Eleven Minutes Late Read online

  Now one should always be mindful of the fate of the philosopher Professor C. E. M. Joad, the star of the 1940s radio programme The Brains Trust. Joad fell from grace for what was described in court as ‘a common ticket fraud’. Travelling from Waterloo to Exeter, he told the ticket collector he had got on at Salisbury. He was fined £2 with 25 guineas costs, was sacked by the BBC and died in disgrace. Apparently, he did this all the time; it may even have been part of his philosophy. Against that, there is the more recent case of Tony Blair who, shortly after ceasing to be prime minister, was discovered on the Heathrow Express, ticketless, cashless, cardless. The conductor was so starstruck that he rejected offers of payment from the entourage and let Blair ride free.

  The less bold among us generally pay our way, and have not considered a reluctance to rake in money as a major fault on the part of modern train operators. Rather the reverse: with them, corporate avarice generally seems more obvious than commitment to service, hence all the mousetrap-style automatic ticket barriers, an innovation neighbouring countries have managed to avoid, and one which slows up further the process of getting on a train. As in other countries, the companies have now provided ticket machines. However, thanks to the combination of Britain’s ticketing regime and a mindset towards passengers that did not appear to bother Anthony Smith, these are often laid out so the unwary can easily be trapped into buying the most expensive fare imaginable.

  That was not a problem in Newport that morning: the barriers were functioning but the ticket machines were not. ‘The machines are bust,’ I said to the vaguely uniformed figure patrolling the barriers. ‘Would you tell me if the toilet was broken?’ he asked. ‘Why, are you in charge of the toilets then?’ ‘No. I’m not in charge of the machines either.’

  The ticket clerk, his job presumably threatened by the march of technology, was certainly uninterested in the problem. As things stood, he was greatly in demand. And by the time I’d queued to see him, I had to race over the footbridge to catch the 0739. It could have been late; it could have been cancelled; it could have been packed owing to the cancellation of the previous train; it could have been on time and then stopped dead owing to a points failure at Didcot or the breakdown of a freight train at Swindon or a landslide near Bristol Parkway or a fault in the wiring in the Chipping Sodbury tunnel; six women in the quiet carriage might have been screaming into their mobile phones or – as happened one bleak morning – someone from the Environment Agency Wales might have chosen that very spot to give a full-throated, hour-long lecture to his colleagues, with everything short of a PowerPoint demonstration. And First Great Western might have forgotten to put on the dining car, as happened frequently around this time.

  None of these things happened. Instead, they were serving breakfast. Yes, I do have a thing about breakfast. And the full First Great Western breakfast is one of the hidden delights of British life, an astonishing survival. It exists on only two trains – one from Plymouth and one from Swansea. It can even be listed with the Gobowen to Marylebone service as one of the few things that improved after privatization because, after British Rail was abolished, baked beans were added to the bacon, sausage, egg, tomato and everything. The breakfast is not advertised, it is not marketed, sometimes it is barely even announced. It is expensive but worth it, unquestionably the best breakfast on the network; I expect its abolition any minute.

  I can’t remember whether I had the full English that day or the kippers, which are never soapy on this service. But somewhere around the second helping of toast I took the decision to write this book. I wanted to explore the disasters and delights of Britain’s railways, their geography, their history and their mystery – not just for what they are and what they were, but for what they say about the very strange country that they serve.

  I love trains. I hate trains. This is a book about trains. This is not a book about trains. It is a little about me. It may be a lot about you. This is a book about the British.

  CHAPTER ONE

  NEWTON-LE-WILLOWS

  The train that now runs between Liverpool Lime Street and Manchester Victoria, currently operated by a company called Northern Rail, is unprepossessing even by the standards that the British have come to expect.

  A two-car diesel Class 150 is scheduled to do the thirty-one-mile journey in sixty-four minutes, which is faster than the two hours achieved in 1830, but somewhat slower than you would expect between two great cities whose conurbations merge into each other.1 Especially these two.

  For it was on this route, only slightly modified by the passing years, that it all began. And I do mean all. It is reasonable to argue that what happened here in 1830 marked the beginning of not just the railway age but of the modern world as we have come to know it. None of the inventions and developments in communication since then has transformed the way of life that existed beforehand as completely as this one did. Not the telegraph, not the telephone, not the motor car, not the aeroplane, not the internet.

  There had been means of transport that might have been called railways for centuries before the Liverpool & Manchester. The Babylonians had roads with smooth stone blocks to ease the passage of vehicles; the Syracusans had roads with grooved tracks; copper miners in Cumberland were pushing wagons between rails in the 1560s. Probably some American intelligent-design theorist has concluded that Cain was run out of Eden on the morning express.

  Dozens of experiments created the conditions that made the Liverpool & Manchester Railway possible; 375 miles of track were already open in Britain using a mixture of horsepower, manpower, gravity and a little steam. The most notable was the Stockton & Darlington, opened five years earlier by the chief begetter of this railway, George Stephenson. But even that was substantially dependent on horses. On 15 September 1830 Stephenson showed the world that it was possible to produce locomotives that could convey passengers and goods at speeds which even winged horses could never contemplate.

  All this is recorded in (truly) thousands of other books. This is not a formal history of the railways. The outline of the story is here, but it is the footnotes of history that I find most fascinating and which seem to me to teach us something remarkable not just about the railways, but about Britain, about the world, about the way we are governed and where we might be going. Or, since we are talking about transport, not going.

  And 15 September has an extraordinary footnote: a tragic one, yet also bathetic; from this distance, it has to be said, the story usually makes people chuckle rather than cry.

  The Death of a Dithering Politician . . .

  Close to Newton-le-Willows station, south of the tracks and just on the Manchester side of a road bridge, there is a memorial. There was once a station here too, Parkside, but now the memorial is ludicrously placed since it is virtually impossible for the unprepared traveller even to glimpse it unless the train stops unwontedly. And the drivers – having moved lethargically through the Manchester suburbs – seem to take particular pleasure at speeding up round here.

  The writer Simon Garfield thought the memorial looked like a railwayman’s rain shelter. He studied it more closely than I did, but I thought it was instantly recognizable as a memorial: perhaps the local squirearch’s family sarcophagus in a country churchyard. The only reliable way to get a better look is to approach it from the road and trespass onto the tracks. And the subtext of the inscription is that you really shouldn’t do that.

  The memorial commemorates ‘THE RIGHT HON. WILLIAM HUSKISSON M.P.’ who, on the opening day of this railway, was knocked over by an oncoming train as he tried to hold a particularly ill-timed conversation with the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington.

  The accident ‘deprived England of an illustrious Statesman and Liverpool of its honoured Representative’, according to the inscription, which is indeed true. Huskisson was a figure of considerable significance in the development of nineteenth-century economic policy who pursued notably advanced free-trade policies as President of the Board of Trade. They were certain
ly too advanced for Wellington, who happily took advantage of a threat of resignation that was not actually intended and, in 1828, got rid of him.

  As part of Huskisson’s general philosophy in favour of international trade and industrialization, he was an early enthusiast for the development of the Liverpool & Manchester, at a time when there was a great deal of scepticism about the whole notion of railways. Unfortunately, Huskisson is one of those historical figures – like the archduke Franz Ferdinand – whose entire life has been eclipsed by the nature of his death. He is now remembered primarily as the first person to be killed by a train, although this is not exactly true. Indeed, there is a record of two boys being ‘slain with a wagon’ on one of the wooden pit railways in County Durham in 1650. An experimental locomotive blew up, also in Durham, in 1815, killing sixteen, and there are reports of pre-1830 fatalities on the Stockton & Darlington.

  The inscription also says that Huskisson was ‘singled out by an inscrutable Providence from the midst of the distinguished multitude that surrounded him’. This is not true either. He was singled out for being a bloody fool.

  Huskisson, Wellington, three future prime ministers in Grey, Melbourne and Peel, and a whole host of other celebrities of the time were travelling in the first train to leave Liverpool, pulled by the engine Northumbrian, driven by Stephenson himself. Seven other locomotives also made the journey, on the parallel track.

  Huskisson was no longer in the government; indeed he and Wellington were barely on speaking terms, and he evidently saw the day as a chance to patch up relations. The north-west was Huskisson territory. The previous night he had spoken to a huge crowd in Liverpool, telling them what prosperity the railway would bring, and had been rapturously received. He had marked the success by drinking a fair quantity of wine and was now evidently rather hung over.

  When the train stopped at Parkside to take on water he got out and walked towards the duke’s private carriage, ‘dripping with gilt and crimson drapes’. Some of the trappings of stagecoach travel would remain part of the railways for years to come, likewise the etiquette and habits. It seemed quite normal for the guests to take a stroll on the road – even this new iron road – when the opportunity arose. Huskisson may have been emboldened by the success of the previous night; the duke, however, was very much off his normal territory. He was famously wary of modern innovations, and was also on difficult political ground: with the pressure for electoral reform growing, Manchester, a city without an MP of its own, was expected to give him a mixed welcome.

  Huskisson clambered up to the carriage, and Wellington greeted him cordially enough. At that moment the shout went up: ‘An engine is approaching. Take care, gentlemen.’ (Even at moments of alarm, nineteenth-century man seemed to find the time to be long-winded.) Nearly all the guests on the track either got back into their carriages or took refuge on the embankment. Two did not.

  The engine was the Rocket, driven by Stephenson’s associate Joseph Locke, later to become a famous engineer in his own right. Locke responded by using the only means of braking available to him: throwing the gear lever into reverse. Huskisson, along with his companion William Holmes, was left clinging to the side of the duke’s carriage. Had he stayed completely still, as Holmes did, he would have been safe – just.

  Huskisson was always considered a bit sickly and accident-prone, with one foot permanently damaged after an unfortunate accident in the Duke of Atholl’s moat. And that morning at Parkside, he was suffering from an unpleasant inflammation of the kidneys and bladder, compounded by the ancient curse of gout. The hangover might not have helped either. According to Garfield, who has provided the most complete modern description:

  Huskisson doubted his judgment and began to move about. He manoeuvred his good leg over the side of the carriage, but those inside failed to pull him in. Holmes cried to him by his side, ‘For God’s sake, Mr Huskisson, be firm!’ at which point Huskisson grabbed the door of the carriage. Unable to bear his weight, the door swung wide open, suspending him directly into the path of the engine. The Rocket hit the door, and Huskisson was flung beneath its wheels.

  In my fancy, the explanation is slightly different. Confronted by the need to take a decision involving transport, Huskisson suffered precisely the same mental block that was to afflict just about every British politician from that day to this. He dithered, he panicked, he got it spectacularly wrong. The death of William Huskisson was to be a motif for nearly two centuries of British policy-making, which has left the country with a staggeringly inadequate system of transportation.

  Huskisson did not die instantly. The Northumbrian rushed him towards Manchester, past oblivious, cheering crowds. He was taken off the train at Eccles, still conscious, and carried to the vicarage. There he was placed on a sofa, given brandy, laudanum and the best available medical attention. The wound to his leg was beyond the resources available in Eccles in 1830. He died at 9pm, the very moment when guests were sitting down in Liverpool to begin the kind of banquet (turtle, Dee salmon, stewed partridges, roast black game; the works) that would be a regular feature of railway opening days across the world for the next seventy years and more.

  The inscription is right on another point. The tragedy ‘changed a moment of noblest exultation and triumph . . . into one of desolation and mourning’. Indeed, the day was pretty dire even for those who yet knew nothing of Huskisson’s fate. Wellington quickly decided he did not care for the mood of the Manchester crowds and ordered that he be returned to Liverpool as fast as possible. It was a grim journey back, though. Among the spectators, the disgruntled now outnumbered the excited: one train hit a wheelbarrow, apparently placed on the line deliberately; some were pelted with missiles thrown from bridges; the locomotives were starting to fail. Wellington had had enough and got out short of Liverpool, staging a strategic retreat to the Marquis of Salisbury’s house at Childwall.

  Only twenty guests sat down, two hours late, for the turtle, Dee salmon and all. Most of the others were still stuck on the railway, unable even to yell ‘Nightmare!’ down their mobiles to their loved ones, as their descendants would do after far less nightmarish journeys on Northern Rail or Virgin. And yet, before there was time to bury Huskisson, the success of the railway became an established fact. Anyone who read the story understood that the tragedy was not the railway’s fault. All the fears that had assailed the public while railways were being discussed in the 1820s now melted away. The locomotives did not explode. The noise did not stop nearby hens laying or send cattle insane. The speeds did not send the passengers into paroxysms of shock.

  Even at the conservative official speed limit of 17mph (though the train carrying the stricken Huskisson had touched 35mph), the railway was almost twice as fast as the quickest stagecoach. Within weeks the coaches were being forced to slash their fares. On 5 October the Liverpool Times carried five adverts promoting further railway companies. By the end of the year the railway was carrying the mail and running excursions. Other parts of the kingdom, the Continent and the world rapidly took an interest. Railways ‘burst rather than stole or crept upon the world,’ said the American writer C. F. Adams.

  The Liverpool & Manchester was a stunning success, and a British success. Throughout the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, British engineers and British capital crossed the planet to hand this great boon to the world. It was a boon too. Railways gave markets to farmers and traders who previously had none. They brought fresh food to cities that had previously known none. They brought knowledge where there had been ignorance. Public enthusiasm for the railways as a means of transport would not be in any doubt for nearly a century until the private car came along to issue a challenge as devastating – and as unexpected – as the challenge that the railways, in their turn, had delivered to the poor old stagecoaches and canals. All that was as true in Britain as anywhere else.

  And the Birth of a Very Strange Relationship

  Yet from the start there was always something odd about Britain’s
welcome for the railways. It was as though the bizarre dichotomy of that opening day – the triumph and the tragedy, and indeed the rather ludicrous nature of that tragedy – had left an indelible mark.

  Commercially, no one had any doubt whatever. Railways were seen as the transport of the future, which they undoubtedly were – and therefore a surefire means of making money, which they undoubtedly were not. This attitude survived the collapse of the ‘railway mania’ of the 1840s, one of the great boom and busts of history. After a short period of recovery, investors piled back into railway shares. And towards the end of the century – by which time every route that could conceivably be profitable had long since been built – local businessmen continued to put money into schemes to link remote locations to the national network. By then they were largely motivated less by greed than by pride, optimism and a powerful belief that their trade and their community could not thrive if they remained isolated.

  Among intellectuals, the attitude was decidedly different. The response in both art and literature was far more muted and wary in Britain than in other countries, a point I will come to later.

  And among politicians, confusion reigned from the start. Huskisson’s indecision – do I climb aboard or run away? – produced immediate echoes. By the time the young Victoria came to the throne in 1837, it was clear that the infant industry was about to become a dominant force in the life of the nation. Yet parliament could not form a coherent view about its own duties. It had to balance the prevailing philosophy of laissez-faire against the case for regulating such an extraordinarily powerful industry.