rest of his history moves on to film, that should be our first production. Well, okay, so when will we three meet again? I think when we do meet, we should definitely stage the death of William Huston yeah let's do that at the station and see how it goes what could possibly go wrong I think on that on that stunning note we should possibly take a break here and when we come back we should look at the explosive

growth of the railways in Victorian Britain. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's therestisentertainment.com. Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change. That was Alfred Tennyson in his 1842 poem, Loxley Hall. And it's one of the kind of the lines that sums up the sense of dynamism and change and growth that Victorian Britain represented. But it was actually founded on a complete misapprehension. Tennyson wrote, when I went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830 I thought that the wheels ran in a groove it was a black night and there was such a vast crowd around the train at the station that we could not see the wheels and then I made this line so Dan the fact that Tennyson gets it so wrong gives you a kind of brilliant sense of just how novel and

strange this technology that we're seeing showcased in 1830 with Stevenson and the rocket and everything, just how strange it was to people. It was strange. It was thrilling. It was incredibly exciting. And I've got a passage from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's kind of blank verse poem, Aurora Lee, which is written in the 1850s. And there's almost a slightly sexual tinge to a lot of this. Ooh. Yeah. I'll warn listeners to brace themselves for this,

because she's writing about, and this, if anyone's seen the final scene of North by Northwest with Cary Grant, which I saw recently laughed out loud. Oh, yes. But she's writing about the tunnels that she traveled through. We might get onto the kind of the civil engineering aspect of this in a moment.

So she writes, and shot through tunnels like a lightning wedge by great four hammers driven through the rock, which quivering through the intestine blackness splits and lets in at once the train swept in a throb with effort trembling with resolve the fierce denouncing whistle wailing on and dying off smothered in the shuddering dark while we self-awed drew troubled breath oppressed as other titans underneath the pile, a

nightmare of the mountains, out at last, to catch the dawn afloat upon the land. I mean, flying. That's great stuff. That's like the Meg Ryan scene in Harry Met Sally. It's amazing. Because the Liverpool

to Manchester line had some pretty formidable civil engineering challenges to overcome itself. You know, all the mosses of South Lancashire, the marshy ground and so on. But then you start to see through figures like Robert Stevenson, who I mentioned earlier, who did have an education unlike his father. In fact, George Stevenson, who was known as Geordie Stevenson, because men in the North East called George get that nickname, one of the more plausible origins, I think, of the Geordie descriptor for people from the North East is because George had to go down to Parliament

to give evidence often for railway building schemes to get acts of Parliament through. And people couldn't understand him. So they would mock his Geordie accent. So there's other theories that it was because of loyalty to the Hanoverian Georges in the Jacobite rebellions, or it was George Stevenson's miner's lamp, which is known as a Geordie lamp.

But I quite like this one. So he took care to make sure that Robert Stevenson had a proper gentleman's education, Edinburgh University and so on. And he was a bit more refined than all Geordie. But Robert Stevenson was one of these pioneers of civil engineering. You know, the Killsby tunnels outside Birmingham,

which were described as the greatest civil engineering project since the building of the Great Pyramids. All these embankments and earthworks and viaducts and bridges just incredible so dan who who who is who is paying for this i mean how where is the money coming from it and how is it that these lines are being laid well the source of the capitalism there's an interesting and pretty lively debate at the moment that this about slavery yes um that that the the payoffs to former slave

owners many of much of that capital found its way in investment into the railways but there's also a growing middle class that are looking for places to invest their money there's the industrialists themselves who can see the commercial advantages of much better communications and so but but so it's but you've so you've got the um the manchester liverpool one but then is it other companies are saying that's a great idea let's we want to do this and we'll start building up exactly yes so so there's a lot and is there any regulation you know it's a bit of a free-for-all to be honest and you start to get these piratical figures emerging like george hudson the railway king there's no

guiding hand really over the development of these i mean major major um uh civil engineering projects and building of railways require acts of parliament but it's there's there's no central planning to this and that's one of the things that start to perturb robert stevenson who could see that this was becoming a bit of a a, potentially. And there's also the lively debates about the standard gauge. Right. Okay. So the Stevenson one is narrow, isn't it? Yeah. It's four foot eight and a half inches, which is, people have said, isn't it a coincidence that it's the same width as chariot wheels and so on? But basically, they were using horse-drawn vehicles as the prototypes for their carriages.

So it's pretty inevitable that it's going to be that width. Whereas Brunel favoured the broad gauge, which is, I think, now almost seven feet wide. And going back to the Acts of Parliament, I mean, that's obviously a massive bonanza for corruption, isn't it? Because basically, you need somebody to introduce a bill on your behalf to allow you as the capitalist, as the railway baron, to get the land, to get the rights to the land. Dominic, we've got a question from Queequeg on the Discord, which you get if you're a member of the Restless History Club. Oh, very good answer.

Sensational, sensational answer. Very good answer, St Tom. How did railroads gain right-of-way through private land? Was this a politicised process? Did corruption occur? I imagine corruption did occur, did it? Yeah, I mean, there were huge scandals. There was this sort of sense in the mid-19th century,

correct me if I'm wrong, Dan, but that politics had been, you know, that the interests of the kind of, the entrepreneurs, the railway entrepreneurs, had enmeshed with, you know, sort of parliamentary bigwigs who were just sort of pocketing money in order to push through these bills.

Isn't that right, Dan? Yeah, pretty much. A lot of money was changing hands, legitimately and illegitimately, I think. And also the aristocracy cottoned on to the fact, initially I think many of them were quite hostile to what's this, you know, coming across my land. But the value of just pure agricultural land, if it didn't have mineral resources underneath, it was declining.

But actually access rights over your land, like the earls of Derby agricultural land, if it didn't have mineral resources underneath, it was declining. But actually, access rights over your land, like the Earls of Derby outside Liverpool, you know, they're great Lancashire barons. They made a packet from, you know, having that access over their land. So it's a bit of a bonanza. Because apparently, initially, when they were mapping out the line of the Liverpool-Manchester railway, the surveyors took a posse of prize fighters.

Yes. That's a good story. Yeah. To do what? To like punch up sort of. Well, to guard them, to protect them. Yeah. Well, obviously there's a lot of.

The landed interests were so hostile. There is resistance, isn't there? I mean, famously, there are places like Cambridge where the railway station is quite a way out of the town centre because basically people want to keep out at arm's length. And that quote from Middlemarch, you know, there are a lot of people who always, you know, one of the sort of subplots of Middlemarch is hostility to the railways. You know, I think the thought that it's going to bring modernity, but that being a bad thing and destroy your community and all that sort of stuff. There is a bit of that, isn't there, in the mid-19th century? But it's interesting how quickly that is overcome.

And, you know, having a grand station is seen as the kind of sine qua non of any self-respecting Victorian town. And that brings us to the extraordinary building boom that's associated with the railways. If you think about, well, inevitably I'm going to say this is the first great railway station is Newcastle the first great iron kind of railway shed those kind of elegant struts over

the railway lines themselves with the grand neoclassical frontage by John Dobson and it is like a cathedral with the kind of nave and aisle. Like a cathedral, Dan. Like a cathedral. Did you hear that, Dominic? I did hear that, yeah.

It's sacral quality. I can't say over it, but no. Very much. And if you ever, you know, the confidence of the Victorians as well, if you pulled out Newcastle Station heading north and you notice how the line skims the Norman Castle, the new castle, they almost knocked it down. But it kind of works.

It's just the Victorians just... Well, in Berwick, I mean, in Berwick, the station's built in the middle of the castle. It's kind of amazing. On platform three, there's a kind of sign saying, this is where Edward I awarded the throne to John Balliol. Would you like a coffee? And I just wondered specifically about London, which obviously is the largest city in the world.

So there's a lot of kind of, you know, it's quite, it's one thing to build a railway across empty fields, but to build it across inhabited land, such as you have in London and Dominic quoted the Middlemarch but one of the other famous passages from Victorian literature describing this process is at the beginning of Dombey and Son where Dickens describes the railway going through Camden and the kind of process of destruction and again is that is that a kind of presumably it's not kind of centrally organized this again is private companies just bulldozing their way through i think it i think it's private companies i don't know what dan thinks i think i mean you've got what scores hundreds well more than a hundred private companies by the end of the 19th century if you think about tommy and london so they're building houston but you think about arch which

is the largest art largest classical art yeah these aren't built by central government central government doesn't really have the it doesn't really have the the ambition the kind of the the apparatus i mean central government doesn't do these these things are done by private interests in the victorian period let's take the underground i mean obviously the another you know one of the most emblematic railways of all the underground lines develop i mean the reason the underground map is is as it is it's because they develop through private interests completely higgledy-piggledy completely unplanned duplicating each other you know stations with the same name that are two different stations

or stations that are basically the same station with two different names you know just a shambolic process and that is all through the late 19th century. You have people. I mean, there's always talk about nationalization. So from the late, from the second half of the 19th century, always people saying of monopolization. Yeah. And people, well, they start to combine because actually railways become a bit less profitable as time goes on.

So you stop making so much money after. But in the heyday, I mean, I read that they were more valuable than the East India Company. They are, but there's a big boom and bust, isn't there, Dan? Isn't there a big sort of... The 1840s is the railway mania. Railway mania. There's a huge bubble that eventually these stocks

that everyone's buying have become overvalued and there is a crash at the end of the 1840s where much of that kind of free-form, messy sort of growth of the railways, it coincides with that period. But then there's a sense of government starting to step in. You've got voices like Robert Stevenson arguing for some direction to this, some standardisation. And interestingly as well, you know, some of the things we talked about, about the obliteration of time through the speed of the railways, you get things like the standardization of time itself, which, you know, railway timetables obviously rely on the country moving to a standardized system of time, which is an amazing thought, really, because before was it was a kind of laissez-faire

attitude so we the adoption standard adoption of greenwich meantime across the whole of the country as part of that rational progress of the victorian age is a part of that story definitely um as well as the time you know before um was it ajp taylor who said that up until the napoleonic wars it basically took napoleon the same length of time as it would Caesar to get from Rome to Paris and vice versa? Whereas after that, I think before they built the high-level bridge over the Tyne to connect it with Newcastle Station, in the 1840s, you could get from London to Gateshead

in about, I think it's nine hours. That's just extraordinary, isn't it? Considering it would have taken four days, something like that. But Dan, you were saying about the gauges, that that complicates it. And apparently, so the Great Railway timetable is Bradshaw's. This guy Bradshaw develops it. And Punch has one of its many rib ticklers, where it says that the only volume more complex than Bradshaw's was the catalogue of the great exhibition.

But presumably part of the reason for that is that you've got all these different companies. So they've all got kind of different, you know, very difficult to kind of mesh them. But also that you have these different gauges and you're going along, you to a different gauge you have to get off get on another train a bit like um spain and france was for a long time yes and the indian railways were always broader i think so so so and and the great figure who who broadens the gauge is brunel so just how does brunel fit into this story because he is kind of the absolute you know know, Stevenson is the archetype of the early age of the railways. Brunel is the archetype of the kind of the heroic heyday. Well, he is, but he's quite a useful civil engineer, but he's not a great actual engineer compared to Robert Stevenson, who would often lock horns with him. They were good friends. They were kind of commercial rivals to an extent.

But it was Robert Stevenson arguing for the narrow gauge and he won out um brunel was arguing it was experimenting with things called did they call it the atmospheric railway which is kind of a complicated system of pressure to propel trains along rather than using um basically you know coal power and steam locomotion so he's often going on these flights of fancy that the very pragmatic and hard-headed Robert Stevenson would just be sitting shaking his head going, what's he doing now? But you mentioned the Great Exhibition, Tom,

which is a useful segue into what the railways ushered in was kind of mass spectator events. I mean, Dominic mentioned London Underground. The London Underground is so old that some of the first passengers on it went to watch public hangings. That's an amazing detail. That's an amazing detail.

What a marble arch. I think it was a bit around Farringdon, you know, around there. Oh, right. But Farringdon's a very, very early one, isn't it? Yes. And that stretch. But you've got events like the Great Exhibition itself.

That wouldn't have been possible without the railways. Not just getting all the exhibitions themselves, exhibits themselves down to London, but the paying public as well. And it was a huge success. And if you think about those great, I mean, the Euston Arch is like a triumphal arch. Some people have described it as it.

You know, the North is arriving literally in London, you know, with that like the stations kings cross houston and pancras is it it's quite a statement isn't it's quite an architectural but see i think i think the railways um are the i mean you you use the expression the sine qua non i think they are the absolute building block for some of the things we talked about in previous episodes of this podcast so the idea of a national culture we had a whole we did an episode we did episodes about football and cricket you know let's say take football football is a mass spectator sport in which people will follow their team to the cup finals you know and those scenes that you get in sort of early 20th century England of the whole population of Bolton, you know, descending on London or something.

They are utterly unthinkable without the mass transit possibilities of the railway. And I would argue that what the railway, I mean, the railway is key to me in modern nationalism and the modern national identity in the nation state because it creates a sense of a sort of collective story and a collective culture that would be that and a telegraph and the kind of development of a national mass media

without those things. And by the way, you wouldn't get the national mass media without the railways because you wouldn't be able to get the newspapers to different parts of the country so quickly. I mean, I think without the railways, you don't get any of that. Also, of course, if you're a private consulting detective in London, you wouldn't be able to get to Dartmoor to solve mysterious crimes involving giant hounds.

I think it's fair to say that about 70% of our podcast episodes depend upon the railways, and the others are all your Greek ones. Oh, another interesting footnote. The national culture point is an interesting one, Dominic. William Henry Smith, key figure, because he spots the opportunity to sell newspapers, periodicals, books. Is he from Northumbria?

He's not, but he founds W.H. Smith that we wrote. It's now a slightly shabby high street presence. But back in the Victorian age, they'd spotted that it was quite easy to read on trains. And so that national sense of everywhere you go, you see WH Smith, they used to be literally on the platform and then they moved out into the streets around about stations. Obviously the commuter.

Yeah, the commuter. The commuter is a railway creation. I mean, people aren't riding their horse into London, you know, to the office. Yeah. Well, it's the invention of suburbia, isn't it, is only possible. The urbanisation itself, you might say,

goes hand in hand with the suburbs and you need to be able to travel in. The other great Victorian invention as well, of course, is the seaside holiday you know blackpool scarborough even places like tangmelt and whitley bay in my part of the world you know become easy to get to from the urban centers by train and and the amazing thing is that um although in britain uh mr beachy doctor is it dr beech yes dr beaching kind of cut it all that by the late 19th century the railway reaches almost everywhere in britain i mean you can get almost anywhere you

want by train completely so that might be a good place i think at which to end this episode because i i dan your intention of doing the whole sweep into the 21st century. He wasn't, he wasn't even going to do the whole, he wasn't going to do the whole period. He was going to do the world. Yeah. Yeah.

So, so we've, so we focused entirely on Britain here, but obviously there is a story going on in the, on the content of Europe, obviously in America with the railroads in India, lots to orient express and all that kind of stuff so there's lots more to talk about would would you be willing to come back in six months or so and

we do the railways part two absolutely absolutely and if you could just pay for my research trips on the Orient Express and so on I'll get get back to you. I think the key thing is he needs to wear a different hat. A Homburg or something like that. Well, Dan, I'm assuming that it will still revolve around Newcastle. I don't really see that you need to... Why don't you have a nosebleed

if you start going off to foreign clients? Can I just mention one thing we didn't touch on? Perhaps George Stevenson's greatest legacy do you know what it was, do you know what his culinary gift was to the world? no, oh, is it some sort of

Neil Theiston food stuff, what's it going to be? no, it's even more widespread than that, it's the straight cucumber we have George Stevenson to thank for the straight cucumber, he's a very like a lot of northumbrian men he was a keen allotment gardener and and cucumbers used to grow curly and he had a great rivalry with paxton the gardener at um yeah great exhibition again

yes indeed and basically um stevenson had the lads at his engine engineering workshop in newcastle knock up his cucumber straight now it just looks like a glass condom which you grow your cucumbers in. Before that. But hold on, has that so I'm thinking about modern cucumbers. Are they still doing this? Are they growing them in glass condoms?

I don't know if there's been some sort of genetic change in that after years of growing them in this way they just naturally grow in straight lines there's a cucumbers have a kind of folk memory if it's been bred into them now but certainly we've got george stevenson to thank for the straight cube wow so we can have dan back for the railways and for the history of the cucumbers just salads generally Dan thanks so much my pleasure

absolute joy as ever and we will we'll welcome you back in six months or so to do Railways Part 2 look forward to that thanks so much excellent

thank you very much Dan bye everybody bye bye thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.