The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs

By Anthony Dawson

The steam locomotive, ‘the most potent symbol of nineteenth-century civilisation’, is perhaps the image that best sums up the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The year of Victoria's coronation saw the completion of the first links in the iron chain that made up the West Coast Main Line, and the opening of the first section of the Great Western Railway. By the time of her death sixty-three years later, the railways had not only spread to every corner of Britain, but across the globe. The travelling public were first both entranced and terrified of the new means of transportation, with many dire predictions about boiler explosions and suffocation in Brunel’s Box Tunnel. This fascination with railways, coupled with the growth of photography, meant that the railways became subjects for the photographer’s art, and, thanks to cheap printing later in the century, an excellent means of publicity through sets of collectable postcards issued by the likes of the London & North Western or Great Central. These images not only showed technological improvements on their lines, but prospective destinations for the traveller.Here, Anthony Dawson presents Victorian and Edwardian photographs and postcards showing the railway at home and abroad, in all its splendour, with locomotives, carriages, stations and destinations giving a flavour of what it was like to travel during this golden age of the railway.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amberley Publishing
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781445679747

Anthony Dawson

Anthony Dawson is an archaeologist and historian who has made a special study of the history of the British army in the nineteenth century. He spent two years as a post-graduate research student at the University of Leeds where he gained an MRes. As well as writing articles on the subject in magazines and journals, he has published Napoleonic Artillery, French Infantry of the Crimean War and Letters from the Light Brigade: The British Cavalry in the Crimean War.

Book preview

First published 2019

Amberley Publishing

The Hill, Stroud

Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

www.amberley-books.com

Copyright © Anthony Dawson, 2019

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

ISBN 9781445679730 (PRINT)

ISBN 9781445679747 (eBOOK)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

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

Typesetting by Aura Technology and Software Services, India. Printed in the UK.

Contents

Introduction

A note on the illustrations

Chapter 1 - Railway People

Chapter 2 - Locomotives

Chapter 3 - Carriages and rolling stock

Chapter 4 - Royal Trains

Chapter 5 - Trains and Stations

Introduction

The period between 1880 and 1910 is often described as the ‘Golden Age’ of rail travel: ornately painted locomotives pulling trains of sumptuous rolling stock; smartly turned-out staff and station masters in their silk hats. The railway was the creation of the Victorian age, and indeed the most potent symbol of that age was the railway locomotive. For a people addicted to the idea of progress, the railway heralded the first great conquest of ideas of time and space. Henry Booth wrote of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway:

The sudden and marvellous change which has been affected in our ideas of time and space. Notions which we have received from our ancestors, and verified by our own experience, are overthrown in a day, and a new standard erected, by which to form our own ideas of the future. Speed – Dispatch – Distance are still relative terms but their meaning has now totally changed … what was once thought quick is now slow; what was distant is now near.

When Victoria came to her throne in 1837, the mainline railway was only seven years old but growing rapidly: the Liverpool & Manchester had opened in 1830. The first trunk-line, the Grand Junction Railway, which joined the L&M near its mid-point and ran almost due south to Birmingham in 1837. In the following year, it became possible to travel by train from London Euston to Liverpool Lime Street (albeit with a change at Birmingham) following the opening of the London & Birmingham Railway in September 1838. The first stage of Brunel’s broad gauge Great Western Railway opened in the same year, but wouldn’t reach the far-west until 1859. In 1830 a Manchester cotton broker could travel by mail coach to London in a little over nineteen hours, but in 1838 he could catch the 6.30 am train from Manchester and be in London eight hours later. That great Victorian guru of self-help Samuel Smiles (himself the secretary of the Leeds Northern Railway) believed that the railways had ‘effectively reduced England to one sixth its size’.

Thus, the bulk of the southern portion of what would become known as the West Coast Mainline was in existence in the year of Victoria’s Coronation (1838) largely thanks to three men: George Stephenson, Robert Stephenson and Joseph Locke. George Stephenson, the erstwhile ‘father of the railways’ was a self-taught mechanic and engineer, responsible for the Stockton & Darlington and the Liverpool & Manchester railways. His son, Robert, had a formal education at the University of Edinburgh and was apprenticed to Nicholas Wood at Killingworth Colliery. Not only was he a skilled civil engineer but a locomotive engineer too. It was Robert who had done much of the design work behind the famous Rocket of the Rainhill Trials, as well as develop the pioneering Planet and Patentee class locomotives of the 1830s. Joseph Locke, a scion of Barnsley, had been apprenticed to Stephenson senior, but the tensions between the two that developed during the building of the Grand Junction led to a break in their