Andrew Swift reflects on 200 years since the birth of the modern railway, and explores why Bristol was a little late to the party. Image above: Opened in 1731, the railway which carried Bath stone from quarries at Combe Down to a wharf on the River Avon, ran past Prior Park, home of Ralph Allen, who owned both quarries and railway
Twenty-twenty-five has been the year of Railway 200, a nationwide celebration marking 200 years since the birth of the modern railway. It’s fair to say, though, that while there have been some spectacular events elsewhere, around these parts the festivities have been somewhat muted.
This is not altogether surprising. The year 1825 may have been when steam-hauled trains first carried passengers between Stockton and Darlington, but it would be another decade before the Great Western Railway was granted parliamentary approval, and not until 1840 did the first train steam out of Temple Meads.
But if Bristol was late at the party, it wasn’t for want of trying. Back in 1825, railway mania was as frenetic in Bristol as anywhere else, although, in retrospect, it seems difficult to understand what all the hoo-ha was about. Railways were, after all, nothing new. They had been around for over a century, hauling coal, stone and heavy minerals over short distances. They were admittedly pretty rudimentary, with rails and carriage wheels usually made of wood, and with power provided either by horses or gravity, but they were nevertheless railways.
A force of nature
The first railway in the Bristol area was a gravity-powered affair which opened in Bath in 1731. It carried stone from quarries at Combe Down to a wharf on the River Avon, from where it was shipped downstream to build the grand houses of Georgian Bristol. One of 18th-century Bath’s biggest tourist attractions, it was also one of the first railways whose carriages were fitted with iron wheels.
Although there were plenty of other horse- and gravity-powered railways in the Midlands and the North, there were no more in this part of the world until the early 19th Century, when a network of horse-drawn lines was built in the Forest of Dean to carry coal. Others soon followed. In 1811, the Gloucester & Cheltenham Tramroad opened, linking Cheltenham with the docks at Gloucester and quarries on Leckhampton Hill. Three years later, after the Radstock arm of the Somerset Coal Canal ran dry, a railway – the first in Somerset – was laid along its trackbed.
Although all these lines relied on horse power, across the country ingenious engineers were working furiously to harness the power of steam and create a safe, reliable and infinitely superior alternative to horses. It was George Stephenson who made the breakthrough. In 1821, he told Edward Pease, who was promoting a horse-drawn line from Stockton to Darlington, that he could not only build a steam engine which could do the work of 50 horses, but also supply rails strong enough to bear its load.
Even before the Stockton & Darlington Railway opened, word spread that it was going to be a total game changer, and in the closing months of 1824, railway mania gripped the nation, as investors subscribed to projects to build ever more ambitious new lines.
In December 1824, the Bath & Bristol Railway Company was formed. Its promoters promised that by taking advantage of ‘that Grand Improvement, the LOCOMOTIVE STEAM-ENGINE, passengers and merchandise’ could be conveyed ‘with certainty and security, by day and night, at all times of the year – in periods of frost or of drought, at the rate of at least eight miles an hour, and passengers at a rate of twelve’.
That same month, eager investors pledged £350,000 (equivalent to around £28million today) to build a railway from Bristol to Birmingham. Other companies were formed to build lines from Bristol to Exeter, from Bristol to Birmingham and from Bristol to London. The route to London was surveyed by the great road engineer John Loudon McAdam, who bizarrely suggested building a turnpike road alongside the line from end to end.
Schemes grew ever bolder. In January 1825, the newly-formed Grand Western Railroad Company proposed a line from London to Falmouth, with branches to Bath, Barnstaple, Plymouth, Lyme Regis and Bridgwater. This, along with similarly ambitious projects, found willing backers, even though the chances of even a fraction of them being built were negligible.
The Stockton & Darlington opened, to great acclaim, on 27 September, but by then the bubble had burst. A stock market crash – for which railway mania was partly responsible – led to two London banks stopping payment and scores of provincial banks, including half the private banks in Bristol, going under.
Wild hopes were followed by sober reflection, and it was another two years before the next proposal for a railway serving Bristol came along. Its name – the Bristol & Gloucestershire Railway – may have been impressive, but its ambitions were not, for this was a horse-drawn tramway carrying coal from pits in South Gloucestershire to a wharf on the floating harbour in Bristol. It also had a branch line – the Avon & Gloucestershire Railway – which ran to two riverside wharves near Keynsham. Rather than use the official names, most people referred to both lines as the Dramway.
Bristol, Bath and Brunel
The two lines opened in stages, with the first trains running in November 1830. By then, proposals for more ambitious schemes had once more come and gone. Among them was another attempt to build a line from Bristol to Bath, with the promise of trains now travelling at 20mph. For a time, it looked as though it might go ahead – until a phalanx of vested interests decreed ‘that land and water communications now existing between the cities of Bristol and Bath are fully sufficient for all purposes of conveyance and that the proposed railway is uncalled for upon public grounds which would alone justify the inroad it will make upon private property and the rights and comforts of individuals.’
And that, for the moment, was that. By then, though, Brunel was in Bristol, making influential friends, winning the commission to build the Clifton Suspension Bridge and carrying out improvements to the floating harbour. So when, in 1833, a group of Bristol businessmen decided that a railway to London was needed as a matter of urgency to stem the city’s decline, it was Brunel they turned to. And by the time it opened, such strides had been made in steam locomotive design that speeds not of twelve or twenty miles an hour, but of sixty, were commonplace.
The railway Brunel built is still very much with us, and, although the rudimentary railways that preceded it are long closed, their routes can still be traced, at least in part. Most of the course of the tramway which carried stone down to the River Avon in Bath has been converted to a road called Ralph Allen Drive. As for the Dramway, although its course through Bristol has largely disappeared, a nine-mile Dramway Path follows the old tracks through South Gloucestershire, where bridges, tunnels, cuttings and two wharves on the River Avon still survive.
As far as celebrating the birth of the modern railway goes, given the reverence accorded to Brunel in Bristol, it seems safe to say that lack of enthusiasm is unlikely to mark the Great Western Railway’s bicentenary when that comes around in 10 years’ time.
Discover more of Andrew Swift’s work at akemanpress.com. All images courtesy of Andrew Swift
