Full Steam Ahead: How the Railways Made Britain. Peter Ginn

passenger railway service.

      “MUCH OF THE CONFUSION OF BEAMS, RODS AND SHAFTS HAD GONE – INSTEAD, THIS ENGINE LOOKED SLEEK AND PUNCHY.”

      Probably most of the credit for designing the Rocket deserves to go to the younger of the two Stephensons, Robert. His father, George, was busy elsewhere designing and supervising the building of the Liverpool and Manchester railway line, although the two kept in close touch. There were a great deal of technical improvements incorporated within Rocket, but probably the most important and the one to have the longest-term impact was the multi-tube boiler. The older engines worked by wrapping a large canister full of water around the chimney of a firebox. The hot smoke and air from the fire travelled along the chimney and heated the water as it passed through the horizontal section within the canister of water (the boiler) and then escaped vertically up the chimney at the far end. The rocket had not one but 25 parallel tubes that carried the hot gases through the boiler full of water. With so much more surface area contact between the hot tubes and the water, far more of the energy could be transferred. Put simply, 25 small hot pokers plunged into a bucket of water will heat that water very much more quickly than one large hot poker. When the much cooler gases reached the end of the boiler, they were allowed to come together again to escape up the chimney, aided by a shot of steam. This ‘blast pipe’ system fed a small stream of exhaust steam into the base of the vertical chimney, creating a vacuum that in turn created a fierce ‘draw’. In addition, the Rocket also made use of the radiant heat of the firebox by giving it a double skin and passing water through between the two layers. The Rocket was designed to be light and fast, but not particularly strong. Passengers in their carriages are a much lighter load than wagons of coal or slate, and Rocket was intended from the outset to pull no more than three times its own weight.

      COOKING WITH COAL

      As someone who has a lot of practical experience of cooking upon a variety of both wood and coal fires, I can honestly say that I think wood is very much my preferred fuel. Wood is tremendously controllable. Of course, you need skill to get the best out of it, but if you know what you are doing it is possible to control wood fires with more accuracy than can be achieved using any modern appliance. Unlike electric plates or halogen hobs, wood fires respond instantly – and they also add a distinctive flavour to food. On the other hand, coal is slow to heat up and cool down, the merest hint of its smoke gives the food an unpleasant taste, and it is filthy to work with. Wood ash is easy to clean up, there is usually very little of it and it leaves no stains. In the case of coal, however, there is always lots of ash and the black smuts that fall like snowflakes leave greasy, staining marks on everything in the vicinity.

      In the nineteenth century, when household after household converted to coal fires, they did not do so because it was a better fuel. Rather, they made the change because it was cheaper. However, coal must be substantially cheaper before people are induced into making such a change, not just because of its general inferiority, but because of the costs of the conversion required for burning it. A wood fire simply requires a space, and hopefully a chimney and some round-bottomed pans on legs. Of course, the big kitchens of Victorian grand establishments were equipped with far more equipment than that – the burning brands of wood were held upon brandreths or trivets, and spit dogs were used to hold spits in front of them. Many big kitchens had a sort of crane fixed into the chimney from which a pot could be suspended, and some had mechanical devices for turning their spits. However, within the commoner’s cottage you could if necessary dispense with all that expensive ironware – even your cooking pots might be just inexpensive earthenware, if necessary.

      Put a pile of coal on the floor in the hearth and you will soon discover how difficult it is to cook upon. It needs far more draught than wood in order to burn at all, so as an absolute minimum you will need an iron basket in which to put your coal, so that the air can get to it properly. The next thing you will discover is that the pots and pans you use over your wooden fire will not work so well over coal. The earthenware variety will quickly succumb to heat shock, and all those round-bottomed metal pots are no longer efficient over the varying, different-shaped flames. Therefore, if you want to cook over a coal fire, you will have to invest in a new set of metal pans.

      As the nineteenth century progressed, coal did become markedly cheaper and wood became ever more difficult to source and purchase. As coal became less expensive, so more people converted their fireplaces. Similarly, as demand for coal rose, the collieries became more willing to invest in railways, and as railways spread, the coal became progressively cheaper to transport and buy. It was a powerful and irresistible cycle of supply and demand.

      An archetypal Victorian kitchen, shown together with an array of contemporary utensils. This is actually the perfectly preserved kitchen at Lanhydrock House in Cornwall. Copper pots and pans hang from the wall above the cooking range, which would have been fired by coal.

      The Foxfield Railway is a preserved standard gauge line located south east of Stoke-on-Trent. The line was built in 1893 to serve the colliery at Dilhorne on the Cheadle coalfield. It joined the North Staffordshire Railway line near Blythe Bridge in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

      Page 37 from the notebook belonging to John Urpeth Rastrick (1780–1856), used to record details of the Rainhill locomotive trials in 1829. Rastrick was one of the judges.

      “THE GREAT DAY ARRIVED. TEN LOCOMOTIVES HAD BEEN ENTERED INTO THE RACE AND VAST CROWDS GATHERED. THE PRESS WERE THERE IN NUMBERS.”

      The great day arrived. Ten locomotives had been entered into the race and vast crowds gathered. The great and the influential had all been invited, the press were there in numbers from all over the world – with a particularly large contingent from the United States. Five of the engines never made it to Rainhill, problems with design, manufacturing and reliability forcing them to withdraw. Two more arrived but had to withdraw on the day. Just three engines were still in the running. Fireboxes were lit and steam began to build.

      It is hard to overplay the public interest that this event generated. This was an arena displaying the absolute white heat of the technology of the time. All the various small-scale lines, the experiments and the stuttering commercial successes of the last few decades had shown that steam locomotives running on iron railways were the future. There might well still be technical difficulties, but it was easy to see that in time these would be ironed out, and that a new, connected world was just around the corner.

      GEORGE STEPHENSON (1781–1848)

      George Stephenson was world-famous in his lifetime and has not been forgotten since. His father worked at the Wylam colliery near Newcastle upon Tyne, shovelling coal into the firebox of the static pumping engine, and the family lived alongside the wooden railway. Thus, rail and steam entered George’s life, almost from the first. However, his was a family with few of the advantages that usually offer hopes of success. Neither of his parents could read or write and George, like so many children in the last years of the eighteenth century, was working out in the fields from the age of six or seven. School would have cost money that his family simply did not have. By the age of ten, George was driving the horse-drawn, coal-filled wagons along the wooden railed way. Life began to change when he moved from tending horses to following in his father’s footsteps and instead began tending steam engines.

      As a 17-year-old engineman, George had a few pennies to spare, and these he chose to spend upon an education, attending night school after a long day at the pit. Within the year, George had learnt to read and write and handle basic arithmetic. Such determination and drive were to be lifelong traits. Over the next few years, George Stephenson moved around the local pits, working in one menial capacity or another upon the static engines. Finally, in 1811 at High Pit Killington, he got a chance to shine when he fixed a broken-down engine and was promoted to the position of engineer. This