The Railway: British Track Since 1804

2006.

Introduction

This book is about a success story. The demands of the steam locomotive, when it first appeared in 1804, were such that most forms of track on which it ran failed to bear the weight or to resist the dynamic loads that it imposed. Thus was started a constant struggle by the engineers and platelayers who designed, made, laid, and maintained the track to anticipate and meet those demands. Throughout the nineteenth century the weight, speed and frequency of traffic was constantly on the rise, and the wear and tear on the track rose accordingly. In due course, over 22,000 route miles of track were laid in this small country, and thus it was enabled to be the powerhouse of the Victorian age, withstand the demands of the twentieth century, and provide the way forward today.

The first response, in the 1820s and 1830s, was wrong. There had formed a belief that track should be laid as rigid and firm as the foundations of a house. Cast and malleable iron rails rested in cast iron chairs on stone sleepers, and were shaken and battered to pieces by high unsprung weights. By happenstance, it was realised that a resilient way was needed, rather than a rigid foundation, and this was provided on wood sleepers with, before long, double-headed rolled rails. That formula, with refinements, lasted for about one hundred years.

Along the way, the railway companies had to sort out a number of vital matters that today we call industry standards. First was the track gauge, but there were many others, and in the fifty years from about 1845 the railway fraternity experienced a remarkable period of inventiveness and innovation that has not since been equalled. This period included the development of switch and crossing work, without which not even the simplest railway system could be of the slightest use; the form and length of rails; means of fastening the rails to the sleepers and to each other; the design of sleepers, including the selection of the best timber and its treatment as well as experiments with steel; matters of geometry such as superelevation and transition curves; the adoption of superior materials and manufacturing methods for rails; and the form and best use of ballast.

All of this work was done in an environment that demanded the longest possible usage for track components while the early adoption of significant improvements was encouraged by economy and reliability if not actually by managerial diktat.

In the twentieth century, significant increases in speeds continued to place demands upon the track, and these had to be accommodated almost regardless of the economic climate. Electric traction brought its own specific problems of wear and tear, as did increased axle loads and train frequencies.

That this is a success story is illustrated by the fact that throughout, the number of accidents caused by the track was extremely low: most of reported accidents were caused by all sorts of other factors, such as material failure in vehicles, signalling errors, and human failure.

Much of this success was thanks to the skills of the platelayers and their supervisors, who had to perform hard work of an increasingly back-breaking nature until machines came in during the twentieth century. They then adapted themselves to the use of tools and big machines to the extent that purely manual work on main line track has now been significantly reduced.

This latter point does not, of course, apply to many forms of railway, such as underground railways, industrial lines, narrow-gauge tourist railways, and other lines where investment in heavy machinery is not always financially feasible. They, too, however, have a good record of keeping the trains running rather than of interrupting traffic, through diligent inspection and prompt correction of problems.

It is certainly true that track is one of the four fundamental disciplines of the railway. The other three, signalling, the timetable, and the rule book, are no less vital, but track, in a very physical sense, can not be ignored. It carries, it guides, it provides stability and predictability in ways that the road, the air, and water do not, and its use is largely unaffected by the weather. It is the design, installation, and maintenance of track that permits the TGV train to run at 272 feet per second.

In the nineteenth century this nation relied upon the railway for its expansion, both in itself and in support of the expansion of empire. In the twentieth century, the railway was an indispensable ingredient in the prosecution of two world wars, and whether above or below the ground was vital to the living and breathing of our great cities. In the twenty-first century, the railway is enjoying a renaissance in the fight for environmentally acceptable forms of transport. Much is made of today’s railway carrying more than a billion passengers, but this magical figure was first passed in the late 1880s, when the population of the nation was about 36 million, in comparison with 63 million today. In the mid 1880s work on the line was all manual, on rails 30 feet long, with unrefined ballast, and with virtually all maintenance and renewal work carried out in available time between trains in an uninterrupted timetable.

The development of our track has generated its own share of heroes, who deserve to be fêted no less than mechanical engineers and locomotive drivers. Most of their names will be unfamiliar to readers of this book, but their feats of invention and persistence should be recognised no less in the study of railway history.

Theirs is an extraordinary story.

Newton-on-Ouse

November 2013

Chapter One

Before Steam

The essential and unique thing about a railroad is the track. There were tracks long before there were locomotive steam engines, or even stationary steam engines, and no matter what may be the locomotive power of the future, still there will be tracks.

Robert Selph Henry

When Richard Trevithick’s pioneering steam locomotive ran for the first time on Monday 13 February 1804, it did so on a plateway that had been built a mere four years earlier, but which owed its origins to the first railway in the kingdom, laid two hundred years earlier, in 1603.¹ That line, between Wollaton and Strelley, west of Nottingham, was two miles long and was laid with wood rails. In the following 164 years, about fifty tramroads had been built with track made almost entirely of wood, before the first iron rails appeared in 1767. Even then, railways continued to be built with wood rails, and relatively few with iron, until there were probably about two hundred of them on the eve of the appearance of Trevithick’s first locomotive.²

These tramroads, with an average length of a little under three miles, probably had an aggregate route mileage of about 600. However, with sidings, passing loops, and occasional double track taken into account, the total track mileage may well have been nearer, say, 800.

Most of the tramroads were built for the carriage of coal. There was an increase in coal mining activity after the dissolution of the monasteries, when much land went into private ownership. Many new owners sought to exploit coal-bearing land, and the resulting activity brought not only a development of mining techniques but also a dissatisfaction with the state of the roads over which the coal had to be carried. The principal carrier of heavy goods was then the river, but the coal had to be taken to the river by some means. Roads were, of course, unsurfaced, and were pretty impassable in winter once a few heavy carts had churned up the mud. As far as is known, the first person to do something about this, by way of finding a better way of carrying coal overland, whether to market or transhipment point on a river, was Huntingdon Beaumont, a member of a coal-owning family from Coleorton in Leicestershire. He it was who brought about the construction of the earliest recorded railway in Great Britain, at Wollaton, west of Nottingham, and it is believed that he also built two or three coal-carrying lines in Northumberland, in the area immediately north of the Tyne.

These railways, and a handful of others built in the 1600s, were all constructed of wood. That is, both the track and the vehicles were constructed almost wholly of wood, although iron pins may have been used in their assembly. Wood was locally available in the counties in which they were built, as were carpenters’ skills in forming and assembling the component parts.

The track was very simple. What was needed was a means of supporting and guiding the waggons that were to carry the coal.³ Supporting the wagons on a way with a clean surface, clear of mud came first, with planked ways in mines in mainland Europe. Such ways dated back to the 16th century, and often were laid with a small gap between two planks, with the planks supporting the waggon and the gap between them accommodating a vertical pin at the front of the wagon, to provide guidance. In the dark confines of a mine such a device was no doubt a boon, and its principle was to be used again on a tramway three hundred years later, in Salford in 1862.⁴ For surface railways, a pair of rails separated by three or four feet was the norm.

The waggons were hauled by a horse, usually one at a time, but sometimes in trains of two. The weight of such waggons was limited by the strength of the horse, as were their dimensions, and the speed at which they could travel. Typically an early waggon, fully loaded, weighed up to three tons, on two axles, and thus it had an axle load of up to one and a half tons. The whole of the weight was unsprung. Springs on road carriages were known from 1768, but there was little chance that such devices could be made strong enough for coal waggons, and it is doubted that their benefits for increasing the durability of the track were realised at that time.

The track to carry such vehicles, therefore, had to provide support and guidance for such weights, operated at walking pace to suit the horse and the driver, who walked alongside him. Gradients were kept to a minimum, particularly as most coal railways ran loaded down hill to rivers, and brakes on the waggons were primitive. The track had to be laid in such a way that provided for a path for the horse.

In this the railway was unlike the canal, which commonly had a towpath alongside, and which permitted the horse towing the barge to walk along a path that was dead level, except at the approaches to locks. The horse knew where to walk, and the barge could easily be steered to keep it away from the bank. Guidance therefore was simple, if not entirely automatic.

The towpath had an equivalent on the railway, where of course there were no locks. The structure of the track was buried except for the tops of the rails, and the horse walked between the rails. Below the surface on which the horse walked were transverse sleepers, two to three feet apart, usually not projecting far outside the rails. The rails were laid on them at a variety of gauges between three feet and about four feet ten inches. This allowed the rails to carry a waggon which, when loaded with coal, was within the capacity of the horse, not only on the straight, but also around curves on which the resistance of the waggon was higher. This was probably the reason for the avoidance of sharp curves of the kind that road waggons encountered at a common crossroads, quite apart from the expense of forming the curved rails which would undoubtedly have been necessary. The rails were beams of wood, rectangular in cross-section, about four inches broad and five inches high. They were cut variously in lengths of three to six feet, or occasionally more. The actual dimensions varied very much from place to place: there were no industry standards, and until railways started to join each other, no need for any. The rails appear to have been laid with joints opposite each other, not staggered.

The rails were oak, if possible, but also of other kinds, including particularly beech, which earned a reputation for gaining a polished surface, with consequent ease of haulage: what today we call low rolling resistance. The rails were held to the sleepers with iron nails or wood treenails, and the whole assembly was laid on levelled ground before being buried close to the rail-tops in ballast of gravel or small stones.

The wood was not treated, and various means of preservation were not to be developed until later years. As a result, the wood eventually succumbed to rot, and had to be replaced if it had not already been removed because of wear.

The rails were not joined together at the ends, but were affixed to sleepers that they shared. In this way the skill of the joiner ensured that the rails were in a good line, and the common height of the rails ensured that the top line was even. It was difficult to lay lines in curves, although curves were an inevitable part of tracklaying. The shortness of the rails, about three feet, allowed curves to be established by means of a number of short straights. At the speeds operated, this no doubt was acceptable for relatively smooth operation, and was unquestionably better than running carts on muddy and rutted roads.

Accompanying long stretches of plain track were points. These were fundamental to the utility of any railway, for they allowed one track to be split into two or more, and also allowed waggons to be switched from one track to another. Without such devices, the single track would have been so limited in its use that the railway, as a system, would probably have never been developed.

1.1 Typical single wood rail (above) and doubled wood rail (below), with a plan of both. From Plate I in Nicholas Wood’s Practical Treatise on Railroads, 3rd edition, 1838.

Acceptance of the uneven progress around curves made the early points equally acceptable. Such drawings as survive from three hundred or more years ago show the use of a single moving rail, hinged from the point at which one crossed the other, and operated by the drivers, at what was once quaintly called ye parting of ye ways. There was little effort to introduce curved switch rails, although some drawings suggest that they were made occasionally, and it is probable that many thought that the effort to do so was not worth while. The drivers had to keep a close eye on keeping the waggons on the rails at points, for once they had set the switch rail, they had to watch it to ensure that it did not move while the waggon was passing over it.

1.2 Early plateway points, 1808, showing the single switch blade used for facing traffic, check rails on the outside, and checks on the leads from switch to crossing. From The Evolution of Permanent Way, Charles E Lee, 1937.

It is from the 1808 drawing that an early indication of thoughts on the layout of junctions, whether for loops or branch lines, can be seen. The drawing was produced by the Tredegar Iron Company for the plateway to be laid for the Oystermouth Tramroad, later to become the Swansea and Mumbles Railway. Whether for plateway or railway, junctions involved some means of selecting the route that vehicles should follow, and another means of crossing one running surface over another. A refinement to follow later was the addition of checks, to ensure that at the crossing, wheels did not go down the wrong route.

The primitive nature of the cast components seen in John Curr’s book in 1797 was improved upon by the use of a single switch blade: it was not a rail because it did not carry the vehicle, but just guided it. The blade is hinged on a vertical pin at the trailing end, and one face is tapered down, so that it could lie flush with the vertical leg of the plate. This may be the earliest example of what was later achieved by planing or milling. In this case, however, it was undoubtedly cast in that form.

Also to be seen in the drawing of 1808 are checks, which suggests that eleven years after the junction shown by John Curr, their use was now accepted. It seems that they were cast integrally with the plates. All of the plates were cast with half a notch at each end, to allow a vertical pin or spike, driven into the sleeper, to hold them down. The presence of studs, or perhaps rivet heads on the outside of the vertical flange, at each end, is not explained in either of the books by Charles E Lee in which this drawing has appeared.⁵ The drawing refers to the assembly as a tramroad parting and is set at a crossing angle of about 1 in 5.

1.3 Typical short switch rail on a plateway. NRM archival photograph of item 2012-7010.

There is little doubt that from the earliest days, the wheels of many coal waggons were flanged. The flange was more often carried on the inner edge of the wheel, rather than the outer, and this feature influenced the design of early points. The first written evidence of flanged wheels dates from 1676, and such wheels were first illustrated in 1734, on Ralph Allen’s line at Prior Park, Bath. In the following year, the first cast iron wheels were made; their significance will be discussed later. There were to be other forms of flange. A very few of the early mineral tramroads used a very narrow rail that demanded a double flange, one on each side of the head of the rail. And a few street tramways used a wide rail with a groove down the middle, requiring a centre-flanged wheel. These exceptions will be noted in due course: in all other cases, reference to a flange means a flange on the inner edge of the wheel.

The track demanded maintenance. When wood rails were worn it became the practice to turn them upside down, to gain use of the underside for a running surface, although it is clear that the worn surface, now underneath, had to be even and undamaged to provide a good base upon which to sit the inverted rail. In the eighteenth century it became practice to lay a second rail above the old one. This had the effect of strengthening the rail, of course, but it also required that the old one underneath be evenly worn to act as a firm base for the new one. It is recorded that the increased height of the pair of rails was accompanied by the laying of a fresh quantity of ballast between them.

Another device that was used to combat wear, from about 1716, was the reinforcement of the top of the rail by an iron strip. This was, as far as can be determined, the earliest application of iron to the railway, but the extent to which it was done is not known. In any case, it was not entirely successful, and was replaced by the iron rail later in the century. However the practice emigrated to America, where some steam railways experimented with the iron strap until sufficient failures of the strap, causing damage to vehicles, resulted in the universal use of all-iron rails.

Little is known about the pattern of wear on wood rails, but our understanding of it is important because it tells us about design and maintenance practices that evolved in the horse-drawn era, and which may have survived into the steam era. It is one of the enduring myths of modern understanding of railway track that the wheels are coned deliberately to ensure that the vehicle runs centrally down the track, with the flanges of the wheels rarely contacting the rail. Those who appear to know about these things are prone to stating that this arrangement was deliberate, elegant, and brilliant. There is no evidence to support any such theory about how these things came about.

Let us take the rails first. In all the accounts of wooden track,⁶ the rails were cut or planed parallel, and fastened to straight, parallel sleepers. In other words, all of the relevant angles were of ninety degrees. For many years, at least from the early 1600s until the middle years of the next century, wood rails were used solely by waggons with cylindrical wheel treads: the treads of the wheels were of constant diameter from next to the flange to the outer edge. It is assumed that such wheels were made on a wood lathe, with the tread of the wheel turned parallel.

In 1729, cast iron wheels started to appear, first at Coalbrookedale and later in Whitehaven. Cast iron wheels were used on Ralph Allen’s line at Prior Park, and in the drawings of the vehicles on that system they are shown with uncompromisingly parallel treads. But then, in 1735, cast iron wheels made in Whitehaven appeared with coned treads. Michael Lewis showed a drawing of such a wheel, and comments upon the fact that it is coned, but he drew no conclusions from that.⁷ The drawing shows that the coning is at about 1 in 9, which is much the same as in the early days of the age of steam.

1.4 Cast iron wheel, cast at Whitehaven, with a cone of about 1 in 9. From an illustration in Early Wooden Railways, Michael Lewis.

There is little doubt that this coning was an incidental product of part of the manufacturing process. To cast wheels, wood patterns were laid into special casting sand, to form a mirror image of the shape required, and then withdrawn, leaving the shape of the wheel in the sand, into which molten iron was then poured and allowed to cool. Sand casting was the common means of producing cast iron components, particularly as one pattern could be used to produce many hundreds or even thousands of identical parts. But for the process to work, the pattern had to be withdrawn from the sand without disturbing the sand in any way: if the sand was disturbed, the hot metal then poured in would take that disturbed shape. For this reason, part of the skills of casting iron lay in the making of good patterns which, among other things, could be withdrawn from the sand cleanly. The well-established and simple way in which to do this was to put a slight taper on the pattern, known as a drawing allowance, and to place the pattern narrow-edge down into the sand. When it was then drawn out, the drawing allowance permitted the first small vertical movement of the pattern, providing it was perpendicular to the sand mould, to free the pattern across the whole of the tapered area. As long as it was then lifted clear, without coming into contact with the sand, it would leave behind a faithfully-formed image of itself in the sand. In the case of the pattern for a wheel, the drawing allowance, in the form of a taper, was provided on the tread of the wheel. Of course, this was not limited to wheels: rails for plateways were cast upside down and have a slight taper on the vertical flange which keeps the wheels on the running surface.

1.5 Lambton Colliery excavations, 1995, showing a turnout, all in wood. Beamish photograph 94581, by courtesy of Jim Rees.

It is believed that the coning of the tread can have had no other origin, and no other reason for its existence. Not only that, but that because the drawing allowance is a fundamental and essential feature of pattern-making, it has remained as such in the craft to this day. However, more recent developments have allowed the drawing allowance to be reduced, and today a smaller degree of taper is required.

What effect, then, did this coning of the wheels have on the wood rails on which they ran? The possibility has to be considered that it wore the rail to a slight slope across the top, following the line of the tread, with greater wear on the flange side, and less on the outer edge. The extent, if any, was probably not great, primarily because the weight of horse-drawn coal waggons was modest.⁸ In addition, it was the practice on many wood railways for the waggons to have only one pair of cast iron wheels: the others were wood, and were used for the application of the brake⁹ with which all waggons were fitted.

It is possible, although no reference to such a practice has been found, that if the rails were worn to a slight bevel across the top, and before the rail was inverted, the bevel had to be planed off, to obtain a clean, perpendicular surface. Without planing, rails could lie with a slight inclination, and for a variety of reasons, a slight narrowing or widening of the gauge; this was not desirable with wood wheels with parallel treads.

1.6 Richard Reynolds’ cast iron rail, on wood sleepers, both longitudinal and transverse. From an engraving in Das Eisenbahn Geleise, 1891.

During the eighteenth century, still many years before the steam locomotive was created to run on rails, improvements in the manufacture and forming of iron led to the introduction of metal rails. Although such rails were at first cast, they brought great hope that they would be more durable than wood rails, and that their greater expense would be justified.

The first use of cast iron for the manufacture of rails was by Richard Reynolds, at Coalbrookdale, in 1767. These took the form of a shallow trough, reminiscent to those familiar with later developments, of a half section of a parallel rail laying on its side. These were to be fastened to wood transverse sleepers, perhaps by pins through the running surface in the middle, as a means of spreading the load on the ground and of keeping the rails to gauge. The rail was clearly designed for flangeless wheels, and led in due course to the development of the plateway, which remained only in use on horse-drawn tramroads. The plateway did not contribute greatly to the development of the steam railway, or, more particularly, to the development of the track which could support the steam locomotive. The trade of those who laid the plates, however, that of the platelayer, added a word to the growing lexicon of the railway, and which was to survive until the 1960s or later.

Plateways of iron were described in detail in John Curr’s The Coal Viewer and Engine Builder’s Practical Companion, published in 1797.¹⁰ Details are given of plate rails of L-section, in which the vertical leg is on the inside, with the running surface outside it. Noteworthy is a junction with an extremely sharp diverging line, which could only be of service if the horse or man with the waggon helped to guide the vehicle around the corner. There is no more appropriate word than corner for such a sharp curve. The junction does not merit the term points because there is no moveable blade (pointed rail) to direct the vehicle on one route or the other.

1.7 Typical of the demands of the mine railway, this very sharp turnout nevertheless shows the basic requirements. Note the absence of checks opposite the crossing.

1.8 This turnout shows a more modest curvature, for a passing loop. Checks are provided opposite the crossing. Both from engravings in John Curr’s The Coal Viewer and Engine Builder’s Practical Companion, 1797.

More modest curves are shown, with the plates being thus cast; a number of these in sequence, or perhaps in combination with straight plates, could be assembled to follow any curvature in a mine passage. The small size of waggon used underground, in the confines of the passageways, is reflected in the lack of space between tracks on the passing loop. However, as well as the basic flat crossing, the junctions shown here have another design feature that remains with track today, albeit in a different form: opposite the crossing are check rails. The geometry of the plates dictated that the checks, originally known as cheeks, had to be on the outside of the plate rather than inside the rail, but the principle is there established.

Noticeable is the fact that the wood sleepers are some distance apart: the day of the intermediate sleeper had yet to come. It should also be noted that the easiest entry for wagons approaching from the left is to go straight ahead, and so to take the left track.

The distinction between plateways and edge rails needs a little further examination. On either, the passage of the vehicle down the pair of rails is not as tight as, for example, the slide on the bed of a lathe. There is a small amount of lateral freedom, if only to allow the vehicle to go around curves. If lathe beds had to incorporate curves in them, as well as straight sections, the same freedom would be required there. On the plateway, the freedom is given by the width of the horizontal running surface, and as a result the wheels could have narrow treads, to wander side-to-side in that freedom. On edge rails the relationship is reversed: the head of the rail is relatively narrow, and the actual area rolled upon by the wheel is narrower still, while the tread of the wheel is wider, and it is the wider tread that gives the wheel the freedom to move laterally. It is important to recognise this, because the coning necessary for the manufacture of cast iron flanged wheels clearly must also have been a feature of narrow wheels cast for plateway vehicles. However, as far as is known, the wheels of plateway vehicles were not case hardened, and so the narrow wheels, with their slightly coned treads, must be assumed to have worn to a cylindrical shape before they could cut into the plates and cause grooves or unacceptable wear.

For some while the distinction between tramroads and railways was blurred. Dendy Marshall illustrated a section of compound rail, almost certainly cast, showing a plate rail trough in which one side is carried up and over a wide running surface to allow flanged wheels also to use it: a dual-purpose rail.¹¹ He does not state where it was used. It begs the question of the gauges of the two lines in question. If the vertical flange on the left side was the conventional inside flange of a common gauge 4ft 2in plateway, and the edge rail was laid outside that, then the gauge of the edge rails was about 4ft 10in. This is entirely feasible. Perhaps more important is the thought that the part of the compound rail that makes the edge rail is an early form of bridge rail.

The first iron rails, as distinct from plates, which were made appeared from Dowlais Iron-works in 1791, where they were first laid on the Dowlais waggon-way, to the head of the Glamorgan Canal. Michael Lewis, in Early Wooden Railways, makes a point of stating that the Dowlais rails preceded those of William Jessop in Loughborough and elsewhere. It is widely stated that William Jessop patented his edge rail in 1789, and so may have preceded those of Dowlais in conception, but not in application, for Jessop’s rails at Loughborough were not laid until 1793.¹²

The Dowlais rails were distinguished from iron plates by providing an edge on a vertically-aligned rail, rather than a flat surface, and on which a flanged wheel could run. They were thus called edge rails. It seems, from their dimensions, that they took the form of parallel iron bars. They were six feet long, weighed 44–45 lbs per yard, and were secured by three pins in holes which pierced the rail. They were three inches thick at the foot, two-and-a-half inches across the head, and two inches thick. This last dimension must refer to the height, unless it referred to a thin web between the head and the foot. If that was the case, the design anticipated the flat-bottom rail, but this is not thought likely. They also differed from the Jessop rail, which was the first form of what was correctly an elliptical rail but which came to be known as the fish-belly rail. This name was suggested by their form, which was of a shallow depth at each end, and while the top was, of course, in a straight flat line, the bottom edge followed a parabolic curve, so that the rail was somewhat deeper in the middle. No provision was made for any form of intermediate support. The feet, at the ends, were flared out to take pins, which were driven through the rails into stone sleepers. These took the form of a block of stone, large enough to provide resistance to sideways movement, buried in the ground, and flat on top. The greater strength in the middle of the rail recognised that it was acting as a beam, supported only at the ends by the stone sleepers, for much of its length. The section at the ends, where the feet were wider, to allow the fastenings to pass through, was strongly suggestive of the flat-bottom rail, at the time some forty years in the future.

1.9 Combined plate and edge rail, early nineteenth century. Note that the plate rail has flanges on both sides, and the edge rail is little different from a bridge rail, as later developed. From a photograph in A History of British Railways Down to the Year 1830, by Dendy Marshall, 1938.

1.10 Jessop edge rail, in the National Collection at National Railway Museum. NRM Archive record photograph 1892-107.

It is possible that the elliptical form of edge rail borrowed the idea of the ellipse from the plate rail. Many examples of angled plate rails in the National Collection held by NRM have an ellipse on the top edge of the flange, and a few also have an elliptical flange underneath. All of these examples are three feet long, and cast. Unfortunately most of them are not dated.

There are two samples of cast Jessop edge rail in the National Collection. One has a running surface only ¾in wide, and this probably shared, with the first Jessop wrought iron rail, noted below, the distinction of cutting grooves into the treads of the wheels that ran over it. The other cast rail, identical in all other respects, has a head 1⅝in wide but the presence of the letter W, rolled on the web, tempts one to think that this stands for wide.¹³ That can not now be proved, and its date is not known.

The arrival of the iron rail, which was adopted as a replacement for wood on many of the tramroads before the age of steam, and used extensively for newly-built lines, brought about a revolution in maintenance costs. Although the iron rail was more expensive, to transport, to buy, and to lay, it offered great savings in maintenance costs. It also made significant demands on the iron foundries that made them. One mile of single track, using three-foot rails, needed 3,520 of them, and the demands on manufacturing facilities rose accordingly. Another very real economic fact in favour of the iron rail was the great reduction it offered in rolling resistance. Wood was somewhat variable, with Beech the favoured material because it wore to a very smooth finish which reduced rolling resistance. But according to one estimate, albeit not recorded in writing until 1832, on wood rails one horse could haul 8½ tons, while on iron rails the load could be 18 tons. This difference could hardly be ignored.

The demands on the fledgling railway supply industry, noted above for rails, also applied to sleepers. Soon after the appearance of the iron rail, in the 1790s, sleepers made of stone started to appear, these being of various sizes, nominally square but in fact, in tramroad days, of almost any shape as long as the top was flat enough to have a chair secured to it and a rail going across. Later they were more carefully cut, eighteen inches or two feet square, and a foot deep. The actual dimensions were not vital, providing that they were prepared with a suitable surface for the attachment of the chair. Again, 3,520 were required per mile, for as long as they were stone, but when wood came back into favour, at much the same time that rails were supported more closely than every three feet, the number per mile was still over 2,000.

This requirement for preparing sleepers to receive rails became a little more refined in 1797, when chairs or saddles were developed to carry the rails, at their ends, on top of the sleepers. This notable step forward was made on the line built at Lawson Main Colliery, near Newcastle. This was the first iron railway in the North, and the rails were of T-section, not elliptical. Because they only had a head, for the running surface, and a web, to give vertical strength, they could not stand up by themselves and needed chairs to support them. The chair was to be much refined over the years, but its primary purpose was to hold the rail vertical, and to spread the weight of the loaded rail where it rested on the sleeper. Had chairs not been used at Lawson Main, the webs of the rails would undoubtedly have cut into the sleeper beneath.

1.11 An example of a very early chair, in the National Collection at NRM. The slot for the wrought iron key may be seen. NRM Archive photograph of 1903-223.

The use of the chair, or more precisely the joint chair, was an important advance, because it served to keep the ends of the rails in line with each other, both vertically and horizontally. Before the joint chair this could not be assured. References to the manufacture of joint chairs are few, but it is believed that from the early days they were cast. For the T-rails at Lawson Main, the chairs were in the form of an inverted T, with the web of the rail sitting on one side of the leg, which was placed outside the rail to prevent spreading of the gauge. Pins were driven vertically through holes in the horizontal bottom of the invertedT, into the stone sleeper, where they were probably received by wood dowels or treenails. The vertical leg of the chair also was pierced by holes, to permit bolts or rivets to pass through the chair and the vertical web of the rail. In this way the rail was held to gauge, and was prevented from rising under the stresses of carrying the load of passing waggons. In retrospect, we can see that this assembly of rail and chair, T and inverted T, was a step towards the flat-bottom, or I-rail. Another user of the inverted T-rail was at the Stondart Quarry, near Welshpool. The T rested in flanged plates, and there was a very narrow head to the running surface on the inverted leg of the T; wear on both sides of a surviving length of rail suggests very strongly that the wheels on the wagons were double-flanged. One detail of permanent way practice on this line was of greater historical significance than this, as will be noted in Chapter 9.

A variety of devices was used to keep the stone sleepers in gauge, usually in the form of an angle iron attached to opposite pairs of stone sleepers. The side loads imposed on the track by slow-moving waggons were not great, and the use of stone sleepers, which weighed a good two hundred pounds each, was as much an attempt to keep the track solid and unyielding as any effort to find a substitute for wood. Two influences were bearing upon the railway-builder at this time. The demands of the Napoleonic wars had put up the price of wood very considerably, while they seem not to have had the same effect upon quarried stone. In passing it should be observed that the demands of those wars had also increased the price of hay for horse feed to the point that men such as Trevithick were encouraged to find means of providing motive power for railways that did not rely upon the supply of hay.

1.12 An early joint chair, holding two scarfed rails with a pair of wrought keys that each hold a ball against the web of the rail. NRM Archive photograph E2011.79.2024.

The other influence upon the greater use of stone sleepers was the belief current among engineers that the only way to build a railway was to do so in the same manner as building a house: it had to have very firm, if not actually rock-like, foundations. This belief persisted well into the steam era, and it was not until the 1830s that some appreciation of the value of a resilient railway was realised. The construction of early railways, before the steam era, has not often been described, but it is clear that it could be a simple case of throwing track down, so to speak, on a crudely prepared surface.

As increasing traffic placed greater demands on the track, the platelayer was soon to realise that the two physical measures of a good track were its top and line. The top was the horizontal surface of the rails, free of vertical interruption, and the line was the similar freedom from lateral disturbance whether in straight lines or smooth curves. The latter was hard to achieve with cast rails, but malleable rails were to allow some curvature, and rolled rails were more amenable still.

All of this started with the careful preparation of the formation of the line. This was the term given to the earthworks undertaken: the top of the formation was the surface upon which the bottom layer of ballast was placed. The formation had to be free of dips caused by sinking, for whatever reason, and free from peaks of earth not properly levelled out. As a general rule in the days of the horse-drawn railway, relatively few earth-works were required, because such was the demand for a level way, it was preferred to follow a level around a hill rather than dig a tunnel or build an embankment. Certainly steep inclines were to be avoided simply because they were beyond the capability of the horse, if it was to haul any useful load. In any case, the economics of the horse-drawn tramroad rarely supported much in the way of capital investment in great earthworks.

An early description of the construction of a tramroad, from 1765, states that wood transverse sleepers were placed directly on the prepared surface of the ground.¹⁴ That preparation seemed only to involve digging to obtain a level, but not the laying of any form of stone or gravel under the sleepers. A later description, from 1801, was written by William Coxe in his An Historical Tour of Monmouthshire in which he wrote:

The ground being excavated about six feet in breadth and two in depth, is strewed over with broken pieces of stone and the frame laid down it is composed of rails, sleepers and cross bars and under sleepers.

He made it clear later that the sleepers were transverse, of wood. The under sleeper was a square block of wood, attached to the extreme end of each sleeper, and we may take it that this was a means of preventing the track sliding sideways on the formation.

By this date it is clear that the value of broken stone on the top of the formation was appreciated. Although it had become the practice to bury the sleepers in gravel or sand, with the aim of preserving them and of providing a path for the horse, the value of broken stone under the sleepers took a while to be seen. It was all part of the realisation of the need for well-drained track. Not only did water cause and accelerate rot in the wood, because chemical forms of preservative had yet to be developed, but in the winter wet track would freeze, and become quite unyielding. Although, as already noted, the need for resilience in the track had yet to be identified, frozen track merely increased the vulnerability of wood sleepers and cast iron rails to cracking under load in low temperatures.

The judicious use of ballast was yet to be made to keep the track in a straight line, or more particularly a smooth curve. Another way of doing this was to raise the outer rail on curves, in what was called superelevation. Surprisingly, in view of the slow speed of traffic at the time, superelevation was called for by Benjamin Outram in 1803:

… and at turnings of the road great care is required to make them perfectly easy; the rails of that side forming the inner part of the curve should be fixed a little lower than the other, and the rails should be set a little under the gauge so as to bring the side (sic) nearer together than in the straight parts; these deviations in level and width to be in proportion to the sharpness of the curve.¹⁵

It should be noted that Outram was talking here of plateways, and that his recommendation that gauge be tightened on curves recognised that the vertical flange of the plates could bind against wheels on curves and cause resistance. This is the direct equivalent of easing gauge on curves where edge rails were used, and where the flange of the wheel binds against the outer rail.

Over the years, a few further refinements in track and vehicles were to take place before the arrival of the steam locomotive. Check rails on plain track appeared: they were of two kinds, the first appearing as early as 1729. The purpose, whether fitted to the outside of the outer rail on curves, or on the inside of the inner rail, were designed to stop wheels climbing the rail on sharp curves, and coming off the track.¹⁶

In 1785 the first rails of malleable iron were made, and used on a railway at Alloa.¹⁷ Basic cast iron has the property of being brittle, and this characteristic was to result in its being rejected for rails after some years’ experience with them. Cast iron, can, however, be heat-treated, in which the heat changes the nature of the carbon in the iron and makes it ductile. In that form it is known as malleable iron, and is far less brittle. Its introduction in the manufacture of rails was an important step in the use of metal as opposed to wood for railways, because it got away from the limitations imposed by the brittle nature of cast iron.

Another form of iron was wrought iron, in which the heat treatment was applied to low-carbon iron, and containing slag. This had the effect of giving the iron a grain, and allowing it to be worked. An old form of the word worked is wrought, and this is what this form of iron has ever since been called. It is the most common and widely used form of iron: everything from rails to the Eiffel Tower. The first wrought iron rails were laid by William Jessop at Walbottle Colliery in 1805. They were later noted to have grooved the treads of iron wheels.¹⁸

Getting away from the weaknesses of plain cast iron in rails was important, not least in track, as components became more complex. Points required several types of worked rails, for which casting was not suitable, although the crossing itself was for many years cast. On the other hand, the development of the chair depended entirely upon the use of cast iron, and indeed upon the development of casting methods. Another use of cast iron which was of interest to the track man was its application to brake blocks, first undertaken in Carmarthen in 1801. But like many other developments, this application was neither rapid nor, for a long while, universal. Wood brake blocks were to reign supreme for many years.

1.13 Superelevation on an early tramroad, the Little Eaton Gangway, as required by Outram. Photograph SSPL 10344229 by courtesy of National Railway Museum /Science & Society Picture Library.

For much of the life of the cast rail, the elliptical was the most used. Its brittleness eventually caused its demise, but during its life changes were made as increasing traffic demanded greater durability. The use of iron rails caused wear on the treads of cast iron wheels, and damaged both. The wheels adopted a worn groove close to the flange, brought about by this area, the highest point of the coned tread, running on the edge of the rail. The first remedy for this was to make the head of the rail wider so that the area of contact between wheel and rail could be made larger. This seems to have worked well enough for the light axle loads of the ordinary horse-drawn coal waggon, but eventually two other remedies were be developed, and these will be described in due course.

The pressure of the wheel on the edge of the rail often caused significant wear on the rail itself, and sometimes caused the rail to fail. When wrought iron rail was more widely used, the manufacturing process assisted the wear on the edge to cause delamination. This was exacerbated by the arrival of the heavier axle loads of the age of steam.

The development of track in the two hundred years before the arrival of the steam locomotive can be seen to have established what were to be the general rules for the construction of the steam railway. There were probably many short spurs and branches that had short lives and were lightly laid, but the main routes were more carefully built. Ground was prepared as reasonably level as possible, but Nicholas Wood, in his Treatise on Railways, suggests that this may have been a little casual in many cases. Usually there was a single line of track following generous curves, and all laid with an eye on good drainage.

Sleepers of wood or stone supported iron edge rails, the sleepers as far apart as the rails were long, and usually with chairs to support the rails but only at their ends. Sleepers were secured by the use of ballast. Pointwork was very simple, hand-operated, and devoid of any form of signalling, but the basic geometry of the rails had been established. Passing loops and sidings made the system easy to operate, and sidings were laid on level ground wherever possible so that stationary waggons were not likely to run away. The motive power did not run on the track, but it did know when to stop. The axle loads of the waggons were modest: one and a half tons, or three-quarters of a ton on each wheel.

Chapter Two

The Demands of the Locomotive

Tush! Don’t speak to me about Napoleon! Give me men and materials, and I will do what Napoleon couldn’t do – drive a railway from Liverpool to Manchester across Chat Moss!

George Stephenson

In spite of the historical significance of the arrival of the steam locomotive, in a very real sense it did not make a very good start. C F Dendy Marshall, in his 1953 work¹ referred to a letter from Davies Giddy, one of Richard Trevithick’s supporters, stating that when Giddy saw the locomotive work, a number of rails broke. This comment, placed in parentheses, seems to be dealing with an almost incidental event. But if, as has often been stated, that the track and the train together make a single machine, then on that day the machine failed.

2.1 A surviving plate rail from the Pen-y-darren tramroad, sitting on typically crude stone sleepers. This is the kind of plate that broke under Trevithick’s tram engine: the development of modern permanent way started here. NRM Archive photograph of 1931-201.

The Pen-y-darren tramroad, near Merthyr Tydfil, was just that: it was a tramroad laid with plates, not rails, and Trevithick’s Tram Waggon, as he called it, was built with unflanged wheels to run on those plates. Trevithick stated that it weighed ab’t 5 tons; this means that, from the weight of the ordinary fully loaded coal waggon, the axle load to be borne by tram road track had increased by two-thirds. It was a huge increase, and the plateway was not up to it.

Trevithick’s second locomotive, which was built the following year, was built with flanged wheels and was therefore the first true railway steam engine. The design was slightly different, for the single horizontal cylinder was at the rear of the boiler, with the slide bars facing back and the drive rearranged accordingly. It was built by John Steel at John Whinfield’s foundry in Gateshead. It did not last long. It was built speculatively, and it is known that Christopher Blackett, owner of Wylam colliery, declined to buy it. It was run on temporary track at the Whinfield works, to show that it worked, but it failed to sell, and it was later used as a stationary engine. It has been surmised that Blackett was afraid of the damage that the locomotive would cause to the wooden track on his tramway. No doubt other mine owners had the same fear. If that is the case, it is odd that he showed any interest in it in the first place. But perhaps he did not think sufficiently of the track when he did so, and he was not the last to make this mistake. Certainly he appeared to think that rebuilding his railways with edge rails was not worth the expense.

The acceptance of the steam locomotive was slow. Trevithick made another effort to get the machine accepted, by establishing a temporary circular track on a piece of land in London, near where Euston station now stands, and demonstrating his third locomotive to whomsoever wished to see it. This was for some weeks in the summer of 1808. The demonstration was brought to an end when a rail broke, and the locomotive overturned. It was not re-railed.

Another four years passed before John Blenkinsop, a superintendent at Middleton Colliery near Leeds, laid down a railway equipped with a rack along the outside of one of the rails, and persuaded Matthew Murray to build a suitable locomotive to work on it. The idea of the rack was to guarantee adhesion, for many engineers at that time were doubtful that smooth iron wheels on smooth iron rails could prove capable of hauling adequate loads. The locomotives, of which four were built, weighed about five tons, rode on six wheels, and the rails were of cast iron. Undoubtedly this method of manufacture was used so that the rack could be made integral with the rail, but it denied the Middleton the chance of using wrought iron rails. Although the rack experiment was not to be repeated until mountain railways came along very many years later, the locomotives have gone down in history as the first commercially successful steam engines.

2.2 The Gateshead locomotive was superficially similar to Trevithick’s original Pen-y-darren tram engine, but the cylinder, with its slide bars, faced the rear, and the arrangement of gears was quite different. Its flanged wheels made it the first true railway locomotive in the world. From a contemporary drawing published in Richard Trevithick, by H W Dickinson and Arthur Titley, 1934.

2.3 A section of Blenkinsop rack rail in the National Collection at NRM. This particular form of rack was not perpetuated, but a central rack is used on rack railways in many countries. The chairs for this rail were designed to provide an inward inclination of these rails, this being the earliest evidence of the practice. NRM Archival photograph 2012-7041.

Two of these locomotives for the Middleton Railway were built in 1813, and in that year another two were built, for the collieries of Kenton & Coxlodge in Northumberland, where a railway had been opened in 1808. These, and the locomotives built by Chapman for collieries at Heaton and Lambton, show that at last the locomotive was starting to be accepted as valuable and viable motive power for industry. None of them was used on lines which were contributing to the development of track, for the intimacy of the relationship between the two parts of the machine had not yet been generally recognised.

The manufacture of locomotives was given fresh impetus in 1813 by the efforts of William Hedley, who built four, and in doing so proved that Blenkinsop’s rack was not necessary for obtaining good adhesion on smooth rails. But he built no more. A more sustained effort was made from 1814 by the man who was to become a giant in the development of the early railway, George Stephenson. He monopolised locomotive manufacture in Great Britain for the next eleven years,² and in doing so brought significant advances in the arts and sciences of locomotive design. That said, it is not at all clear if his early locomotives had coned wheels, the better to roll on the rails, but if they did not, they probably had somewhat erratic riding qualities on the track. With locomotive wheels, as distinct from waggon wheels, a particular effort was made to construct them, because of their size: they were rarely cast in a single piece, and they did not thus automatically gain coned treads.

Most rails at that time were flat-topped, and cylindrical wheels running on them, had all the freedom that the flanges allowed to wander from side to side as they did so. Wheels were set upon axles with a small amount of play on the gauge of the track. This may not have been precisely calculated in the very early days, but Wood recorded, in 1838,³ that on straight track, the flanches on each side are about one inch from the rail.⁴ This