The Fast Track
"Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."
-Will Rogers
"A fool always wants to shorten space and time, a wise man wants to lengthen both"
-John Ruskin
Speed is taken so completely for granted in today's world that we forget what a relatively recent addition to daily life it is. For the first 99 percent of human society the fastest anyone could travel was the speed of the horse they were riding. The fastest vehicles - the only vehicles - were sailing ships. Most people did not travel far from their homes, and those that did faced many days on a road, inside a horse drawn carriage if they had money, but more often that not they walked - if you had a horse or a mule, it did not carry you, but your belongings. Journeys that we would not blink at today were major undertakings. For when William Shakespeare travelled home to Stratford Upon Avon from London, it would have taken him about four days. So, when the first reliable passenger trains came along, trains that could haul passengers at speeds up to 30 mph, the world was set to be completely transformed. Travel became possible, towns and cities were connected, ordinary people could take days out, whole new markets for goods were created... the world was completely revolutionised by the new speed machine.
After a century of nascent industrial development in the 18th century, the first passenger railway steamed into life in 1829. It seems scarcely credible seeing the anonymous Georgian facade of the Liverpool Road station in central Manchester - one end of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway - to think of all the changes in society, all of the thousands and thousands and miles of railway track, and the massive increases in speed and size that came about in the wake of the trains that ran from the platform behind the building. The staircase inside, leading up from the booking desk at street level up
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Passing the Test
Not that such worries did much to deter the experiments from continuing. Steam was clearly capable of more that just pumping water from mines and running cotton spinning looms. Get all that rotary motion powering wheels on a carriage, the thinking went, and suddenly horse power would be obsolete. To get a steam boiler small enough to move itself demanded higher pressures, and many inventive minds were determined to make this future happen. The first ever self propelled vehicle was built in France in 1770 by one Nicholas Cugnot - the "Fardier a Vapeur" (Steam Dray) was a basic three wheeled wooden cart with a boiler mounted on the front, driving two small vertical cylinders that pushed around the front wheel. Designed to haul loads for the French army the Fardier was abandoned it managed no better than walking pace. Ten years later an associate of Boulton and Watt, William Murdoch, staked a minor claim in the history of transport by building a series of working steam carriage models. Like Cugnot he imagined a three wheel carriage, but Murdoch's designs clearly had the potential to move much quicker than walking pace.
Unfortunately for Murdoch he never got beyond the tinkering stage. Fortunately for technological progess his experiments were known to another innovator who did have the means and wherewithal to build something bigger than a model. This was Richard Trevithick, a Cornish engineer, schooled in the mining industry, and huge personality who towered over his fellows - both literally, at 6 foot 2, and figuratively. He was the man at whom Watt had directed his desire for capital punishment, though despite this passionate professional rivalry Trevithick was not a man to be dissuaded. He had met William Murdoch and seen a demonstration of one of Murdoch's little steam carriages. In 1801 Trevithick trialled a full size steam road engine, the Puffing Devil. The high pressure boiler provided steam at 145 PSI (by comparison a Watt engine was about 5), to a cylinder connected to vertical connecting rods. The engine gave enough power to push the carriage up a hill with several passengers riding on board. It was a volatile beast though - after one test run in the dead of the Cornish winter the engine was left outside a coaching house without properly extinguishing it's fire. It promptly exploded into a million pieces, though as there were no bystanders no harm was done.
In 1803 Trevithick unveiled his 'London Carriage'. It was what we would think of now as a taxi cab, or maybe a bus, as since the carriage stood three metres tall on it's huge wheels it was closer in size to the latter. Either way this giant steaming contraption would stop traffic with astonishment today, never mind in 1803. But for all the ingenuity of the boiler design, the rest of the carriage could not keep up with the pace; the wooden frame flexed and cracked under the strain because the engine could only power one of the wheels at a time. Commercially the service was no quicker than horse carriages, and expensive to run with the amounts of coal required. It was a non-starter when compared to horse carriages, but Trevithick has attracted further national attention. An iron master in Pen-y Darren, South Wales, one Samuel Homfray, contacted him to see if he could build a steam engine to haul coal waggons at his mine.
In building his Pen-Y Darren locomotive Trevithick implemented several important innovations from his various experiments - justifying his status as the father of railway locomotives - Rather than having a separate heater and boiler, in the Watt model, he put the fire inside the end of the boiler in what became known as the fire-box, making the heating of the boiler much more efficient. He also put a large chimney on top of his engine and exhausted the pistons through the chimney with the smoke from the fire. This last innovation was a key ingredient of the steam locomotive; the blast pipe, as it came to be known, pulled a much larger draught through the fire with every stroke, further increasing output. The piston pushed a connecting rod, turning a flywheel just as in a stationary engine, and the wheels were driven by a toothed gear on the flywheel. The engine worked as advertised, hauling trains of coal waggons at barely over walking pace, winning it's commissioner a bet with a rival ironmaster, but it's Achilles Heel was it's huge weight. Weight that cracked the rails on the trackway and eventually led to the engine being laid up as a stationary power unit. Another attempt to exhibit a steam locomotive - this time in the more public location of Bloomsbury in London - was also thwarted by weak rails. Richard Trevithick had come close, but he had not quite made an engine that could haul big loads at high speed. But he had released the genie out of the bottle, and high pressure steam locomotives had been proven as viable, if the impetus came to have them built.
With wrought iron rails, the Stockton and Darlington railway was able to accommodate the six and a half tonne Stephenson-designed "Locomotion" engine. Built around a large boiler - just like the Trevithick engine - the Locomotion differed from it's forbear as it discarded the gear drive and drove the wheels directly with the connecting rods attached to cranks. This innovation raised the potential speed into double digits. On the railway's opening day the Locomotion hauled a train of thirty two waggons - an unheard of amount for any horse hauled load - and reached the unbelievable speed of twenty four miles per hour. The great success of the S&D inspired imitators across the country, though in fact the company behind what would become the first ever inter-city railway, the Liverpool to Manchester, had been begun before the S&D was even opened. What the success of the Locomotion and it's like did was persuade those behind the L&M that steam locomotives would work, and work so well in fact that there would be no need for any horse drawn traffic at all. On Tyneside the world's first steam railway had still relied heavily on horses - the route was in spirit still run like a packhorse turnpike road where anyone could use the rails for a toll and as such was congested and often not a place where the average journey time was brisk. Locomotives frequently found horse carts blocking the way, and with nowhere to pass were stuck behind.
George Stephenson had begun the world's first locomotive company with his then-still teenaged apprentice son Robert, and was clearly the go-to man for the Liverpool and Manchester project. He knew right from the start that the only way to make a long distance steam railway viable was to all-but eliminate grades. No engine he could envisage could possibly pull any kind of load up an incline. To that end the railway had to come up with some enormous undertakings; west of Manchester the large bog called Chat Moss had to be drained under the track, and a huge sponge-like foundation laid under the rails; at the hamlet of Sankey, mid way along the line, a huge brick viaduct was built over the Sankey canal and brook; and at Liverpool the opened line would stop short of the city centre as a temporary terminal while a mile long cutting was blasted out through the city neighbourhoods. After several years of hard graft, some of it deadly, by the teams of "navvies", the line was completed, and a grand competition was held to find the best design for a locomotive - not for hauling coal waggons, but to pull passenger trains at speed.
Open to all-comers, the Rainhill Trials, held near the mid way point on the line at Rainhill station were a spectacle the likes of which the world had never seen before. Though the Stephensons were the obvious favourites to win the tender, several challengers turned up, and the crowds were captivated by the sight of the new-fangled designs chugging up and down the twin tracks at dizzying speeds. Unless they had personally been north to Darlington then the fastest thing these people would ever have seen would have been a galloping horse. To see machines moving without horses pulling them would have been uncanny, exciting and probably a little uncanny. Already railways had their detractors - from the aristocracy, many of whom banned rails from entering their estates, to physicians who warned that the human body could not withstand any unnatural speed, to coaching and canal companies (rightly) scared of the challenge to their business, and to the always timeless snobs railing that the hoi polloi might get ideas above their station. This last group found all their prejudices confirmed with the stoutly working-class George Stephenson, a man they had delighted in ridiculing for his provincial manner and lack of sophistication.
How satisfying, then, for the father and son to wheel out their latest engine at the Rainhill Trial, in Rocket, and it presented all the Stephenson's latest innovations in design. Most obviously the two front wheels were big and connected directly to two large slanted cylinders mounted on either side of the boiler. No more treading lightly with the cats-cradle of dainty rods and cylinders seen on the Locomotion. Rocket looked a little like a prizefighter with the two big cranks pummeling the wheels around. The really big innovation, however, not not quite so visible. Unlike previous steam locomotive designs, which generated steam by sending the hot gas from the fire through a single, large heating pipe in the boiler, the Rocket had twenty five, beautifully turned, copper heating pipes. There was therefore far more heating surface area and a massive increase in the amount of steam generated by the boiler. The team from Tyneside even had time for a little presentation - the boiler was clad in wood, painted gaudy bright yellow for extra sparkle. With an estimated top speed of a scarcely-believable forty miles per hour, the trial was no contest, and Rocket won at a canter, tearing up and down to the delight of the public while most of it's rivals broke down or failed to muster much pulling power.
front of all the London newspaper reporters and to run rings around their opposition. This was the
So unprecedented was this level of speed that it was to prove the undoing of one of the railway's main advocates on the occasion of the grand opening of the line. For all the technical breakthroughs that made the Liverpool and Manchester line possible, it was never going to be a non-stop journey between the two cities. The engines could not possibly carry enough water and coal to travel thirty miles in one hop. They had to stop from time to time to refuel, and it was while stopped on day the inaugural runs back and forth between the two cities, September 15th 1830, that the former member of Parliament for Liverpool, one William Huskisson, a great supporter of the railway, joined the assembled throngs of dignitaries for a mid-journey mingle while the engine took on water.
Rocket's time at the top was measured in months. With the railway up.and running the Stephensons could concentrate on improving their engines. To start with they made detail improvements to the Rocket, building an oft forgotten engine called the Northumbrian - a slightly better Rocket. The firebox was fully integrated into the boiler, fulling insulating the fire and allowing for higher temperatures to be reached without melting the metal, the 'smokebox' at the front was larger, (where the blast pipe connected with the fire exhaust) and the pistons were lower down, reducing the swaying motion that Rocket' s pistons tended to induce. With the first generation of engines working well the next step was a total rearrangement; the wheels were swapped around so small now led large, making the machine more stable in corners. The cylinders now lay completely horizontal and were held inside a wooden frame under the boiler, a boiler that now had a steam dome on the top, where the steam could be collected under higher pressure before being passed into the cylinders. This was the Planet class, the first truly consistent, reliable and fast locomotive for passenger railways, and the first to be built and sold en masse It was a trend setter and inspired half a century of imitators with its handsome teak covering, brass finery, and large padded front and rear buffers to prevent jarring vibrations between engine and carriages. By 1835 the Planets had spawned the Patentees - an enlarged version with two further wheels carrying a bigger boiler.and firebox.
The success of the Liverpool and Manchester railway spawned imitators all across Britain and Europe. The doubters were proven wrong; people did not suffocate when travelling at 30 mph, and horses and farm animals were largely untroubled by a few trains passing by in the distance. The speed and ease of travel was a revolution that transformed the world. Journeys that took days, over rough toll roads, now took hours, in relative comfort. Even the cheapest seats, sat in open trucks, fully exposed to the smoke and cinders thrown back from the engine, still got there in the same time 
as the First Class coaches. The railways were huge social equalisers - much like the printing press brought learning and knowledge to ordinary people, so the railway brought travel to all. Journeys were now for leisure as well as necessity. And whatever was true for passengers was also true for goods. Now materials and products took one or two days to get to factories, market or the port, rather than weeks being towed down a canal, the industrial economy could really take off. And now workers did not have to live within walking distance to their workplace the big cities expanded massively, fuelled by commuters using the railway lines.Nowhere got larger more quickly than London. Already the largest city in the world, the British capital was a little late to the railway party- the first station in central London, London Bridge, opened in 1836, but soon the floodgates opened and all major lines led to the capital. Naturally everybody with interests in the new railway game wanted their line to be best, and the most obvious way to be number one was to be the fastest. When plans were afoot for a line west to Bristol, the planners wanted to make sure their line would make all others look ordinary. To that end they hired the perfect man for the job - Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
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Great Western
Already the young engineer (he turned 30 in 1836) had a reputation as a maverick and a budding genius, building the first of a kind Thames Tunnel- the first such deep pedestrian underwater tunnel in the world - under the direction of his engineer father Marc Brunel - and winning a competition for a grand suspension bridge in Bristol. That project had foundered due to funding problems but the new Great Western Railway was well supported and allowed Brunel to indulge his vision for a high speed railway. It was gruelling work for the young man - sometimes he worked 20 hour days while surveying and planning his route. Just like Stephenson he was determined to avoid gradients and set down a line that was from direct between London and Bristol. This devotion to deviation earned his project the nickname "Great Way Round" from amused media onlookers.
The great explosion of new railway projects in the 1830s, and the speed with which they were built should not hide the fact that railways represented a huge effort, both financially and physically. The toughest challenge was removing the grades that were the great enemy of a locomotive. Great cuttings, tunnels and bridges, the greatest engineering works this side of a medieval cathedral - and these were spread over miles and miles of fields, woods and rivers. Never before had the English countryside seen such upheaval imposed so quickly. Even so, merely creating working inter city railways was not enough for the engineers. When designing and building railways George Stephenson had one eye on the future. He could imagine a time when trains would be much faster than his creations - his London Birmingham railway of the 1830s could be run on at 100 mph most of the way a century later. This was no coincidence, for the original plan called for minimal grades, and long, wide curves. Today we would call it 'future proofing' but Victorians got there first. Ironically the later trials of British railways, when the old routes were deemed too slow, twisty and narrow, and politicians dithered undecided what to do next, were partly caused by the competence with which they were built in the first place. It was only by the 1960s that the railways of Stephensons time began to seem unfit for purpose.
If Brunel aped the earlier railway projects with his devotion to overengineering the route, he broke with another feature that was already becoming standard. Ever since the early north eastern colliery days the gauge of the tracks had been set at around 4 feet 8 inches. The Liverpool and Manchester added another quarter inch to that, and such was its influence and the popularity of.the Stephensons, that this rather oddly specific measurement had become the de facto norm. Brunel scoffed at that, reasoning that making the rails wider would make higher speeds much more attainable, with the obvious side effect that freight wagons could carry more cargo and passenger carriages would be more spacious.
Seven feet was Brunel's gauge. It seemed a great improvement over the older ways, but there were consequences. For a start wider tracks increased the workload and the disruption caused by the works. For all his efforts at surveying and flat route Brunel could not avoid a two mile tunnel through Wiltshire's Box hill. Punching over 15 feet of width through the solid rock, in the days long before pneumatic drills, could only be achieved with immense amounts of gunpowder. Even by the loose safety standards of the day the Box tunnel site was a bloodbath; about one hundred men were killed and and many more maimed. (exact figures are elusive since complete records were not kept in the 1830s)
Things did not go swimmingly with the rolling stock either. Brunel had imagined that with three feet extra width to play with he could mount the wheels of the carriages clear of the frame, making them much larger and duly increasing speed. In practice this was easier said than done. Big metal cast wheels are expensive, and have huge amounts of inertia when they spin, increasing the chance of cracks turning into spectacular failures. And in a more practical sense they would get in the way of the doors. Even though Brunel was no locomotive engineer, his obsession with sticking his hand in every pie led him to commission the engines too. Only when the early models turned up for tests did it turn out that he was significantly under informed about the latest locomotive developments. He'd asked for, and got, some embarrassingly underpowered and underweight models.
Pride well and truly swallowed by their lead engineer, the GWR hired a Stephenson apprentice called Daniel Gooch to be the locomotive engineer. 21 years old, a mechanical prodigy, he was very much cut from the same cloth as Brunel, except of course he knew how to build locos that would work. His was a thankless task to start with, trying to make the recalcitrant engines work, under time pressure and no small amount of resentment from Brunel. Then came a useful piece of serendipity when a pair of engines that Gooch knew well from his time in the North East, and due to be shipped to America, were cancelled by their owners-to-be. Instead he persuaded the GWR to take them, suitably widened for the broad gauge. They worked much better than any of the existing motley crew and set the blueprint for future GWR engines.
Meanwhile the line itself faced another physical barrier to cross. The first section, from London Paddington to Maidenhead opened in 1838. At Maidenhead, twenty two miles east of Paddington, the railway needed to cross the Thames. Not, at first glance too much of a problem. Already the nascent railways had crossed some fairly mighty gaps - Sankey viaduct was twenty metres high and over one hundred metres long - but Brunel faced two obstacles completely unrelated to the river itself. To keep the river clear to boat traffic he had to build high, and because he could not afford a large unclimbable hump on his railway bridge he had to bridge a much larger gap than merely over the river. Plus he was also under instruction that there could only be one pier obstructing the river. Nowadays we would call such a long and high bridge a flyover and scarcely notice it, but this was long before reinforced concrete and high strength steel made such constructions routine. Brunel had to get across the Thames with bricks, not much different than the Romans. What he came up with - the Maidenhead viaduct - was a piece of mathematical genius
The two great brick arches are still the longest spans of their kind in the world, taking the railway across the river for seventy eight completely flat metres. Striking even today, in 1839 the bridge showed what railways could be, fast and smooth, literally looking down on the waterways and horse carts of the past below. As always with the age it had not been easy. There were plenty of doubters around who did not believe the daring low profile arches.would stand, and they seemed to be vindicated when the bridge did indeed sag slightly during construction. However, this was deemed by the contractor to be due to a premature removal of the forms underneath the arches. They were replaced, and the bridge mortar set correctly. The whole GWR route was finally finished with the completion of Box tunnel in June 1841.
The western world was changing apace in a very short amount of time. As Thomas Carlyle wrote, with a touch of trepidation in 1850 when considering the fates of towns and their ways of life in the future; “Railways are shifting all Towns of Britain into new places; no Town will stand where it did, and nobody can tell for a long while yet where it will stand… I perceive, railways have set all the Towns of Britain a-dancing”. As a measure of the speed of change consider that it had taken an entire week to ship the Rocket via canal and horse-drawn cart to the Rainhill Trials from the Stephenson's works. Twenty years later that length of journey was possible in only a few hours. Even time itself had been subject to change. Until railways everywhere had operated to it's own time - clocks were set by whenever midday happened to be, a time that varied depending on longitude. Across the British Isles the time could vary by twenty minutes, and when nobody could travel faster than a few miles in an hour, nobody noticed the discrepancies. Suddenly, the need to catch a train at it's assigned departure time, meant that everybody needed to know that the time was the same at every station. In the space of ten years from the mid-1840s virtually every railway town of note ran it's station clock's to Greenwich Mean Time.
Artists were drawn to the sight of the railways. JMW Turner immortalised the scene at the Maidenhead bridge in the railways earliest years in his painting Rain, Steam and Speed, arguably his most famous work. Ever since historians have debated whether or not the painting is a positive or negative depiction, and whether the most influential artist of his time was for or against the brave new world of railways. If he was uncertain then he would have been in good company, as not all travellers were convinced either, especially by the unlit darkness of Box tunnel. In an age where many believed the underground was closer to the devil's realm, there were many overland diversions around the tunnel.
The new railway was undoubtedly the fastest in the world. On one section the ''average'' speed was 57 mph. This is a reasonable speed for a frequently stopping commuter train even today. In 1848 it was something extraordinary. In one record attempt a GWR train averaged an incredible 67 mph, covering a 50 mile run in well under an hour. These statistics were mostly to the credit of Daniel Gooch and the GWR locomotive works. The 'Iron Duke' engine, first run in 1846 represented the next level of speed and power. With an eight foot diameter driving wheel, and the wide stance bestowed by the broad gauge the Duke was a physical manifestation of Bigger is Better ... and faster. Much of the great performance was attributable to the broad gauge allowing the boiler to be proportionally larger than its standard gauge equivalents. Single driving wheels became de rigeur for passenger train engines. It was the same theory as the notorious 'Penny Farthing' bicycle, whose five foot front wheel allowed cyclists to speed along faster than running pace, that the larger the wheel the further it would turn for each piston stroke.
(though a 'Grasshopper' was in fact a primitive much earlier design already extinct). Speed was high, though without as much boiler weight over the wheels traction could be a problem, much like a rear wheel drive car today, and a Crampton was not a heavy freight hauler. What it was, however was a demonstration that broad gauge was not a prerequisite for high performance. Brunel's gauge was never popular politically - all the transferring of cargo between trucks at the junctions between the GWR and its branches and the rest of the network coming in usually from the north disagreed with Victorian sensibilities of neatness and national togetherness.
This was not a good time to be a maverick no matter how fast your trains could go, and now the highly tuned Crampton engines showed that standard gauge could be a high speed proposition, even if they never attained much popularity at home compared to their export success in France and Germany. (The French even casually called flagship passenger expresses 'Le Crampton' for a time). What the Crampton engines also demonstrated (to those in the know at least) was that despite the flashy big wheels what was going on under the surface was just as important. The designs had a large firebox in a trapezoid shape, a very large surface area of boiler tubes and huge driving bearings nearly the same size as the wheels themselves. The designer claimed speeds up to 80 mph, though this was more like 60 mph in practice. A year after Cramptons death in 1888 descendants of his original engines could just scrape the bottom end of the 90's mph, so it seems unlikely such speeds were being achieved twenty five years earlier.
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Railroads
No sooner had railways caught on in Britain then they were being exported to America. Early efforts simply involved buying up British engines and copying them, but almost immediately American industrialists started tailoring their locomotives to their very challenging environment. The railways had a huge impact on the United States of America, indeed the country only really became United because of rail travel and, even more importantly, the movement of freight across the giant continent. The big difference between new and old world railways, even in the relatively bijou dimensions of the oldest Eastern states, were the distances involved. Faced with hundred of miles of track to lay, often over very unwelcoming terrain, and working in all kinds of extreme weathers, American engineers could never be as precise and meticulous as their European equivalents. The American attitude quickly became that of getting down a passable route as soon as possible, making a profit, and then hoping that the money earned would be enough to re-engineer and retrofit the line to a higher standard. Faced with rough lines and often unfavourable grades, almost at once efforts began to make the locomotives that pulled American trains stronger and more powerful.
American designs quickly adopted an underused design rarely used on European engines; the forward wheel truck, or the bogie. On rougher American lines the extra wheels helped keep the engine on the track. To put down more power, and get traction on hills the large single driving wheel so favoured in Europe was replaced by two wheels a side, coupled together with a drawbar. With four wheeled trucks, and four large driving wheels, the new 4-4-0 designs became known as American engines. The quintessential 19th century North American steam locomotive. Practicalities created the unmistakable look. A huge bulbous 'balloon stack' chimney prevented glowing wood embers from escaping and catching fire on the train or the lineside. The exposed sides made maintenance much more straightforward than on European style engines. The large covered cab was a necessity in North American winters - in classic masochistic British Victorian fashion it was felt that leaving the crew exposed to the wind, rain and hot cinders would keep them alert to their duties, but as speeds climbed ever higher even the cab window became de rigeur. The 'cowcatcher', to prevent errant wildlife derailing the wheels, was the most famed design touch. Not entirely everything was down to the rigours of the American routes; railroads were proud of their locomotives, they lined the cabs with expensive hardwoods, added gleaming polished brass fittings, and colourful paintwork.
The American type came to become synonymous with the classic old wild west era, and unlike so many of the other popularly imagined cornerstones of the time that in reality would have been a rare sight - Indian battles, shootouts at noon, posses of lawmen hunting fugitives, cowboys herding cattle (railroads in fact made the cattle drives obsolete) - the 4-4-0 American pulling cheerily painted wooden carriages was the standard. With a potential top speed of sixty mph the light design with four big driving wheels was ideal for hauling passengers and moderate loads. In an age long before automobiles, presidents, businessmen and armies went by train, and the train became the star of a thousand sepia tinged photographs. When the rails were being connected across the great plains, when the Gold Rush came to California, when Civil War broke out, the train was ever present in the heart of events. The American Civil War of 1861-1865 was the first major conflict where trains and locomotives were prized as a major asset and targeted for the same reason. The American-type locomotive took the starring role in one of the war's most celebrated episodes. In April 1862 a crew of Union mercenaries commandeered a Western & Atlantic American called the 'General' (and three of its cars) during a station stop in central Georgia, with the intention of high tailing up to the major railroad centre of Chattanooga and blowing up as much of the Confederate infrastructure before they reached the front line. This was still the age when many tracks were single tracks and all stations were run by station agents communicating by telegraph, so naturally the hijackers cut the lineside telegraph lines to stop word of the raid reaching up the line, and tried their best to blend in as if they were still the normal train crew.
However they reckoned without delays that left their pursuers able to grab another W&A engine, the 'Texas' and give chase. For an hour the Texas raced, backwards, at 50 mph and ran the General out of fuel. The raiders did not do nearly as much damage as they had hoped for, and the Texas towed the General back to Atlanta. Many of the Union raiders were caught and hanged (capital punishment also being another Western trope that has not been overstated). Both locomotives survived the war, famed for their roles in a small triumph for the South in the war they ultimately lost. The story of the Great Railway Chase would have likely become a footnote in American 19th century history had it not been for the 1926 silent movie recreation of the event starring Buster Keaton (and often called his finest piece of work). Keaton's movie, being an action comedy piece differed rather dramatically from the actual events, and was shot in Oregon rather than Georgia. Indeed in The General, the Texas ends up crashing off of a collapsing bridge. Remembered as the most expensive stunt of the whole early movie era the scene used locally bought locomotives, and stood the test of time well for the simple reason that there wasn't a whole lot of movie magic going on - Keaton and crew crashed a train off a bridge and filmed it. The movie had tried to use the real General for filming parts of the chase, but were turned down, perhaps not surprisingly
It was the often overlooked advances in machining and tolerances helped to bring about more complicated valve gear and joints to push the next generation of engines into higher speeds and larger pulling power. Americans, flush with forests and timber also created the ubiquitous wooden sleepers we have associated with railways ever since and that grace every child's drawing of a railway line. Until then all kinds of layouts were tried - the Stephensons favoured stone blocks under the rails, creating a harsh ride. The section over Chat Moss bog was immediately noticed to be smoother to ride on than the rest of the Liverpool and Manchester. Brunel, willful as always, had made the sleepers longitudinal under the rails, and tied every so often with metal ties. Somewhat invariably this created an up and down ride as the rails sagged between the ties. After many years it all became academic as the broad gauge was gradually overtaken by the Stephenson standard gauge, whatever advantages it might have brought were overtaken by the desire and necessity to make all Britain's railways compatible with each other. Brunel died in 1859, collapsing of stroke while supervising construction of his gigantic Great Western steamship, and in all probability worn down beyond his fifty three years by his exertions over the decades. He did not live to see his Clifton Suspension bridge finally finished, but he left plenty of monuments still in use today, most notably the huge train shed at Paddington station, still a great work of engineering art 160 plus years after it was first raised.
Steam engines faced several problems that ingenious engineers put their minds to over the years. One of the hardest concepts for designers and engine drivers to get their heads around was how to make the cylinders operate at both high speed and from a standing start. Steam engines do not have a driveshaft and a gearbox like a car or truck, but instead use valve gear - the complicated arrangement of rods and joints seen on most engines by the front wheels. The earliest locos had simple v-shape rocker arms called Gab gears to engage basic forward, neutral and reverse. The Stephenson works came up with something more complicated for their post-Rocket designs; shaped like a 'Y' laying on its side, the adjustable bars could adjust the position of the intake/exhaust valve on top of the cylinder. This acts to admit steam into the cylinder while simultaneously exhausting out the spent steam. With the valve gear installed the amount of steam could be adjusted so only part of the intake stroke was open to the intake. From a start to gear could be set to flood the cylinders with steam for maximum pushing power, then when up and running the stroke could be reduced to improve the efficiency of the engine. Not long afterwards, in the 1840s, a more complicated design, the Walschaerts gear (named after it's Belgian inventor), was first patented. Unlike the Stephenson gear the newer design was more adjustable, allowing more precise control, and could be hung entirely on the outside of the frame.
This last feature was not a big selling point for most of the 19th century and explains why the more basic Stephenson design clung on for decades. Aesthetics were very important for Victorian engineers; they followed the lead of the Planet locomotives, and one of the key features was placing all the greasy bits - the cylinders and connecting rods - inside the wheels for a nice tidy look. Maybe this explains why the Crampton engines never really took on in Britain, but sold in great numbers on the continent. Maybe too the proud French, Belgian and Prussian railway builders were keen to forget that the British had beaten them to the railway game and so embraced engines that didn't look very
"British". Certainly continental artists, writers, and thinkers embraced all the drama, both positive and negative, of the new railway age just as the British had.
Just as Turner painted a railway bridge for one of his most famous works, so a generation later did Vincent Van Gogh paint the scene as the railway crossed the Seine at Seine at Asnieres in northern Paris - though Van Gogh was rather more reserved in his celebration of rail travel as he disliked any change to the timeless rural idyll that made up so much of his subject matter. In another work he put the train in the background, passing from left to right in the midst of green fields, is if acknowledging, but not celebrating the railway line in his view. Rather more smitten (or so it seems from his works at least) was Claude Monet, who painted many scenes of railway lines, stations and yards. He seemed particularly taken with including the billows of spent steam ballooning out of chimneys. He captured the definitive view of a Victorian railway terminus in his works on the Gare St Lazare in Paris - the everyday experience of activity and purpose, all dwarfed under the great triangular roof of the station. Monet's contemporary Camille Pissarro also had a go at railways and trains, though in his case they appear more as an aspect of the scenery. He spent time in England, and left for posterity some very French-impressionistic paintings of unquestionably English railways. As if anticipating the day when steam trains would be forever looked on as jolly objects of a long lost happier Britain, Pissarro's trains look cheery and pastoral as they run nonthreateningly between bright brick buildings.
Only a few years later, in 1896, another pair of artists, of a slightly different kind, the freres Lumieres, captured the scene at a station on the Riviera with their newly invented cinema cameras. L'Arrivée d'un train en Gare de La Ciotat went down in history as one of the first motion pictures seen by the public, as well as spawning a famous legend that many viewers fled in terror at the sight of the train chugging toward them - despite the rather obvious problem that then film was all of fifty seconds long, jerky, black and white, and silent. It seems more likely audiences were simply astonished by seeing a piece of daily life brought to life on screen. Just as their grandparents were left wide-eyed by the spectacle of machines moving without a horse in sight so these people had never known seeing anything happen in front of them that wasn't really there. Still, they and their late 19th century contemporaries all had many good reasons to be wary, even a little scared, of railways, for they could be truly dangerous places to be, and throughout the 19th century had taken a great many lives with them in their quest for speed.
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Danger Ahead
The Great Western had been Britain's greatest railway, but also the unfortunately distinction of being the scene of Britain's first major rail disaster of the pioneering years. Yet another of the great engineering achievements of the line's construction was the huge Sonning cutting. But on Christmas Eve of 1841 a landslide sent piles of dirt from the banks onto the tracks, detailing a passing train and killing nine passengers. The death toll led to acts of Parliament demanding minimum standards for carrying passengers. The third class carriages were, as was the usual standard of the time, basic open wooden trucks no different that those used for hauling livestock, and some of those killed or injured were thrown out. Not that those paying for an expensive ticket were that much safer. Only a few months later, in May 1842 a packed Sunday excursion train derailed on the Paris to Versailles line. At 25 mph one of the two engines axles shattered. Nobody ever knew how many passengers were killed in the ensuing crash; the wooden coaches splintered to pieces and the overturned engines set them on fire. To ensure security and stop anyone catching a free ride the standard practice in France had been to lock all the compartments closed. Those whose coach did not collapse around them thus faced being dreadfully burned.These calamities shocked the sensibilities of urban European folk. This was a world used to death - but mostly from disease and deprivation. Violent death and severe injury had previously been a risk run by soldiers & navy sailors, or miners and the navvies who had built the railways. For rich and poor travellers alike to come to a violent end while simply making a journey was an idea it was hard for the public to comprehend. British society in particular was to be astounded and outraged in equal turn by a crash in 1865 when the Folkestone Boat Train on the South Eastern line had crashed off a river bridge, killing ten passengers. What made this crash different was one of the passengers was famous; perhaps the country's most famous private citizen, certainly it's most renowned author. Charles Dickens had been in Paris, had caught the steamer across the channel and was travelling back to London via the railway. At the same time a work crew was taking up and replacing rails on the line, including on the bridge over the River Beult.
A basic safety measure had been put in place; detonators, small packets of black powder strapped to the tracks, capable of emitting a startling bang when the engine crossed over, warning the driver to stop. Unfortunately the detonators were not placed nearly far enough away from the works - the Boat train driver heard the warnings and set the brakes, but too late to avoid slithering into the disrupted rails. The first coaches made it across but the later ones fell three metres into the gully. Dickens later wrote in his journals of walking around the debris, seeing several dead and dying injured people. The day's newspapers made him out to be a stoic figure, watching over and caring for the injured. In reality he was doing his best while wandering around in a daze, profoundly shocked by what had happened. Previously a great enthusiast for train travel, the crash made him forever nervous of the railways, and probably took years off his life. The whole experience undoubtedly not helped by his awkward personal situation; Dickens had not been abroad alone, and his much younger lady companion Ellen Ternan (who also survived the crash) was most certainly not his wife. Naturally the press sought out the great writer to tell the story in all its grisly detail for their newspapers, while Dickens, panicking that his adulterous holiday would be exposed, ruining his reputation and standing, hid away, trying to pretend nothing had happened.
This sort of story was emblematic of a changing world brought about by the train - the old aristocratic world built on folk knowing (and staying in) their place had been shaken up by the advent of mass transit, speedy trade and economics. Railways had made many people huge fortunes, and had boosted the prospects of millions more. But there was a price to pay in terms of lives with "the pace that kills" as Punch magazine called it mid century. And it wasn't just the passengers who faced perils. Statistically working on the railways was one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. Fortunately many of the innovations that made trains faster in the 19th century also made them safer to work on. Boilers were the most publicised cause of fatalities to railways workers. James Watt hasn't been entirely wrong in his caution- boilers made from riveted plates of iron often could not withstand high steam pressures when pushed too hard, or left alone too long. Neglecting the water in a boiler could be a fatal mistake for a train crew. Leave the tubes to dry out and the broiling engine turned into great iron bomb. Such explosions were not uncommon, leaving a grisly scene for bystanders to pick through and frequently a spectacularly destroyed engine, with boiler tubes blasted out in every direction - hence the inevitable popularity of such reports in the press. Gradually the demands of speed and performance did make boilers tougher, and the use of safety valves to blow out excess pressure became commonplace
As well as the boiler there was the constant danger of being run down or crushed between carriages. This latter fate was a constant hazard when shunting in an era when all of a trains cars had to be manually chained together. Crews had to stand between two very heavy trucks, the coupling right in the centre- one small nudge from a misplaced engine and they had nowhere to go. Brakes on early engines and carriages were, to put it mildly, basic. The earliest locomotives did not have brakes at all - on Trevithick's Peny-Daren engine the driver stopped by putting the drive in reverse. When passenger coaches came along they had a riding brakeman, just like a stagecoach, who screwed on a crude brake shoe. Except unlike a stagecoach there was more than one brake to engage, so the brakeman usually had to walk along the roof, or shuffle down the running boards of the moving train. Needless to say, between the rocking and shunting motions of the train, and the low bridges over the railway line, some did not always make it in one piece.
The lack of friction that made wheels run so well on rails counted against safely coming to a stop. In time newer designs began to make use of more ingenious methods. The vacuum brake appeared in the 1860s, using a hose that could be coupled down the top of the train, connected to all the brakes on the carriages, the driver the train could slow the train with one handle. It was a great improvement but not infallible. The tragic story of the Armagh disaster in Northern Ireland bore out the limitations of all aspects of technology in the 1880s. It happened in summer 1889, when an overloaded Sunday excursion train came to a halt two hundred metres from the top of a steep grade. The driver had protested before setting off to the railway clerk at the station that his single engine could not haul a fifteen car train over the route. But the pressure to get nine hundred restless passengers, a good proportion of them children, on their way for a rare day out won. When the inevitable happened the train's crew decided to split their train, pull the first half over the summit to a siding, and return for the rest. To do this they had to uncouple to vacuum brake, leaving the rear coaches held only by the backup manual brakes in the guard's van.
Had this been a freight train the crew would have had metal 'sprags' to brace behind the wheels, preventing any movement. On a passenger train there were none provided so they made do with rocks and ballast stones from the trackside. When setting off the engine rolled back before picking up traction - exactly why the wheels were braced - but unfortunately the stones were easily crushed and the guard's brake could not hold the weight. At first the crew could run next to the train, though they would have been helpless even if they had climbed back aboard. Just like in Versailles the doors had been locked to keep out fare dodgers. Soon the speed of the runaway picked up to 30 and then 40 mph. On another day the incident might have been harmless, but this Sunday another train was following up the single track. This line still used the old practice of leaving a 'reasonable' gap between trains and limiting the speed low, a practice that usually worked without problems but clearly made no provision for runaways. Though the driver of the next train did see the danger ahead and had nearly stopped the impact still smashed several coaches in the runaway excursion trains to pieces. Eighty nine deaths was the eventual toll, a quarter of them children, an unprecedented amount of carnage and tragedy for Britain's railways.
Armagh had a chastening effect on the government of the time. Previously politicians had left the railway companies mostly to their own devices when it came to running the railways, and naturally in such a competitive world maximising the number of passengers and profits took priority over the quality and safety of their service. Armagh had been caused by a flaw in the braking system -uncouple the train and the brakes were disabled. Yet there was already a more sophisticated and safer system available by 1889. Instead of using the vacuum to activate the brakes, the reverse happened; the vacuum held the brakes off, until the driver or guard pulled the lever to release them. It was failsafe. A similar problem applied to signalling - crashes had been caused by signals getting stuck, frozen, or broken. By making a signal indicate 'Clear' rather than Stop the same solution applied as with the brakes, where failures would fail in a safer condition. Signalling was another feature of many railways that had fallen far behind the times by the 1880s. The earliest lines used flagmen to signal whether a train could proceed and dealt with the problem of single tracks by stationing policemen at danger points. The policeman would pass over a token, often their truncheon, and wait until it came back in the opposite direction before letting another train through.
At speeds below 40 mph this system just about worked, but once trains could travel nearly double that it was patently unsafe. Already the invention of the electric telegraph in the 1840s had made for much more reliable signalling - station masters could communicate instantly with the next station and know where all their trains were with morse code. But telegraph lines cost money and money was made back by charging the public for cabling messages. Fitting out railways with such sophisticated innovations as interlocking signal wires and points, and wiring up the line with telegraphs was all cost, a cost many companies were disinclined to pay. It took a major disaster for the government to finally step in and demand the changes.
Eventually change would no doubt have come - safety was a side effect of the quest for speed. in a few decades at the end of the 19th century trains took a leap in size, speed and safety all at the same time. Automation of signals made trains that could run approaching 100 mph following each other on the same line possible. The danger of coupling and uncoupling was greatly reduced by the American Janney 'knuckle' coupler, an automatic mechanism that both removed the need to have men between the carriages, and meant the train was more stable under acceleration and braking. The development of mass production of steel by the Bessemer process meant that large amounts of high strength steel were now available, and coaches could be made from steel rather than wood. Firstly just the frames and couplers, but eventually the whole body of the coach. The days of wooden coaches that disintegrated into matchwood when they fell down even a small drop were numbered. Electric lighting was also on the way - no longer would carriages need to be lit with flammable gas lamps. The vacuum brake, while an improvement on manual brakes, would be superseded in the 1870s by the Westinghouse Air Brake system (another American invention) that could generate far more braking power.
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20th Century Limited
For most of the 19th century it was the norm to have trains stop at every station. But as trains got ever larger and faster, there were an increasing number of non-stop trains that missed out the smaller towns and villages. In Britain they took on names like "Express" and "Flyer"; in America the suffix "Limited" became particularly popular. Names like this designated exclusivity and premium luxury. The image of railways had been stung in the 19th century by a number of self-inflicted financial crashes that left thousands of shareholders out of pocket, or even ruined. Ruthless, unethical and often illegal business practices also made the headlines, with antics like stock manipulation andanti-competitive corporate takeovers seemingly being standard procedure for the rail companies. Rather like the banks a century later, the public had grown to distrust the railway "Tycoons" and their seeming obsession with profits at the expense of their public, and shareholders. The novelty was starting to wear off so the trains needed to win the public back on side, and they did it with speed and luxury.
After the completion of the first American transcontinental crossing in 1869, the country's network kept expanding. The original Central and Union Pacific crossing of Nebraska, Utah, Rocky and Sierra Nevada mountains was joined by the Santa Fe in the deserts of Arizona, the Southern Pacific across Texas, the Northern Pacific in Wyoming and Washington state and The Great Northern skirting the border of Canada (that country also building it's own cross country line to link with the Grand Trunk railway in the east - then the longest rail route under one company in the world). Distances were heroic to say the least, and the competing companies did their best to ensure that their trains were renowned as the most comfortable, with the best service. In fact, some contemporary accounts reported that the hotels in San Francisco would come as an anticlimax after the service offered by the train that took passengers across the continent.
In the Eastern lines the distances were a little shorter, but the competition was even more intense. The New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad battled for supremacy in on the route from New York City to Chicago. The former was renowned for it's "Four track mainline", as the name suggested it was a quadruple track, and it covered almost the entire distance of the route between the two cities. The pride of the Central route was the "Empire State Express", between Rochester and Buffalo, and in 1893 a specially prepared train, hauled by American-type engine Number 999, supposedly did something no other train had done before; run at 100 mph. One hundred and twelve miles per hour in
fact. Maybe. Ever since the day the news was published the doubts have far outweighed the claim. A recorder in the train showed 86 mph. Respectable but 14 mph short. And given that later generations of trains couldn't match a spiced-up but fundamentally obsolete design the claim is most likely a tall tale, Eventually '999' was retired from the mainline and ended up as a menial workhorse before regaining fame as a travelling exhibition piece, and finally taking place in the Chicago science museum where it remains, along with it's dubious claim to history repeated verbatim by it's keeper, to
this day.
American engines got larger and larger, creating new types, and new innovations. The country was now undoubtedly at the forefront of developments, it's great works churning out a panoply of ever grander designs. The biggest improvement to steam engines in the end of the 19th century was so-called 'superheating'. In the first generations of steam engines the steam generated in the boiler tubes was wet steam, saturated with water that had not been vapourised. Clearly not as efficient as it could be. With the superheater element added to the top of the boiler tubes, the saturated steam was dried out before being sent to the cylinders, boosting power by at least 25%. The idea had been tried before in mid century but construction techniques could not produce a boiler that could cope with the complexity and increased temperature. After the turn of the century all large steam locomotives would be fitted with superheating elements.
All American locomotive engineers faced a conundrum - maximum bridge weights were a major limitation on the size of boilers. Many bridges were simple wooden trestles designed for much smaller trains. So weight was a problem, but in more than one way. Without enough weight an engine had no traction. And a boiler could be as big as anything but without a large firebox it was useless. One solution was to make the firebox much taller, so it hung down in an L-shape at the cab-end of the boiler. To support it two trailing wheels were placed on a truck underneath, creating the 4-4-2, "Atlantic" class. Ever larger fireboxes led to the 4-6-2 "Pacific" at the turn of the 20th century. 'Atlantic' derived from a design for a line to Atlantic City, New Jersey. Whether or not 'Pacific' came from the obvious source of being one larger than the Atlantic, or from the fact that the first ever example, built in America by the Baldwin works, was exported to New Zealand is unsure. What is sure is that the Pacific layout became the default type for a high speed steam engine all around the world. Thousands and thousands were built, and by the early 20th century most major countries of the world had been tied together by main line railways for them to run on. When the layperson thinks of big steam engines, a Pacific - four wheels in the bogie, six big drivers, and two wheel truck under thefirebox, is what they are likely to think of.
The Pennsylvania Railroad went one better than the New York Central with the "20th Century Limited", introduced in 1902, running all the way from New York to Chicago. At first it took twenty hours to get to Chicago, though by finessing the timetables, and working on the track and engines, they soon cut three hours off of that. In 1905 a Pennsylvania Railroad Atlantic, number 7001, while on the flat of Ohio, allegedly reached as high as 127 mph. As before the hyperbole convinced and was ridiculed in equal measures. The New York Times scoffed; "Of course no such thing happened". It is likely the speed was closer to 80 mph. By mishap the actual 7002 was scrapped before the railroad noticed it's little slice of notoriety. "7002" that lives on today in a museum was actually another similar engine given a makeover to look like it by the railroad.
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Chemin de Fer
The French had had a slow start to it's railway age, but by the late 19th century was well on the way to becoming one of the leaders in speed and innovations. A big idea the French took to like no other country did was compounding the locomotive to make more use of the steam generated. Steam engines with a high pressure cylinder that exhausted into a lower pressure cylinder and then into a further, even lower pressure, one were commonplace on ships. Ships, of course, had great amounts of space below decks to fit in the much larger lower pressure vessels. Railway engines, and especially railway engines in Britain, where the loading gauges were at their most narrow, usually only had space for two cylinders. Some attempts at compound engines were attempted, but the limitations on space usually meant the engines such as the Webb Compounds of the London North Western Railway, or the Midland Railway's three cylinder 1000 Class did not greatly improve their performance enough to be noticed. Anyway Britain was sat on top of a sea of coal, so fuel efficiency was never at the top of most railway's priorities.On ever so slightly more capacious routes in France, however there was room inside the frame for compounding, and the French, in a country somewhat lacking in coal reserves, took to the idea keenly. In France there was far less of the divide between the worlds of science and engineering as there was in many other countries. Railway engineers were not hamstrung by the ingrained need to be rough and ready, down-to-earth, intuitive thinking types. In France, a locomotive engineer had dirty fingernails, but was also an intellectual. Even the engine drivers were taught with classroom theory as well as shop floor experience before they took up the footplate. Drivers were often assigned engines as theirs alone - unheard of elsewhere. (In typical Gallic fashion the less older workhorse engines ran by multiple crews were referred to as "Whores"). As a result of this culture of scientific enquiry mixed with obsessive passions the French works came up with some ingenious compound designs.
What he did was to take an old, slightly worn out engine, and double it's power output. When they took his creation out for a trial with a full train to pull, they found it could accelerate so fast, (always a strength of compound engines), that it could average close to 70 mph for the journey, despite the line's speed limit being 75 mph. With exacting design changes, Chapelon had doubled the size of the heated area inside the engine, and massively streamlined the flow of steam. He had brought the railways into the modern age of precision engineering, and all the other French lines clamoured for him to work his magic on their engines too. When the nationalised SNCF was formed in the 1930s it could boast a lineup featuring easily the most efficient steam engines in the world with power to
weight ratios that would never be matched.
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Motor Rail
The end of the 19th century finally saw some another form of power step up and provide alternatives to steam. Urban railways had sprung up all over the world, many of them heading underground, following the lead of the London Metropolitan railway of 1859 that tunnelled it's way for several miles under the busy streets, connecting several of the main railway termini. Steam engines were the only practicable form of transport, at first, but in the confines of cities, and especially in tunnels the smoke, soot and waste steam were very unpleasant for crews, passengers and station staff. Experiments with electric motorised trains went back nearly as far back as railway themselves. Only twenty one years after Michael Faraday had performed his famous demonstration of rotary motion -showing how a wire with an electric current sent through it would rotate around a magnet, the basis of all motors - a Scottish engineer, one Robert Davidson, had built an electric locomotive, the "Galvani". It could only do 4 mph, and looked like a goods truck. Soon afterwards the local railway workers ganged up to dismantle the only example, and the idea was forgotten about.The disgruntled workers were thirty years ahead of their time. It took until 1879 for the first electric train that carried paying passengers to appear. The passengers were visitors to the Berlin Trade Fair, and the "train" was a tiny four-wheeled box built by the Siemens company of Berlin. The tiny engine hauled a wheeled double-sided bench behind it. It wasn't much, but this was an electric motor powered engine as would be familiar to future generations. Unlike the Galvani, which created rotation by sealing it's axles in cylinders of zinc acid, the Siemens had a motor consisting of coils of wire surrounding a magnet, and took it's power from a third rail fixed in the middle of the track. Thus introducing the electric locomotive's main advantage - it didn't need to carry it's own fuel. It could be powered from a central source, a power station. Over the next decade several small electric tramways appeared in Europe, including one that did away with the obvious safety hazard posed by the electrified rail by hanging wires over the track on pylons.
In 1888 the Richmond, Virginia trolley line opened - it's engineer, Frank Sprague, had designed a traction motor that gave far more power than had been seen before by an electric train. His Richmond trolleys could climb hills, were very reliable, and easily controlled by a single driver. Sprague's designs provided the blueprint for a explosion in interest in electric traction across the United States and the world. The first electric London underground line, the City and South London line, opened in 1890. This was a much deeper line than the existing routes. These used the terribly disruptive "cut and cover" method - essentially digging a trench, building the railway and then covering it over again with a street. The electric line could be dug down far deeper and there would be no worries about ventilating out smoke and steam. The four mile Baltimore Belt Line in 1895 introduced electric equipment and engines to haul the Baltimore and Ohio steam engine headed trains out of the city's terminus station. Also in 1895 the venerable Baldwin locomotive works partnered with the George Westinghouse Company to make alternating current (AC) locomotives.
This was right at the dawn of the electrical age, when the battle between Westinghouse and Thomas Edison over which current was the best for distributing electric current over a citywide network was decided - Edison favoured direct current (DC), but despite his huge influence, and a few anti-AC publicity stunts like staging the first electric chair execution with AC current, AC won the day. Edison's DC plan's would have required many power stations within a city, while AC could be sent over power lines huge distances without any resistance. Despite the growth of massive power stations on the edges of cities to provide electricity to homes and offices, the railroads and transit companies usually built their own power houses. Within ten years the Baldwin/Westinghouse development team had created the so-called "Steeple cab" electric locomotive - as the name suggests it had a cab in the centre, and two sloping bonnets on each end containing the power motors.
In 1908 electric trains were given a great boost by the councillors of New York City. They decreed that no steam engines would be allowed to run under their own power at all within the inner city limits, all but guaranteeing the use of electric switcher locomotives on the New York Central. A fatal collision in 1902 in the Park Avenue Tunnel leading to Grand Central Station had been caused by the tunnel's near permanent filling of blinding thick smoke obscuring the signals. The American Locomotive Company (ALCO) and General Electric built their own version of the electric locomotive, the 'S-Motor'. In use in the New York tunnels from 1906, they gained the popular nickname "Tunnel Rats". Nearly fifty were built, the first electric locomotive to be built in such large numbers. On the rival Pennsylvania Railroad the extraordinary DD-1 locomotive did the honours within city region. The DD-1 had 2,000 horsepower from Westinghouse motors, but retained steam engine-style driving cranks and wheels, making for a bizarre Steampunk hybrid of old of new technology. Though not the flagship engines of the railroad - that honour still stood with steam - the DD-1 could do 85 mph, and in almost complete silence.
In Europe the growth of electricity was concentrated on those areas that lacked coal and were heavy on mountains, places where electric locomotives had clear advantages; Swizterland, Austria, southern Germany, northern Italy. In hilly areas electricity also provided 'free' power using regenerative braking systems, where the current flow could be reversed to both slow the train and generate electricity that could be sent back into the lines. In America the Chicago Milwaukee and St Paul Railroad (aka the Milwaukee Road for short) built the mother of all electric mountain lines across the Rockies to the Pacific. Finished in 1909 (the last of the great American trans continental lines) their two thousand mile 'Western Extension' had 650 miles of electrified sections in two separate parts in the remote mountains of Montana, Idaho and Washington State. To run over them they showed off their humongous "BiPolar" engine. 250 tons of pure form over function (about 120 road cars worth). With it's massive cylindrical ends and giant central cab looked as though one of the lineside buildings had been lifted up and put on wheels. Twelve motors were crammed in the ends, with a large boiler in the middle to provide heating to the carriages, and the drivers cab clinging on around the edges The railroad published advertisements showing off the monster, trying to associate it and electric power with innovation and unstoppable brute force in the mind of the public. The steeple cab look became popular in Germany and Switzerland too. The commonly applied dark green colour schemes of these countries also added a reptilian look of the designs, hence a popular nickname that stuck - Krokodil.At the other end of the elegance scale came the Pennsylvania Railroad's new electric locomotive, the GG1. As part of their never ending game of one-upmanship with the New York Central by the 1930s the PRR had wired up large sections of their eastern regions, including the main line running to Washington DC. Headlining the Washington services was the GG1. Not many electric locomotives seem to gain the affections of enthusiasts in quite the same way as steam engines but this elegant machine has certainly been one of them. It was sleek and elegant, with sporty pinstripes, and a top speed to match of 100 mph. GG1 showed how electric traction could be made beautiful and characterful.It had a long life too - built in the 1930s the last one pulled it's last train in 1983. by which time it had come full circle from futuristic symbol of modernity to a classic piece of retro-Americana. As well showing that an electric locomotive could be as good, if not better than a steam engine in passenger service, the design also heralded the dawn of industrial design in the railways. The designer Raymond Loewy had been brought in by the PRR (his first job for the railroad had been it's waste bins) to advise on the fit, finish and colour scheme of the engines. Formerly anything to do with the design of locomotives had the sole preserve of railroad men, but times were changing. If experts had always made engines work well and keep up with the times technologically, then experts were now going to make them look good and keep with fashion.
At the end of the Victorian age most countries had a panoply of railway companies, most competing against each other for the same traffic. But with greatly increased performance and capacity that came with bigger engines and innovations such as steel bodied coaches, came a pressing need for amalgamation. At the end of the First World War, for example, the UK had 120 rail operating companies. In France, by contrast, the number had already pared down to six. Following this lead, the UK government grouped together the rail network in into four main companies in 1923 - the famous "Big Four" of a thousand picture books, cigarette cards, and model train sets; the GWR, the London Midland Scottish (LMS), London North Eastern (LNER) and Southern Railway. At once they all set to work trying to outshine each other, despite the fact that only really the LMS and LNER were really in direct competition, and that was only for the long distance traveller who wanted to ride from London to Scotland
The competition for railways was not going to come from other lines any more, but from the motor car, the bus and the aeroplane. Cars had been around, in some form or another, since the 1880s, but only by the 1920s were they becoming mass produced and affordable for many people, rather than a toy for the wealthy. Good roads to drive on were spreading quickly too; already the writing was gradually appearing on the wall for the smallest branch lines. But while motor buses and cars were far more convenient than trains, they couldn't match them for pace; speed was still the railway's trump card. Not many 1920s cars could match the turn of speed of an express train - most of those that could were being raced around a racetrack not taking a family to the seaside. Roads, too were often just adaptations of ancient routes - pack horse roads, even Roman roads - and usually far less direct than a railway. And even the fastest cars got stuck in traffic congestion in towns. Aeroplanes certainly could outpace the train, but only taking a few passengers at a time, and brave passengers at that; people who were hardy enough to tolerate bouncing through clouds while crammed into a tiny, deafeningly noisy biplane. And rich enough too to afford the fares. So while the competition was growing for the travelling public's attention, the train still held a lot of the cards. And while the internal combustion engine was powering ahead on road and in the air, plenty of brains were engaged at work making it work on rails too. If railways could be reborn with all new engines, they might
just stand their ground.
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Big Oil
Diesel power began very slowly. A hissing, very static engine ticking over in an Augsburg workshop in 1894. About 23 horsepower was the output of this vertical engine that looked little different from many other industrial steam and petrol engines. Yet within a few years the eponymous creation of Rudolf Diesel was being heralded as the most efficient in the world. The Diesel engine relied on compressing fuel under such high pressure that it ignited itself. It made for a much simpler, and reliable, engine than many more complicated internal combustion designs - for one thing. Diesels needed no spark plugs and all the timing that requires. Chugging away reliably at one speed for days on end without needing much attention, diesels were ideal for ships. Submarine engines in particular were an early field of improvements for diesel. Without much in the way of complicated moving parts, a diesel engine could also be scaled up to huge sizes. Where a highly strung aeroplane engine - all spark plugs, wires and springs - could be the size of a bed, a ship's diesel could be the size of a house.Naturally, such heavy duty engineering was seen as a natural fit for railway engines. At first, the rail diesel found it's niche in switchers (as Americans called them, British English preferred the equally descriptive 'Shunter'), the workhorse of the railway, and industry at large. Industrial countries depended on the little engines - the engines that pushed trucks around yards, ran coal into power stations, pulled scrap iron into steel works, coaches onto boats, main line engines into the works. An engine that a yard's driver could jump into and start from cold at sunrise was a great boon, but there is just one not-so-small problem when trying to build a diesel larger than a shunter. Steam engines and electric motors give the same power at any speed. Combustion engines are either off or, at their slowest, running at hundreds of revolutions a minute. Fine on a ship or aeroplane where the engine runs a propeller. However a petrol or diesel engine can't directly drive any vehicle from stationary without gears to slow down the engine's rotation before it's transmitted to the wheels. Transmissions are fine on cars and trucks, where the engines are small and forces low, but scaled up to the size of a major passenger railway locomotive and a gearbox would need to be a serious piece of hardware. The solution was to combine technologies; use the diesel engine to power an electric generator. The generator makes electricity to send to electric traction motors. As a consequence, the smaller engines are the only genuine diesels; most big 'diesel' locomotives are really electric locomotives, except they get their power for the motors from a generator rather than wires connected to a power station.
Diesel-electrics solved the problem of power delivery, and the future market attracted some big players. Today a diesel train seems utilitarian and ordinary, once it was the very eptiome of the future. Car and truck giant General Motors soon muscled in on the action, buying up the Electro-Motive company, the leading developer of the eponymous technology in the 1930s. New steels that made steam engine components tougher yet lighter also helped diesels in exactly the same manner. Meanwhile, the whole country, and by extension, the whole world reeled in the midst of the Great Depression. The catastrophic economic downturn of the early years 1930s had a huge detrimental effect on locomotive builders. In better times railroads had pushed ahead with an arms race of developments. Faced with massively tightened purse-strings, and large, fit-for-purpsoe steam engines, they stopped buying new engines and made do with what they had. Locomotive builders had no idea what 'planned obsolescence' meant in those days, they were the victim of their own success; their engines did not need If to be replaced, so they weren't.
At first, what the diesel offered was an alternative in troubled times, a new idea. And it came from a country even more troubled than America - Germany. Humbled by the Great War, Germans had to watch as their economy faltered and collapsed. Amid the turmoil, and festering resentment about their surrender to their neighbours and subsequent humiliation, came the rise of the National Socialists. Their strident leader, one Adolf Hitler, had charmed much of the nation with a promise to bring the Germans back to their rightful place at the head of world affairs. His much more sinister side was hidden under a blusterous front that promised investment in technology, and when the Nazis swept to power they set about becoming the world leaders in every prominent field of engineering. Or, at least every prominent field of engineering that either would provide a military benefit, or a glamorous propaganda boost. Nazis loved seeing great German airships, aeroplanes and racing cars dazzle the world, so naturally fast trains were on the agenda too.
To that end, came the debut, in 1933 of the SVT 877. A diesel-electric powered train, consisting of only two cars, but designed to be light and to cut through the air with maximum efficiency. It ran on the Berlin to Hamburg line, gaining the nickname Fliegender Hamburger - Flying Hamburger. There was no locomotive; each of the two coaches had its own diesel engine connected to an electric motor on one of the wheel bogies. The shape of this rail-car was styled in a wind-tunnel rather than being drawn solely by a draughtsman to a best-guess. Research in the tunnel lead to deep side skirt panels covering the wheels, and a odd small central driver's window peering out of the nose. It looked a little like a big metal eel. But it was fast. One hundred miles per hour was the operating speed, and on the journey between the two cities - on a line built in the 1840s - the Hamburger could average over seventy miles per hour, easily the fastest train journey in the world. This first prototype spawned a larger production run, numbered the SVT 137. Capacity was slightly lower than on the Hamburger original, to allow for slightly more passenger space. Based out of Berlin, the thirty three new sets ran to many of the major cities - Munich, Cologne, Nuremberg, Stuttgart. In 1936, one of the 137s was timed at 127 mph.
It was a new record for a passenger train, smashing the existing 112 mph mark, though oddly it wasn't quite the fastest that any vehicle had been on German rails. Six years earlier another diesel railcar had reached 143 mph, on the same line. It did not raise quite as much notice as it's successor because it had never carried any paying passengers - The reason for which will become immediately clear when it's design is described - The single car "Schienenzeppelin" had been designed by an aircraft engineer, and it's appearance lived up to it's name. If anything, it looked more like an aeroplane than a Zeppelin. Made from aluminium it was very light in weight, and in photographs looks like it could have fallen backwards in time from thirty years in the future. That is, until the back of the "train" is seen. The Schienenzeppelin got it's power from an aeroplane engine. Attached to the engine, a large, two bladed wooden propeller. A furiously spinning propeller standing in a railway station was clearly preposterous, and not just for safety reasons. Such a railcar could never hope to climb even the slightest hill, even one made from lightweight aluminium. Still, the short-lived railway plane did provide a useful template for building the bodies of the future railcars.
Not for the first time with railway advances, though, the Americans could claim to have been there first - The Germans had also drawn inspiration from American electric trolley cars, some of which had been getting very rapid indeed. Philadelphia in particular had an "interurban" car called the 'Bullet'. This ran on the Philadelphia and Western Railroad, an upstart competitor to the giant Pennsylvania RR. Built to high standards, with barely any grades, and wide corners, the short (by American standards at least) railway covered the suburbs of the city and it's neighbouring towns. The Bullet, the first American train sculpted by wind tunnel research, could zip along at 90 mph on it's brief sprints between stops. In spirit at least, the Bullet can stake a claim to being the spiritual ancestor of the modern high speed passenger train.
The Depression did not kill off the American sense of optimism. It had become clear that despite the Wall Street Crash, and the strutting posturing of Hitler and his cohorts, that the United States had become the world's leading economy and innovator in technology. In 1934 two American railroads followed the lead of the Reichsbahn by showing off their own diesel railcars. In the silver corner was the Burlington Railroad of Chicago. With hundreds of miles of table smooth scenery over which to race west to St Louis, Denver and north to the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St Paul) the Burlington was ideally suited to railcars. They built a stainless steel three carriage unit called the "Zephyr". Powered by a 600 horsepower Electro-Motive engine, and built with a patent electric welding process, the Zephyr was a technical and literal powerhouse, and stunning to behold to boot. Unlike the German railcars with their twin engines the Zephyr had one engine and retained something of a locomotive at the front. The styling concealed this fact to great effect - the cab windows fitted flush with the nose, and a ground-hugging shovel flare underneath channeled the wind around the train. The stainless steel body did not need painting, saving weight, and did not corrode, saving the looks.
Those looks were no coincidence - a large 'Burlington' logo plate took pride of place in the middle of the nose. This was a charm offensive by the railways in the face of the Great Depression, ever larger aeroplanes and faster and faster automobiles. One of the first things the Burlington did with their Zephyr was arrange a non-stop run from Chicago to Denver. It took the train a mere thirteen hours to complete the thousand mile marathon, including a moment of top speed measured at 112 mph. Quite a bit of planning with local police patrols was needed to make sure that all the road crossings were clear - the quiet diesel did not announce itself with the strident hammering thunder of a steam engine, despite it's large front headlight there was always the danger that inattentive pedestrians and drivers could cause a derailment. The train was a hit, even becoming a movie star in a prototype of the 'impending-disaster aboard a fast moving vehicle' genre. After being shown off on the tracks and screen the first unit was given a stand at the Chicago World's Fair of that year.Other railroads took notice. Nearby, at the same event, in the yellow corner, was the giant Union Pacific Railroad and their less-than-imaginatively-named M-10000 'Streamliner'. A big three car diesel unit, it shared much in common with the Zephyr, with the same power, and a similar capacity. Like the German trains it was an aluminium body, with a duralumin skin (the same alloy as formed the frames of the Zeppelin airships). Thanks to the UP railroad's great financial muscle the Streamliner went on a national tour, showing off it's ability to cruise it's passengers at 90 mph while still cooling them with new-fangled air conditioning. In 1935 a second example of the type managed to cross the entire continent in 57 hours. It didn't win the beauty contest though. The huge round nose was covered in a huge split grille, and the thin cab windows peered menacingly over the top, giving the whole an appearance not-unlike some kind of sinister metallic monster from outer space. Despite coming up with the primarily yellow colour scheme that would last the Union Pacific the next eighty years (and counting) for this train, the designers then inexplicably painted this unlovely nose drab
muddy brown.
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Streamline Steam
In Britain the standard bearer in the 1920s was still the Great Western Railway. A lifetime after Brunel and Gooch the company had long since torn up the last of the broad gauge track but still had a world leading engine works. In the mid 1920s the Cheltenham Flyer - a service from Paddington to Cheltenham held the world record for the fastest average speed for a passenger train service. At the head the understated but fleet of foot 4073 Castle Class locomotives, designed by Charles Collett. There was nothing exceptional about these locomotives, they were simply the product of great attention to detail and some clever design tricks under the skin. The unbroken chain of succession between chief engineers, and the knowledge they passed between them also played a part - Collett had been deputy to the previous chief engineer William Churchward, himself apprenticed by William Dean, who traced his career back to Joseph Armstrong, who in turn was the man who took over the reins of the GWR from Daniel Gooch in the 1860s.Churchward had been a major influence on bringing French and American railway habits to the UK, in particular replacing Stephenson valve gear and concealed cylinders with much larger external cylinders with a longer stroke, and bringing in superheaters. He also believed in making as many of the parts interchangeable between designs as possible, a key factor in making the GWR's precision engineered engines economically effective. Nowadays of course, such part-sharing and balance sheet-watching is standard practice in any manufacturing enterprise. The GWR and Churchward had their own claim on the dubious, unofficial 100 mph mark. Their "City of Truro" was supposed to have travelled over the magic Ton mark in 1904. A handsome type of locomotive, the 3700 City class bridged the gap between Victorian and 20th Century design. At this point Churchward and the railway still couldn't quite bring themselves to give the crew a full cab to work in, or to put the cylinders on the outside of the frame, and superheating was still in the future. Nevertheless 'City of Truro' supposedly was timed over quarter mile marker points at a rate equal to a speed of over 100 mph. But, yet again, there was no actual adjudicated, independent evidence, only the notes of a journalist with a stopwatch. Unlike the previous American claimants (both of which had been vastly inflated by the press) there were at least some figures to report, figures that, when run through a modern computer programme, are convincingly consistent with what the locomotive could have achieved. Also unlike the American railroads, the British were reticent about celebrating any kind of speed record. It took until the 1920s for City of Truro's name to become famed in Britain, as the national mood began to turn in favour of showing off with high speeds on the rails.
Years of being outshined by "God's Wonderful Railway" eventually led other workshops and their staff to pull up their socks (and pull out their drawing boards) and see what they could do. LNERs chief engineer Nigel Gresley penned the Pacific A1 class for fast passenger use. The most famous example, first rolled out of its Doncaster birthplace in 1923, and named after the service it would be hauling, was number 4472, The Flying Scotsman. No doubt the denizens of the LNER Doncaster works would be a little surprised, to say the least, to learn that the Scotsman would, in time, become the country's most famous engine, and still be pulling trains up and down the East Coast main line a century later. The apple green Pacific became an icon partly by virtue of becoming the first locomotive indisputably past the 100 mph barrier. Others could claim to have done so, but the Scotsman had final undisputed proof recorded on paper by a dynamometer in a measuring car as part of a special test train.
This milestone was passed in 1934, six years after the first landmark moment of the locomotive's career, because as well as speed, another big selling point of the Flying Scotsman train service was that from 1928 it was a non-stop service from London to Edinburgh - 393 miles, the longest journey without a pause in the world. In the age of the newsreel, the LNER publicity department was guaranteed that everyone who went to a cinema in the 1930s knew of the train and the country's most famous locomotive. In 1929 the engine even became the movie star with the premiere of the "The Flying Scotsman". By modern standards a typical mannered runaway train action melodrama of the early 'talkie' movie age, but with some hair raising white-knuckle stunts on the outside of the carriages thrown in. And in those days it was the stars of the film itself, not stunt performers, hanging precariously off the sides of the coaches.
Non-stop service was made possible by the famous corridor tender. A ingenious and simple idea that saw the back of the locomotives tender fitted with a door and connector to the coach behind. To change crews the relief crew simply shuffled through a 45 cm wide cranny beside the coal and water and took over on the footplate. The other impressive thing about the non-stop service, besides the performance, was the standard of comfort. The Flying Hamburger had no buffet car, no cocktails, no movie projector, no barber service... all things that were squeezed aboard the Scotsman. By 1935 the A1 Pacific had been the LNER's flagship for a decade. Though many (including the Flying Scotsman) had been upgraded to A3 class, there was still room for improvement. Gresley and his team combined all their efforts into the A4. While the A3 had become a poster boy by matching the German diesel railcars, it had been pushed to it's limits to do so. Gresley was interested in diesel engines, but knew that it would probably be impossible to make a profitable service with anything but a steam locomotive.
To that end the new A4 was designed from the ground up to pull high speed trains. The innards were given a thorough redesign, making the boiler operate at a higher pressure yet using less water and coal. The inner workings were the main technological focus of the A4 but it was the skin that drew all the attention. Even today, a lifetime later, when there are few people left alive who would have seen the A4 in LNER colours, the design looks elegant and modern. Gresley was acquainted with the car engineer Ettore Bugatti - a man who had also tried his hand at railcars - and had access to some proper aerodynamic theory by way of the National Physical Laboratory and it's wind tunnel. The old cliche was never more apt than when applied to this locomotive; it looks fast standing still. Where most 1930s streamlined styling followed the pencil and the eye, ending up with rounded raindrop shapes, the scientifically-crafted A4 is slab-sided but with a long French-curve like taper around the nose. The design has a great deal less bulk than many engines of the.time because only the boiler is cladded- the wheels are contained in separate side casings, with an aerofoil profile and panels covering over most of the wheel. Though the streamlining only really had much effect at high speed, it was somewhat effective at reducing coal use and the looks had some practical use as the smoke from the double chimney (another efficiency improvement) was deflected up and over the driver.
The first four of the new Gresley streamliners were painted silver and grey in commemoration of King George's silver jubilee, and the new high speed service also took the name Silver Jubilee. Aerodynamics were not just confined to the locomotive; the gaps between the 7 coaches were sealed as much as practically possible with rubber seals. The Silver Jubilee put up some impressive figures; on it's first run with press aboard from King's Cross to Newcastle, pulled by the engine "Silver Link", it hit 100 mph soon after clearing the outskirts of London and was averaging over that speed over the fastest thirty to forty mile stretches of the line, topping out at a record breaking 112 mph. In an echo of the earliest days of railways, Gresley himself eventually came through to the footplate to caution the driver not to frighten some of the less gung-ho passengers. The performance was no flash in the pan, and the new train ran comfortably every weekday without incident.
Easily the largest of the British rail companies, the London Midland and Scottish began life in 1923 in a poor state. An "'Ell of a Mess", in fact, as a common jibe of the time had it. The whole was a hodgepodge of what had been very different lines, with a cornucopia of engines, rolling stock and staff. To begin with speed and efficiency were not on the agenda in quite the same way as the LNER and GWR, both of which had far more suitable routes on which to strut their stuff. The LMS had the West Coast Main Line, running from London Euston to Birmingham, on Stephenson's 1838 line through the many towns of the home counties, then on to the great locomotive works at Crewe, before heading to Manchester and the on to Glasgow over the hills of North West. It was a route that took in greater grades and sharper curves than their rivals had to cope with. "Double-heading" - pulling one train with two engines - was a common practice, but it was a costly way of running a
railway.
The solution to these problems, conjured into being by the chief engineer William Stanier, though in practice mostly designed by the chief of the Derby design works Tom Coleman, was the Princess Royal class, and it's larger sibling, the Princess Coronation. Had it been a boxer the Coronation would have been the heavyweight - longer, wider and twenty tons heavier than the A3 and dwarfing engines like the Castle, it was more on the scale of American Pacifics, albeit still turned out in the Victorian minimalist style. At least, at first. With streamlining mania in the 1930s taking hold the wide bruiser that Tom Coleman had penned was ordered by publicity hungry LMS management to be clad in a wind cheating carapace just like the LNER engines. Not an easy task with an locomotive that was all but scraping the inside of the old Victorian tunnels as it passed through. If the end result of streamlining the Coronation wasn't quite as iconic and timeless as the LNER A4 - it looked like a very well turned out submarine with a pair of buffers poking out of the nose - then it did at least have a fantastic set of go-faster stripes radiating out from the nose and running the length of the coaches. And it came in a variety of colours too. The first came in deep maroon as was standard on the LMS, but ones assigned to the new "Coronation Scot" service (the LNER had already nabbed the basic "Coronation" name for another A4 hauled service) came in appropriate blue and white colours.With the powerful new engine at it's head the Coronation Scot was a worthy rival to the LNER in the race to the north. In June 1937 a special test run of the train from Euston to Crewe bested the Silver Link's speed record by two miles per hour. It nearly ended in disaster though; 114 mph had been achieved but it came a mere two miles from their destination. Slamming the brakes on, the driver had managed to get the engine down to 57 mph crossing the 20 mph speed limit into the station. Speeding over points was normally a big no-no for an engine driver, but this time nobody was worried, they were received the big engine had made it to a halt without derailing. Only the dining car staff had a problem, namely a huge pile of newly smashed crockery to clean up.
A rivalry it may have been, but it was on the whole, a friendly rivalry. Railway chief engineers often freely shared information with each other. *All the big new speed machines on Britain's rails owed a debt to Chapelon and his work on increased efficiency. And the A3 Pacific only worked as well as it did because the LNER had done a swap with the Great Western. Able to inspect a Castle Class up close Gresley was able to crib some of it's design tricks and use them in his own engines. The influence of Chapelon had been strong on the Castle design; all the parts worked in harmony to keep all the steam flowing freely through all the valves, cylinders and tubes with no bottlenecks to reduce efficiency. And now the French holistic style had found it's way to Doncaster, Gresley also visited the great man himself in France to further improve his designs. Stanier had spent much of his time at the GWR before taking up the top job with the LMS, and took with him a deep belief in simplicity of use and ease of maintenance. He had been particularly unimpresssed by the top brass and their silly streamlining that hid away the mechanical beauty of his Princesses and Coronations. The speed record pleased those in the press office, but engineers thought of it more of a bonus than the sole objective.
The LNER, armed with more A4s - the latest batch painted bright blue - took the record back a year later, and by some margin. Their engine "Mallard", pulling a train of seven coaches, peaked at a speed of 126 mph while running down the slight downhill grade on the East Coast Line between Grantham and Peterborough. Not only was this a handsome new record for the railway, it also had the added benefit of vanquishing Germany, who had claimed a speed of 124.5 mph for one of their own new streamlined engines. The run became part of British folklore - the driver and fireman pushing the bright blue engine from 70 mph to 126 in a few short miles, to it's literal breaking point, having to stop short of London with overheated connecting rods. Just over a year later, the golden age of Britain's steam express trains came to a end. Like the rest of the country's locomotives, engines such as the Flying Scotsman and Mallard went to war. Consists could be run to as many as twenty five coaches, but the big speed machines acquitted themselves very well, often being able to sustain good speeds even with such heavy trains to pull.Fleet of Foot
It is a little hard to square with the current situation, where the vast majority of the rail traffic in the United States consists of giant freight trains grinding along at 50 mph and rail services of any speed are confined to the eastern corridor between Boston, New York and Washington DC, but the country was once arguably the world leader in high speed railways. Not just the equal of the Europeans, but, given the distances involved in America, arguably more impressive for being able to maintain such quick schedules for such long journeys. As well as the fleet new diesels by the mid 1930s in America there were a plethora of high speed steam services, and since the diesels could only realistically haul three of four cars of passengers, the steamers took the lion's share of customers. The ordinary 1930s rail traveller, arriving at Chicago's Union Station in the middle of the decade could travel North, South, East and West on fast steam express trains.To get North and West, the Milwaukee Road provided the "Hiawatha" service, consisting of a brand new streamlined train hauled by steam locomotives capable of 112 mph to take our traveller west to the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul). The trains gained some of their speed from being a modest five cars in length. At the head was relatively small engine; by the 1930s the six driving wheels of the Pacific type engine were so ubiquitous that the Hiawatha's smaller four-wheel type Class A Atlantic looked like a wilful throwback. What it lacked in traction it made up for in speed. On test in 1935 the Class A matched the speed of the Silver Jubilee, 112 mph, only this was a train that proved it could regularly run close to this speed in service too. Running over the flat lands of the American midwest, on straight and level lines, very well engineered, the Hiawatha was undoubtedly the fastest scheduled long distance train in the world, sometimes averaging over 100 mph on runs between stops.
The Class A was certainly quick in appearance as well as in performance. Streamlining was a fashion must, but draped over a smaller engine the aerodynamic casing had a light, uncluttered appearance. The looks came from the studio of Otto Kuhler, a German emigre, and streamlining specialist, he had worked on the ungainly M-10000 railcar, but left purely to his own devices created one of the classics of American rail design. With coachwork boasting very clean straight lines that very effectively hid the engine underneath, and strong branding featuring a prominent stylised Indian archer logo and bold colours (cream, orange and maroon) It looked years ahead of it's time, almost like a modern diesel locomotive in aspect. Such was the popularity of the Hiawatha that more cars were added. Nine car trains were too much for the Atlantics so a larger Hudson design was ordered (a Hudson being a Pacific with yet another trailing axle to support an even larger firebox). Introduced in 1937, the F7 Hudson was little more busy than Otto Kuhler's previous effort, but made up in presence, and performance Never timed officially running faster than many other steam engines, the F7 did claim the title for the fastest ever average between stations, pulling a train in service at an average of 81 mph for the hour-long section.
The real design classic of the 1930s American steam railway age was to be found running in the opposite direction out of Chicago. New York Central's two headline services, the Empire State Express and 20th Century Limited were still going strong after three decades, and in the 1930s they got the obligatory streamlined makeover. As in Britain the standard engines could have done the job just fine, but the bosses demanded streamlined styling on top. To that end the railroad hired a young industrial designer, Henry Dreyfuss, renowned in the industry for his slick black Bell telephone design. Rather than the look of a smoothed out carapace, Dreyfuss went for a Flash Gordon rocket ship design, fully embracing the form of the underlying locomotive. The boiler was supplanted with a rounded bullet-shape end, with vertical blade-like appendage. Underneath the nose was shrouded in a big cowling - a snowplow for the air. The sides lacked the standard aerodynamic skirts to deflect the wind around the wheels, but on the Dreyfuss design the wheels themselves became solid flat pieces with little round portholes cut in. This detail really set off the overall look, and the wheels even had the extra theatre of being lit up with spotlights at night.
The engines and coaches made a virtue of having an unpainted but polished stainless steel metallic finish. This was space age styling twenty years before the first rocket ships actually took to the air. Dreyfuss wasn't only tasked with the exteriors - following the example set by Gresley expresses in Britain, the entire train and it's contents were restyled and refined to a single unified look. Dreyfuss even took the time to do the dinner menus and matchbook covers. Everything was new and different to what was the norm. In a world that still clung aesthetically to smoking jacket reds, mustard yellows, and gloopy greens, this train's interior was a classy collection of light blue, aluminium, grey leather, and chromium plating. Speed readouts gauges were placed in some cars - seventy years before the practice became a party-piece on some European high speed trains. Even the platform on the station was adorned with a train-length roll of red carpet. This was a train that really did carry the stars. Hollywood and Broadway later borrowed the idea and made it their own.
Back across the Atlantic, light diesel sprinters weren't enough for the railways of the Third Reich either. Steam still reigned over the German rail network, so the engineers were tasked with making sure that German engines were the biggest and fastest. The imposing Borsig works '05' was the end result, yet another debutant of the golden year of 1935, designed by the chief engineer of the company Adolf Wolff. Almost completely shrouded in a smooth, and except for removable grilles over the wheels, almost featureless casing, it could have been mistaken, a little ominously, for an armoured train. With the German railways allowing a greater loading gauge, the engine hidden inside the cocoon had bigger boiler and driving wheels than anything in Britain. The cylinders on their own were 30% larger than those on the Flying Scotsman. At top speed the 05's chimney whistled a shrill howl, quite startling to anybody standing watching it pass.
A year after it had raced to a world record speed on the Hamburg Berlin line the 05 was bested by Mallard to the tune of 1.5 mph. The British engine is doubtless the more famous. The 05's memory was undoubtedly tainted by the government of their homeland, and also lessened by the fact that there were but three of them ever built. Still, the comparison is an intriguing one; unlike Mallard the German engine was on a level track rather than a slight downhill and the engine did not need to stop early for repairs afterwards. However, the Mallard's record run gave up a large amount of possible track that could have been used - like a long jumper only taking half their allotted run up. Given another attempt over a longer distance some estimates have put Mallard past 130 mph. Mallard too is necessarily smaller by dimensions and was hailing a heavier train behind it. A train, too, it must be said, that did not carry SS Korpsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler and his sidekick Reinhard Heydrich as honoured passengers on its journey, so perhaps history does remember the moral, as well as statistical victor.
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Putting Out the Fire
The war presented a false dawn for railways, especially in America. The huge increase in useage, for moving armaments, troops, and supplies, meant that railways were worked hard, pressured as never before, and had no worries about customers. With the end of war came a boom in air travel, fuelled by the great advances in aerospace technology made during the conflict, and a massive increase in private car ownership. In Europe this led to consolidation and nationalisation- British Railways took over from the Big Four in 1948. In France SNCF became the majority state owner of all railway operators in 1939. The division of Germany led to two companies; one in the East and one in the West. The railcars kept running after the war, though not at the speeds they once had. Gradually they faded away, though some were preserved. The same could not be said for one of their home bases; Berlin's Anhalter Bahnhof was bombed to oblivion in the final battle for Berlin in 1945, and it's remaining wall stands today like a tombstone to a long lost era of travel. The super fast Borsig 05s also survived the war, but their streamlined covers did not. They lasted until 1958 in service, without the streamlining, and never coming close to their top speeds. One was saved for preservation and eventually re-clad in it's old party dress.
At least in those war ravaged, financially strapped, countries the day when every household had a car and everybody went on holiday in a jet airliner was a long way off. In America, where there was no bomb damage, a booming consumer economy, and a new high speed interstate highway system in the works, the railroads looked set to carry on with shiny new diesel locomotives pulling their venerable named trains, but gradually their customer numbers began to dwindle. Increasingly the handsome new diesels were pulling freight trains. The storied ALCO works, builder of countless grand stream engines, looked set to lead the world in 1946 when it rolled out it's huge PA diesel electric. Two thousand horsepower was hidden behind a very long bonnet in a towering engine that looked like the very embodiment of post-war progress. But, very quickly, railroads didn't need progress, they needed to economise, and the big PA, with it's wobbly reliability and expense, was not needed. What remained of passenger travel was fronted by the more sensible EMD diesels. Shut out, ALCO rolled on until the end of the 1960s and disappeared forever.
Even the fastest train could not compare to a Boeing 707 or a Douglas DC8, roaring along at 500 mph. And as for comfort and style, the average 1950s Chevrolet or Ford now had air conditioning, a radio, power steering, and lashings of chrome decoration. The American passenger trains soldiered on throughout the 1950s, staggered into the 1960s and eventually died almost completely in the 1970s. The previously cutting edge electric wires were taken down, no longer needed when most of the trains were diesel-hauled freight. The Milwaukee Road's electric route across the Rockies was torn up in its entirety in 1980. The Burlington Zephyr took it's last ride in 1960, and one now sits in the Chicago science museum, the last of it's kind. The last 20th Century Limited ran in 1967, just as the country was preparing to send a manned spacecraft to the moon. Once mighty corporate colosii to rival governments, and former deadly adversaries the Pennsylvania Railroad and New York Central merged in 1968. But to no avail. In 1971 all passenger services were put under government control. 'Amtrak' kept some American passenger trains alive serving the major cities. 100 mph became a preserve of the north eastern corridor between Washington DC and New England. The day's when fast passenger trains radiated out from Chicago, Sacramento, Chattanooga or St Louis were gone.But before this great fall from grace there had been a few brief moments of excitement in the post war years on American rails. In spite of the invasion of new diesel locomotives, and the large areas covered by some electrified networks, some developments came the way of steam. In 1939 Pennsylvania Railroad unveiled their Baldwin-built S1 steam locomotive, and if steam was rapidly becoming yesterday's technology then nobody told the S1. After the success of the GG1, the railroad had re-hired Raymond Loewy to do the looks. The S1 was absolutely enormous and Loewy styled a horizontal missile, a giant rocket-like tube fabricated from aluminium. The sheer size gave enormous presence and the engine was one of the stars of the 1939 World Fair in New York, where it was shown off with electric rollers on its stand keeping the wheels turning steadily at 60 mph revolutions while static.
A so called Duplex engine, the S1 had two sets of wheels and cylinders, a popular arrangement with very large freight haulers, but a less common sight on the front of a passenger train. Those freight designs were always articulated, keeping two sets of driving wheels on separate frames under the boiler, and tuned for torque. (Though such famous creations as the Union Pacific Big Boy and the C&O Allegheny were no slouches, being able to haul at 50mph on the level). To keep itself rigid for high speed running the S1 kept its eight driving wheels (two sets of four, a double Atlantic) on one solid frame, making it the largest such design ever built. Most parts of the Pennsylvania Railroad network were out of bounds as the curves were too tight for the wheels. Where it could run the S1 demonstrated that it could pull a full train over 100 mph with ease. In a familiar pattern the engine had many claims made for its top speed - 127, 130, 150... - without solid evidence being provided. The design was ultimately a flawed one. The immense overhangs forward and rear of the driving wheels meant that so little of the weight of the boiler was over them that the engine often slipped at speed. With little warning the wheels would spin and damage the cranks and the wheel rims. As with many prior streamliners bits of the fancy aluminium casing were shed to ease maintenance.
The problems with the S1 led the PRR and Baldwin to develop the slightly smaller (though still enormous) duplex T1. Another Loewy job, it eschewed sleek curved lines and instead took on much more rectilinear forms that emphasised the horizontal and vertical lines. The most distinctive feature was a wedge shape cover on the front of the firebox, holding a single front headlight, undercut with a inset line to separate it from a big bluff fronted cowling underneath hiding the couplings. Original sketches and patent applications show that the cab was mean to be a third of the way down from the front of the engine, a little like a diesel cab, but that idea was canned in favour of a conventional rear cab. It was still a work of styling genius either way, but ultimately it did not change the workings of the engine itself. Despite its more compact dimensions the T1 also suffered from wheel slippage, and the double set of drivetrains were expensive to maintain.
When first shown off to the public in 1942 the T1 looked great. After a few years of service they were soot stained and grease streaked the paint. When the Second World War ended, with the sudden onset of atomic power and jet engines the T1 was a relic of old-fashioned times in the eyes of railroad managers. In 1949 the solo S1 was quietly withdrawn and scrapped by the PRR, followed in the coming decade by all fifty two of the T1s, some barely over ten years old. The same fate awaited nearly all the other 1930s American streamlined steam locomotives. Long before the Milwaukee Road breathed it's last the 100 mph Hiawathas were all gone. Every single one of the handsome Class A and F7 streamliners were scrapped, as were the Dreyfuss New York Hudsons. Such a complete and ignominious junking of once-iconic industrial designs long before their shelf lives were up shows just how quickly steam was being ushered out of the door. In time the T1, S1 and the rest would become pinups for design students, comic book artists and fans of 1930s retro-futurist looks. But not soon enough to save any of them for posterity. In fact, only one pre-war streamlined American engine survives anywhere; the Chesapeake and Ohio number "490", a 1920's Hudson design that had been reclad post war in a bizarre silver and banana yellow skin, with a single Dreyfuss-like lamp peering myopically out above it's tall prow. 490 is not in working order, and unlikely to ever steam again.The final hurrah of American main line steam engines came deep in the Appalachian & Blue Ridge mountains and the rolling hills of the Virginias, on the Norfolk and Western Railroad. The N&W connected the coastal ports of Richmond, Virginia with Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio. Deep in the heartland of coal mining, steam had made more sense here than anywhere else. Much of the traffic was freight, but there were still passenger services winding their way between Richmond, Roanoake, across the mountains to Ohio. At their head was the thunderous J2, the closest thing to a cross between a freight engine and a streamlined passenger engine as had been created. The J2 had eight, fairly small driving wheels, good for traction, but, as trials on the much faster rails of the Pennsylvania RR had shown, it could race along to 100 mph if pushed. Much of the time on the twists and turns threading through the forests it could not do that, but it looked good doing it. Painted black, with an orange-red longitudinal stripe running down it's clean lines, and with a rounded bullet nose and streamlined fender, the J2 looked like an interloper from the big city rather than a country boy. Even it's days were numbered, though, as the sixties dawned the N&W made the decision to dump all their steam engines virtually overnight for diesels. In the rush, all but one J2 was sent to be cut up, but the one survivor, number 611, remains in steam to this day, a prized possession of it's home state.
Being the very last of the steam railroads the twilight days of the J2 an it's fellows on the Norfolk and Western railroad attracted interest from a photographer from New York City. Ogle Winston Link came South to West Virginia with cameras, flash bulbs, and his nephew as assistant. Realising that the moment was never-to-be repeated he obsessively catalogued the operations - sheds, workers, passengers, sidings, branch lines, and of course the last of the steam passenger trains that there would ever be. Often deep in the night Link would wait by the tracks for an express to pass, his lights picking out the steam silhouetting the black engines as they sprinted by. The images were stark and beautiful, dripping with atmosphere, and very poignant. One of the last showed a husband and wife standing on their porch, watching the last ever steam express pass by their rural hamlet, deep in the inky black night. The end of an era.
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Modernisation
Run down by the six years of wartime struggle, Britains railways were nationalised by the Labour government in 1948. The famous evocative names of the age of streamlining and speed - LMS, LNER, GWR - became a thing of the past, replaced by British Railways, a new rationalised and austere tool of post war reconstruction. To begin with things went well. Pre war designs were still very much fit for purpose; some sacrifices were made; the Coronations lost their streamlining, the A4's their wind cheating wheel covers. The bright colours of the 1930s - apple green, brilliant blue and deep maroons - were mostly replaced with dour olive drab and plain black. Ease of maintenance and standardisation was the new mantra, and it worked well for a time. Well enough that eventually someone in charge had to try and change something.A new mania for modernisation to sweep across the rails, but in the age of the motorway and the jet airliner, a government run rail network did not quite garner the same attention from the exchequer any more. Chief mechanical engineers had been replaced by bureaucracy and Britain's rather muddled modernisation plan, outlined in a government White Paper of 1955. Firstly the head honchos recognised that electrification of main lines was the way forward, but that this was very expensive, and this would be modernisation on a budget. Secondly the best smaller term bet would be diesel traction. Thirdly the steam engine was too labour intensive and expensive to maintain, especially an age when many of the country's lines were clearly redundant in the age of the private car. Unfortunately this plan was implemented in a rather hamfisted way. Making Britain electric happened... slowly. (parts of The Great Western were finally electrified in the 2010s, the Midland Main Line and large portions of Scotland still aren't). Strangely one of the big advantages of diesels - their adaptability compared to all the different types of steam engines - was glossed over, so Britain ended replacing like for like and ended up with almost thirty different types of diesels, an absurd situation. Many were not fit for purpose and soon withdrawn, almost alongside hundreds of steam engines, many barely run in, being scrapped seemingly for the terminal sin of being old fashioned. Naturally this sort of thing did not endear management to their workers, many of whom faced uncertain futures as all the jobs associated with steam - firemen, boiler cleaners, coal and water bunker crews - vanished. (By contrast in Germany many main line steam engines were kept in service until their parts wore out in the 1970s. In the East, the last fast steamer ran in 1988.)
Some momentum passed to France. While they too had axed their main line steam engines prematurely, including many super efficient proposals by the genius Chapelon, they did embrace electric power and were willing to pay to make it work. In 1955, just as Britain was setting forth their brave new future, the SNCF were already there. In the space of just over one year they sent out three record breaking speed runs. One was a warm up that broke the existing German pre war record of the railcars, while the next two were extreme, ragged edge runs using specially over tuned locomotives. And, the really impressive part, they sent out two different locomotives to do the task, back to back. Alsthom of Belfort provided the CC7101, France's first post war electric main line locomotive, initially as supplied with a top speed of 87 mph and a power output of over 4500 hp, all being supplied to motors on every axle. Meanwhile in the other corner stood the Jeumont Schenider BB2004, a newer, largely untried prototype.
To ensure maximum windcheating the rear of the train was bubble shaped, with a window for a spectacular view out of the back. Recording equipment was installed, and timing mechanisms fixed to the tracks for maximum accuracy. In two consecutive days in late March 1955 both of the two Hot Rod locomotives streaked to 331 kph - six miles per hour over an amazing 200 mph. Or, at least that's what the SNCF, and their commemorative plaques, said happened. In reality it was the BB2004 that went a little quicker, while the CC7101 managed 199 mph. Perhaps not wanting all the glory to go to one manufacturer, and to take the shine off the model already being sold abroad they announced that both runs had reached the same speed, even though all the carefully installed timing gear showed that was not quite true.
In the end to all intents and purposes they were effectively equal; both trains were running far beyond what was feasible everyday. By modern standards of safety it certainly had been a leap into the unknown. The line ran through level crossings and small stations. Crowds of locals came out to watch. Each cab was crowded with observers - but who could turn down a chance to travel across the land at a speed that only a few people had been before? In the end the record attempts were a great triumph for French engineering and for electric traction advocates in general, but they did show the limitations too. Both locomotives were left with melted pickups; huge electrical arcs had been filmed snaking out from them as they sometimes bounced clear off the wires. Most dramatically parts of the track were warped left and right, as if it has been hit by a minor earthquake.
What was happening had a name - hunting. Just like a bloodhound on the trail above 150 mph the trains started to rock from side to side, hitting the wheel flange, and getting stuck into an oscillation as the tiniest wobble in the track became amplified with no way to dampen it down. This phenomenon showed that going fast was more a question of power and streamlining, and that once speeds passed a certain level there could be all kinds of unexpected problems to deal with. The dramatic damage to their track showed how close the French had been to the limit and disaster. Nevertheless the French network of electrified express trains was soon expanding, headlined by the 'Mistral' train from Paris, to Nice via a stop in Marseilles. Star of the SNCF at the middle of the sixties was the impressive CC 40100 engine. A handsome grey and silver brute, with an imposing aspectthat belonged almost as much to the innards of a power station than a railway line. It's Zig-zag backward-sloped nose windows and bonnet gave a whole new look to French railways, one that would be ubiquitous for many decades on many locomotive types. The CC 40100 was equipped with four voltage supplies, letting it run across the whole of France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Ideal for the luxurious Trans Europ Express (TEE) services, a pan-European cooperative brand aimed a providing Orient Express-style high speed luxury trains across borders, and for keeping some of the grand old names of the continent relevant in the post-war age.
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Speeding Bullet.
Meanwhile, far away, all the way across Asia, in the crowded confines of Japan, long since vanquished in the War, the national railway company were planning to revitalise their country with a new railway. A new railway that would take full advantage of the latest knowledge and be especially built to be the fastest train in the world. Japan was getting back on it's feet, a new nation cut adrift from it's militaristic past, and now finding a much more efficient way to take over the world; consumer goods. All of this potential economic growth would not be possible without new infrastructure projects, something that, thanks to it's tricky geography, Japan desperately needed if it was to make good on it's promising rebirth in later decades. Japan in essence is a large archipelago of mountains slightly detached from the eastern end of China. Most of Japan is green and steep. Almost all of the conurbations of consequence - Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka etc - are on the edges, in fact the coast on the southern side of Honshu is an almost unbroken run of tarmac and concrete for several hundred miles.Tokyo was to be the hub, with the first line connecting the capital to Osaka. Many Japanese railways were built to a narrow gauge to save space and fit through the narrow mountain passes, but the new high speed railway would be a standard gauge so the engineers could import all that had been learnt in the wider world of fast trains. Early tests on the first prototypes brought up the same hunting oscillations familiar to the French. Corners and grades were minimised, and the track connections with the precast concrete sleepers were sprung with rubber, but still the problem remained. Testing anything they could think of the chassis engineer, Tadashi Matsudaira, tried models fitted with the kind of air suspension that could be found in some cars. Pressurising the dampers to the right PSI was found to be the best answer to stability, and set a precedent for railway engineers that the old insular ways that dated back to the beginnings of the steam age were outdated. Ideas could come from anywhere in the world of industry.
When it was unveiled, the new Japanese train clearly took inspiration from aircraft, on the outside and in. The exterior clearly aped the fuselage of aircraft. Streamlining trains was back into fashion, but this time with aerodynamics in mind more than styling and publicity. The drivers cab was elevated up a level from the coaches floor level for good visibility over the long aeroplane nose, a nose that gave the train it's English nickname, 'Bullet Train', (though the Japanese also referred to the trains being 'dangan ressha' or faster than a bullet). The clean white with a blue-stripe colour scheme was pure Pan-Am 707 too, as was the plastic-heavy interior that only differed from an airliner with the lack of seatbelts.
To get maximum performance each coach had a motor - the trains were effectively a long chain of railcars connected with power cables. There was no locomotive at the front, so passengers sat up right behind the 'motorman' (as the Japanese-English translation had it). After six years of construction the Tokaido 'Shinkansen' (New Trunk Line) was ready for it's grand opening, just in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. These games were the first to be broadcast around the world live via satellite and, though it was far away from Europe and America, the futuristic Bullet Train became an instant household name around the world. At home the Tokaido Shinkansen had immediate and great success; jet travel was still expensive ,while the train was far more affordable. The high speed line almost halved the journey time from Tokyo to Osaka, and with a top speed of 130 mph, became the fastest trains in the world. Passenger numbers passed 100 million passengers in three years. In 1971 a national act was passed authorising a network of high speed rails connecting to all the major cities.
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Advanced Passenger Trains
The antidote to Britain's inauspicious 1950s railway age came with the unveiling of the new star of the rails; the giant Deltic. English Electric, makers of Lightning fighter jets and the Canberra bomber provided British Railways with a big brute with two 1600 horsepower, supercharged marine diesels. With 18 cylinders arranged in a triangle driving three crankshafts, the engines put out twice the power of steam and previous diesels. Deltics took over from the A3s and A4s on the old LNER lines, hauling the Flying Scotsman and other venerable named trains. Still, ever falling passenger numbers against the twin onslaught of rising car ownership and national aeroplane routes, led to a serious rethink about marketing. After the public relations nightmare of the so-called Beeching Report, the government study that had, one way or another, led to hundreds of miles of unprofitable rural railway lines being abandoned, and quite a few main line miles that "needlessly" doubled-up with other routes also being condemned to die (including almost the entire Great Central Line through the Midlands to London, the last of the main lines to be built and subsquently the most advanced in it's construction), the railways needed to get the public back on their side. So in the mid 1960s "British Railways" became "British Rail". With it's now iconic double track logo - a masterpiece of simplicity - and clean blue and white colours, the new BR bade farewell to it's last steam locomotive in 1968 and set out for the future with a clean slate. Top of that slate was something in the pipeline called the Advanced Passenger Train, or 'APT'.Electrification of the meandering West Coast Main Line was well underway by the late 1960s, and a promising roster of powerful continental-style electric locomotives were being brought in to headline the new "Inter-City" branded services. BR was on the up, and even the French railway bosses had to admit that, when it came to PR and marketing the railways as modern alternative to cars and planes, the Brits had become world leaders again. Merely looking good would not be enough for the proud engineers in the birthplace of railways. The success of the Shinkansen in Japan showed that regular speeds greater than 120 mph were clearly feasible. But with no money for bespoke high speed lines on the horizon and stuck with curves laid down in Victorian times, when trains went 70 mph at a good clip, designers were stymied. The biggest enemy was gravitational G forces - the lateral shove that pushed passengers across their seats and sent their lunch sliding onto the carpet should a train go too fast around sharp turns. Seatbelts don't just keep car drivers safe, but also help brace them against Gs; planes can bank into turns, meaning that even though a plane is hurtling along at hundreds of miles per hour the passengers barely notice turns. Trains were stuck in the middle.
If it looked like an exciting future was arriving soon in Britain, then it had already arrived in North America. Turbine power, and a basic form of tilting train was carrying passengers in the Eastern USA and Canada even as the APT-E pulled into a station for the first time. The future was the TurboTrain, built by the United Aircraft Corporation in the 1960s. The TurboTrain was an attempt to rekindle the brief renaissance time of the 1930s railcars as the passenger railroads began to fall like cards in the 1960s. After the Shinkansen had proven it's worth in Japan the Lyndon Johnson government in the USA had drafted a bill to build high speed lines and trains. With the Pratt & Whitney jet engine factory as part of the UAC concern the means to build a fast turbine train were at their fingertips.
The engines weren't strictly jet engines - the train didn't push itself along like the German rail zeppelin with its propeller - but used a turboshaft, just as in a helicopter engine, with the jet thrust spinning a driveshaft. A basic tilt system was incorporated where the cars were suspended high up on the carriages. The driver's cab sat perched on top of the engines. With the tall vertical nose the end result looked very futuristic for the time, and some elements such as the rounded articulated steel carriages and sealed windows were decades ahead of their time aesthetically. In early tests one unit managed to reach 170 mph, and this on a standard main line railway. Sadly the end result was too expensive and not reliable enough to catch on well enough to carve a niche against airliners. The Penn Central ran the trains between New York and Boston, and they could carry a similar passenger load to an airliner, but the railroad was in such dire financial straights by the end of the 1960s that the service never really stood much of a chance to grow and expand. Speeds were limited to 100 mph on the Penn Central lines, so the true performance advantage over previous trains never materialised.
With the creation of Amtrak in 1971 after the demise of private passenger rail companies the Turbos lasted five more years before being mothballed. The fuel crisis of a 1974 did not help the cause of thirsty turbines, though funnily enough the train had originally been trumpeted for its environmental benefits thanks to its light construction using less fuel. More success came the way of the electric General Motors Metroliner, another creation inspired by the high speed rail bill. The steel railcar Metroliners were much less exciting than the turbine, but they ran on established technology, using the Penn Central electric lines between New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC. Metroliner was much cheaper to run than the Turbo, but still suffered from speed limitations barely allowing them to peek past 100 mph. When Amtrak took over the original powered railcars were eventually phased out on favour of more modern, foreign bought locomotives. The last metroliner coaches were retired well into the 21st century.
The TurboTrain lived on for a little while longer over the border on Canada. Things had not begun well for the train in Canada- it had hit a pickup truck on an open crossing while carrying the press, happily without any serious injuries. Canadian National and later VIA Rail ran six Canadian-built train sets until 1982. The turbine set a Canadian speed record of 140 mph (that still stands), but the constant presence of level crossings on the routes kept the operating speed down below 100 mph, as in the USA handicapping the train and removing it's main selling point. Eventually the passing years took their toll and the once exciting brilliant white jet train of Canadian National in 1970 became the oil stained, yellow VIA Rail oddity. The turbines disappeared with so little notice paid that none of the sets in either country avoided the scrapyard.
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TGV, HST and ICE.
The Arab oil crisis and the huge oil price hikes killed off all interest in turbines. The APT project switched to electric traction, as did a new project in France, the TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse). Ten years before the future had looked like it would be jet-powered in France. The experiments with running electric engines at 200 mph in the 1950s convinced many in charge that it was too difficult to make such speeds practical in everyday service. To get to 200 mph consistently required turbine power. As proof-of-concept the SNCF created a series of sub-100 mph multiple unit 'Turbotrains' in late 1960s and 1970s and they saw many years of service across France. Still, the French network was in trouble. As in Britain the main lines were subsidising all the rest, and outside of the major cities SNCF was struggling against cars, trucks and airliners. Six hundred miles top to bottom, France clearly saw themselves as a country just like Japan, one that could make use of an alternative to planes and airports for intercity travel. Unlike Japan though, there was a lots of empty space to lay a high speed railway in France and not a huge amount of hilly terrain in the way of the obvious routes - Paris to Lyon, Paris to Bordeaux, and north to Belgium and - maybe one day - London.The idea of the TGV came into being officially in the mid sixties, soon after the Shinkansen opened, and the plan called for a dedicated high speed line connecting Paris and Lyon. The terrain was easy, no tunnels would be required. Tilting systems were ruled out, the French would build a smooth route with very wide banked turns to absorb the g-forces in cornering (or "Superelevation" as the railway lingo calls it). In-cab signalling was another innovation. No more signals standing by the side of the tracks, it was decided that at 200 mph they would be no use. TGV 001 took to the rails in 1972. The body shape came from the drawing board of designer Jacques Cooper, a designer who had trained with non other than Raymond Loewy. In the wider world streamlined tear-drop space age "rocket ship" styling was passe, and modernist buildings, straight edges and wedge-shaped cars were in. Wanting to bring some of the glamour of the motor show to the rails the design discarded the TGV design had a long flat prow with airliner cockpit cab windows peeking over the top. As it was the decade of of bright primary colours the train was finished in all-over orange. Sandwiched between the two locomotives and their twin turbine engines were three articulated lightweight coaches connected with shared motorised bogies and suspension dampers. Double ended like the TurboTrain and Shinkansen, to increase TGV capacity the plan was that two units could be coupled together (the TurboTrain had promised the same trick, but there had never been enough made to see two coupled together). The train reached a maximum speed of 198 mph, before the oil crisis forced the switch to electric power.
The major change added many years to the project, but the SNCF made the wise move of testing the equipment in an inconspucious mule. TGV 001 had been a cover star on magazines, been splashed over advertisements and television, and it would have been easy for the major overhaul of the whole idea to derail the momentum it had built up. The "Zebulon" testing vehicle was the test bed for the electric motors, a high speed pantograph, a revised suspension and brakes among many other improvements, and it made it's quiet way for thousands of kilometers around France without drawing too much attention to itself. The railcar eventually wound itself up to close to 200 mph itself, and now all that was required was to marry the styling and coaches of TGV 001 with the innards and undercarriage of the Zebulon to make the production TGV. Jacques Cooper's styling was mostly carried over to the production unit, with a few minor alterations around the nose. The large, rather dated looking 1960s SNCF logo plate was tightened up - a metallic nose job - with a more chiselled profile, the lights narrowed and placed clear of the go-faster-stripe, and the window-bordering cheatlines brought along closer to the front. The French did not follow the lead of Japan, and kept the power cars at each end of the train, routing a power cable down the roof of the coaches to power the traction motors.
Nothing about the TGV was revolutionary, but in the spirit of Stephenson, the most influential train of it's time would be the one that made all the little improvements work the best in the real world. The big masterstroke of the TGV was to make it entirely compatible with the rest of the French railway network. The Shinkansen was reserved for it's own lines, and ran from one end to the other without leaving the high speed rails. The TGV could run on any conventional electrified lines before and after joining or leaving the LGV route. Not only did this mean that it was not reserved strictly for Paris and Lyon but that the route could be opened long before the connections to those two cities were fully finished. The ribbon was cut on the LGV Sud Est in 1981 by President Mitterand, but the route into Paris still fell short of where it was supposed to end. No matter, the TGV joined the commuter line into the Gare de Lyon with the rest of the more plebian rolling stock.
On the roof of the TGV power car was the clue to it's versatility - the pair of opposing pantographs ran off the two power supplies in France; the LGV catenary carried wires running on the latest 25v AC supply, while many of the older routes still thrummed to DC electricity. At the end of the LGV outside Paris the driver simply disengaged the AC supply, coasted for a kilometer or so before pushing the button to attach to the DC wires. Coasting was the last thing on anyone's mind a few months before the grand opening when a TGV raced down the line near Passily at a maximum speed of 236 mph (380 kph), breaking the 1955 record, and the best achieved by a Shinkansen train (198 mph). A calculated risk - the record runs were at the ragged edge of the TGV's performance envelope and well above the operating speed - the new record was the feather in the cap for France.
Following the lead of British Rail, the SNCF also overhauled their publicity and made the TGV their "halo" product, using the bright orange rail superstar not only to sell itself ("Save time, on time" went the slogan) but to sell the whole railway brand to the public. After all, a good proportion of the passenger traffic came from minor lines and commuter services connecting to the TGV. This lack of supply routes had been one of the main problems for Amtrak in America when trying to establish any new routes - everybody was already driving the whole way by car, and not considering trains at all. This new French railway was even being advertised in English, with the once unconscionable English subtitle "French Railways" under the SNCF logo. The TGV was a huge hit. Ten million passengers had already flooded onto the services by 1982 alone. The market for flights between Paris and Lyon slumped. When the whole of the Sud Est line was finished in 1983 the whole journey took just over two hours city to city. Very quickly SNCF made good with the TGV's ability to ride the regular rails at the southern end of the line by running to Marseille, the Riviera, catering for winter skiing demand to the foothills of the Alps at Grenoble, and taking the TGV straight the banking and international political centre of Europe, Geneva.----------------
British Rail, knowing that the E in APT-E most definitely stood for 'Experimental' and not 'Guaranteed Success', started work on a much more sensible and conservative project. The High Speed Train (HST) would be a diesel hauled train - if and when it was finished the production APT, now switched from it's initially planned-turbine unit to electric power would not be usable on most of the British network as it stood. Not that either train would be working if another, non technical, problem was not overcome. This was the mid 1970s, the height of union and government squabbling in all aspects of British industry. Both the HST and APT prototypes had single driver's seats in the middle of the nose. The railway workers unions did not like the sound of that and demanded two seat cabs or nothing, necessitating a embarrassing and expensive hiatus in development, but by 1976 the HST was ready to roll onto the rails for real. Before it's debut in service it got a makeover courtesy of industrial designer Ken Grange - designer of the Kenwood Chef and the Anglepoise lamp. Grange's design removed the ungainly central windscreen that wrapped under the nose, and created a clean wedge shaped profile. It also had a new name, the InterCity 125.
This was only eight years after the last steam express had hissed into the sunset. 'Slam door' trains dating to the 1930s still ran on most commuter lines in the country. In comparison the new train looked like something out of Logan's Run or Doctor Who, and while it may have been fairly safe technology under the skin it was a huge PR and commercial success for BR. Quickly becoming a mainstay of long distance rail journeys and the flagship of marketing in the late 1970s the 125 wasn't quite as fast as a Shinkansen or TGV, but it was very comfortable and spacious (there were far more face to face seats with tables than on the Japanese or French trains), had air conditioning, even draught beer on tap in the buffet, and could run to most of the major cities of Britain. Even it's biggest downside - the eardrum rattling scream the turbo diesel generated under power out of stations became a familiar and even somewhat loved feature of the train.
In 1975 the APT-E had set a British speed record of 152 mph. It's testing career ended a year later and it was retired to a museum. The production electric powered APT had managed 162 mph in 1979, a speed the much less expensive HST could not match, and all on conventional railway tracks not super-expensive custom built lines. But ten years had passed, and while the 125 was running it's first trains the APT was running into problems. The train still was not entirely ready and the knives were coming out. Large areas of BR's engineering department had always been resentful of the APT - being built by "outsiders" brought in from other industries, it faced internal politiking, and a lack of enthusiasm, especially in the years between the retirement of the prototype and the launch of the
production train. The treasury had cut four planned first run trains to three and the teething troubles were the result of rushing to get the trains ready for service.
A grand press launch was carried out in 1981, and was tarnished by some embarrassing mechanical gremlins. Hauling a train full of hungover journalists from the press launch did not help matters, as many reported feeling queasy and nausea akin to seasickness. In fact there was something too this more than just sloshing booze in the stomach. Research showed that the APT tilt system was too good. So smooth and free of stress was the ride that it was tricking the brains of its passengers - they felt no sensation at all yet could see the world outside the window moving up and down, leading to the feelings of nausea - as always with such things some hardly noticed while others were darting for the washroom. The solution was to reduce the tilt a few degrees to reintroduce some sideways forces, and reset the control system to tilt slightly earlier, when the train was still in a straight line to visually 'prepare' as it were the passengers for the turn.
The three APTs were reintroduced, with much less fanfare, to the English West Coast Main Line, but with so few trains, and without much in the way of additional publicity they never got over their decade-long gestation and inauspicious debut. Unwilling to fund any more units the government abandoned the whole project and sent the trains to scrapyard. Sadly this decision seemed to overlook the fact that the APT now seemed to be working perfectly fine by this stage. And compared to many major public funded projects (and certainly some private ones, such as new car development), the £50 million that had been spent over the previous fifteen years was small change. The problem for the train was that it was ten years ahead of it's time. For example, a major headache of the production train was it's central power cars - both ends of the train needed their own facilities since passengers could not walk through the power units. This daft arrangement caused much public merriment but the fault did not lie with the train but with the West Coast line. Power cars at each end were found to send huge ripples through the 1960s overhead wiring at higher speeds. Short of rebuilding all the gantries the APT had to have it's motors in the middle. All of the complicated control systems for the tilting systems would have been much more easy to implement in the age of microprocessor sensors and computer-aided design. The APT was still analogue in a world that was suddenly digital.
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InterCity Express
Germans - or, more accurately, the West Germans - had spent the years since the golden age of speed in the 1930s, the devastation of the post war clean up and the division of the country into east and west waiting patiently to regain some prestige on the rails. The Trans Europe Express had seen the first glimmer of a rebirth in the fifties. For use on the German-based trains the West German railway company (Deutsch Bundesbahn - to be rebranded as Deusche-Bahn when East and West were reunified in 1990) had adapted and reclothed the old DRG railcar design into the VT 11.5, a short name for a big train, a striking red and cream coloured diesel unit with a big "TEE" logo displayed on it's whale-like prow. The focus of the German TEE unit was more on luxury than speed. It was first class only, and there were not only a bar, a dining car, but even a lounge, and all this on a train with six coaches.
The inter-country TEE declined and eventually when it's business fled to airlines, and in Germany the V1 11.5 units provided the foundation for InterCity services. Inspired directly by the British Rail brand the German Intercity trains were headed up by a new generation of electric traction. Focus in Germany had been on electrification of as much of the main lines as possible (an ironic twist in the birthplace of diesel) rather than chasing speed records. The turning point came with the introduction of over one hundred, 14,000 horsepower Class 103 engines. With the potential service speed of 125 mph, and smooth unfussy styling, German railways were back on track and looking the part.
Speeds gradually crept up; at first the Intercity trains with the 103 locos on the front were limited to 100 mph. Then the full 125 mph was permitted. The cream and maroon DB 103s became the default high speed West German engines throughout the 1980s. Iconic though they became, and a emblum of Germany's post war rejuvenation, by mid decade they were a twenty year old design, and though one had been pushed to 170 mph on test, the Germans had been overtaken by the TGV. Plans had afoot since the 1960s for a new high speed train, conceived as a whole unit - now the project had a name, the Intercity Experimental, or 'ICE' project. And in 1985 the first ICE train prototype rolled out. Closer in appearance to the British HST than the TGV and Bullet Train- it looked a little frumpy in comparison, with it's all-white finish making it look a little like a railed marshmallow. There was science behind the rather glum face that the new train presented to the world. Contrary to expectations, in aerodynamic terms the rounded brick shape was deemed more efficient than the bullet look.
The ICE did not follow the lead of either the TGV with it's articulated fixed trains, or the Shinkansen with it's powered coaches. Instead it was all conventional; a power unit at each end and some coaches, albeit coaches refined by wind tunnel testing to slip through the air with minimum effort without and minimal noise within. The legacy of the TEE and Intercity services was strong; refinement would be a big thing with the ICE. Lagging ten years behind their French neighbours, DB did not have have any bespoke high speed rail lines until the 1990s. The design was created with conventional routes in mind to start with, and the plan to wow the public with a sophisticated image before the ultimate speed of the trains could be unleashed, hence a more conservative design. The six car ICE prototype looked like an operational train when it first appeared rather than an APT-E style flight of fancy, and it took barely six years from it's first public appearance to the ICE-Series 1 making it's first journeys. ICE now officially standing for InterCity Express.
Good things had come to Germans who had waited - now the TGV was well into it's adolescence the ICE was the hot new poster-train, and felt it too, especially on the inside. Ten years was a long time in the world of interior design. Standard class on the TGV was smaller, a bit cramped and undoubtedly dated compared to the plush 1990s surroundings of the ICE, a place that could boast back-of-the-seat televisions, and speed and journey time display readouts on the vestibule walls, in the airline style. The wider carriage gave more elbow room, and the bar-restaurant car made the TGV's look a bit like a street corner burger stand. The Germans had even claimed the bragging rights that came with the official speed record. The 1981 mark set by the TGV was beaten by the ICE prototype in 1988. The five car train achieved a maximum of 252 mph, taking it past the 400 kph mark.The record was set on the new north-south Hannover to Wurzburg high speed line, a 200 mile long newly-built route running down the middle of the country. In planning and construction since the early 1970s the line is a far more complicated affair than the Sud-Est LGV in France. Where the French railway had no tunnels, the German one had sixty-one (around a third of the route mileage is underground) as well as several large viaducts. Opened in parts throughout the late 1980s it was ready in it's entirety for the ICE service debut in 1991, alongside another line connecting Stuttgart and Mannheim over 100 miles, and another fifteen tunnels, in the western region.
The Rhine valley region and its surrounding areas is very congested and hilly, not natural territory for stringing together an almost level railway route - maximum grades barely exceeded 2% on either of the new lines - but the German engineers were up to the task, and the Deutsch-Bundesbahn lawyers were able to brush away the countless objections from landowners and vested interests trying to push the railway away from their region. The two new high speed bahn had taken far more toil and sweat to create than their counterpart lignes in France, and they did not connect to nine of the ten largest conurbations in the country, but with the new united Federal Government keen to unite the country through railways, that time would come soon, it seemed. Plans were already afoot when the ribbon was cut on the ICE services for a new route between Cologne and Frankfurt, and major upgrades on routes to Munich and Berlin.
The French and SNCF were not going to rest on their single line laurels, especially given the huge success of the TGV in the 1980s. Since it's opening in 1981 the Paris-Lyon route had seen useage more than double. Historically the rail network in France had very much followed the British model - all roads led up or down to Paris - and the much lower population density in France meant that many borderline-wilderness areas barely saw much service at all. Just like the Beeching cuts of Britain, France had been through it's own rural rail purge, only theirs was in the 1930s. The targets for the next TGV routes were clear, and the second LGV was in the works before the first was finished. With the first route linking Paris and Lyon, and conventional tracks connecting to Marseille, Nice and Grenoble, the next step was to head west to Bordeaux, the country's largest outpost on the Atlantic coast. And that was the name the new line took - Atlantique. Reaching Bordeaux would involve hundreds of kilometres of new track, so instead the Atlantique was built in an elongated Y-shape arrangement to Tours and Le Mans. These two cities are a long way from being the largest cities in France, but SNCF were looking again for an easy route. The Atlantique line plan had all of three tunnels and needed some flyovers constructing in the Loire valley.
A new line meant new trains. The new Atlantique TGVs had a power boost that meant two extra coaches could be added with no loss of speed, making for a total of ten. The exterior lines were a little smoother, the stencilled 'SNCF' on the nose discarded as an aerodynamic improvement, and the 20 year old orange and grey paint job introduced with the TGV 001 replaced with a swish silver and blue scheme more befitting of the 1990s. To herald the start of TGV part deux, the objective became to reclaim the world speed record from the German ICE. Even in the planning stages the line had been engineered with speeds in mind far higher than the planned operating speed. Even in 1981 the pantograph on the roof of the record setting TGV had been a sticking point. It didn't melt entirely like the trains in the 1955 speed record but it had been measured pushing the wire a clear foot off the normal line.
By 1990 engineers had developed overhead lines for the Atlantique that could be pulled beyond their normal tension (using the large weights seen on many of the stanchions. They also had the advantage of greatly increased computing power over their predecessors - a great help when trying to reduce the waves and oscillations that such fast running generated in the overhead wires. The trains in fact were moving so fast that would catch up with their own wire waves, and this.was how the huge ripples had been formed. The record train was somewhat modified from its standard form. It was only four coaches long rather than ten, all but one of the four pantographs were removed from the two power cars, and the empty gaps smoothed over with fairings. The wheels were a fifth larger in diameter and the motors beefed up to cope with a potential doubling of horsepower. The final outcome of all the modifications was an ultimate maximum recorded speed of 320 mph (515 kph), in 1990. Or, in other words, it as fast as if Mallard had set off from the front of the old French 1955 records. Only this time the train, track and equipment all survived intact.
Though German pride was a little dented by the ousting of their record, the ICE was still doing good business and new lines were being constructed. There was one slight spanner in the works for DB however, though at the time it felt more like an annoyance than anything more drastic. Comfort and refinement had been pushed a great deal by the railway PR machine, but the ICE services were dogged by minor complaints about ride quality. The flagship of the German rails was, according to some passengers feedback, a little bumpy, and the problem was especially noticeable in the dining car. At top speed cutlery would rattle and coffee ripple. While irritating, at such speeds it was also a little unnerving, especially for the many travellers who took trains to get away from the stomach upsetting turbulence of airliners.
On June 3rd 1998 the residents of the small town of Eschede - one third of the way between Hannover and Hamburg, on the edge one of the large forests of Saxony and home to farmers and commuters alike - were shaken by a sudden extremely load roaring noise piercing the air. Despite the proximity of the main railway line to the town the instant reaction of many was that the noise could only be a plane crash. The first witnesses on the scene, however, saw what had really happened. The road bridge to the west of the town over the railway had collapsed. To the north was the front portion of an ICE-1 - a power car and three coaches slewed off the track behind it. Another coach overturned lying half into the trees on the side of the track, followed by a lone coach intact at the front but flattened at the rear. And the entirety of the rest of the train stacked up like logs damming a river in a pile under and around the collapsed bridge. Train 884 from Munich to Hamburg had been travelling at around 200 kph when it derailed. Passengers in the front coaches that stayed upright nearly all walked off unharmed, the driver was unscathed. But further back the toll of the impact was far higher. The frames of the coaches had come off the bases, and the many of welds in the external skins had torn. Not that that mattered for those who had simply been unable to survive the blunt trauma of being thrown into the seats, tables and floor.
Safety and security were huge concerns for those in charge of high speed rail lines. Railways always held the danger of trespassers or saboteurs, but the major new high profile trains were clearly a potential target for those with nefarious intentions. Airlines had been dealing with the terrible consequences of bombings since the 1950s, and the railway companies did not want the same unwanted attention. The fear became real in 1982 for SNCF when a bomb had exploded on the Paris to Toulouse "Capitole" express, killing five people. A year later the TGV was targeted; a bomb at Marseille station killed two, and simultaneously a bomb left in an end vestibule of one of the coaches of a TGV also exploded, destroying the sides of the train, and killing a further three passengers. Three years later, in another, unrelated attack, a bomb again exploded in a TGV luggage rack, fortunately on this occasion with no fatalities. On both occasions the train remained on it's tracks despite the damage. The articulated design of the TGV set was designed with an eye on safety; the fixed couplings mounted over one set of wheels were more likely to hold the train upright and in-line in the event of the power car being derailed. The steel car frame had withstood the blast much better than a thin aluminium fuselage of an plane would but still the concern over terrorist bombs being planted was clearly not unfounded. Memories were still fresh of a bombing in Bologna central station, an atrocity perpitrated by a far-right Italian terrorist militia that claimed eighty five lives. Nearly thirty years after the fact the blame for the fatal Capitole and TGV bombs was placed at the feet of infamous Venezuelan terrorist Carlos "The Jackal", already incarcerated for life in France for numerous previous murders.
While the trains were less vulnerable than planes to sabotage, the tracks themselves were another matter entirely. Hundreds of miles of route, mostly running through open countryside, criss-crossed by roads, passing villages and countless farms. Clearly impossible to police, the best that could be done was hundreds of miles of fencing, and signals designed to switch to Danger if any break or obstruction in the track was detected. Level crossings and pedestrian paths were clearly out of the question when trains could approach them at 170 mph, but any road bridge was clearly a place of high risk. Even an accidental mishap could lead to a vehicle on the line, and the wreckage of a truck in the midst of the ruined coaches at Eschede set investigators minds to thinking that a road accident had precipitated the carnage. Soon investigations with the passengers would tell a different tale.
Minutes before the disaster a family in the front coach of the train were startled by a loud bang. This was in the first class section featuring separate compartments instead of open plan seating. A design harking back to the golden age of luxury train travel, and feature also seen on the Atlantique TGV trains, it was quieter for those who paid for the privacy but it also meant that nobody else was aware of the startling interruption to routine journey. A large piece of bare metal strip had burst through the train floor and into one of the padded seat armrests. Fearful that this could be some form of explosive device, the alarmed father moved his wife and children out into the corridor and, unable to see an emergency brake, went looking for a staff member. He found the train conductor, who was trained to investigate any disturbance before he was to activate the brakes. Other passengers in the front coaches noticed the commotion, then felt the train rock left and right, as if being pushed from the sides. A minute later the train derailed completely. Clearly in shock, the father, whose family all survived, could only regret that in his alarmed state, he had completely missed that there was an emergency brake handle above the door to his compartment.
Retrieving the metal debris piece, railway workers knew exactly what it was; the metal 'tyre' from one of the wheels, clearly peeled off the rim and sent spearing through the floor and dragging along the track. The jack-knifed appearance of the latter half of the train had been caused by the hanging metal bar jamming into a set of points and switching them. The segmented wheel design had come about as a result of the problems with vibrations. The so-called 'duo-block' wheels, with rubber cushioning between the wheel hub and the metal tyre, had been imported from tramway technology. Trams have to deal with rough bumpy tracks all day, hence the addition of a rubber layer in the wheel. The idea had been imported in the ICE but without enough in the way of research to see how they would react to running at very high speed, or how to maintain them properly. Despite all of the innovations in safety, the result of putting prestige over caution had been by far the worst high speed rail crash, and one of the worst train crashes of all time.
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Channel Tunnel
The spring of 1994 heralded a momentous landmark event in the history of European travel. On May 6th the Channel Tunnel connecting the South of England with the North of France was opened. The 31 mile double rail tunnel connecting Folkestone to Sangatte just on the outskirts of Calais was opened by Queen Elizabeth and President Mitterand, who had been present to wave off the first TGV thirteen years earlier. The tunnel Sous Manche had been a dream of engineers ever since the dawn of railways in the 1830s. In the 1880s an official start had been made on a 'test' channel tunnel not too far away from when the future tunnel would be built, but was soon abandoned after only a few thousand feet had been excavated, and the project was forgotten about. Ninety years later another attempt was begun, only to again be cancelled before much progress was made on either side of the channel.After two decades of post APT-malaise the "Eurotunnel" (the official branding, almost never used by the public) promised a fillip for British railways. Direct rails straight through from anywhere in mainland Britain to the continent. No more transfers of freight and passengers to ships at each side.of the Channel The last of the 'Boat train' services - where coaches were shunted onto railed decks on ships - had died a quiet death in 1980 after years of under use. And now the possibility of competing city to city with short haul air travel. To that end the third Channel Tunnel master plan envisaged a TEE-like train linking London, Paris and Brussels - a so called "3 Capitals" service using TGV- style units. Signed off in 1987, work began in earnest a year later, and this time, progress extended further than a few furtive excavations. Giant TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines) set off from shafts at Folkestone and Sangatte, heading for a meeting point halfway under the channel.
Considering the future of a tunnel in the 1970s many ministers in Britain had been keen to build the tunnel as a road tunnel, but rail eventually prevailed as a safer, cleaner and more easily secured option. The British side of the sea did not fancy seeing waves of cars carrying goodness knows who and what moving freely between the continent and Blighty (echoing the concerns of mid-19th century politicians, fearing French invasion by army marching through the tunnel). Cars, lorries, and their occupants, would be carried through on closed double deck trailers. Following French and German practice the tunnels were much wider than conventional railway tunnels, allowing ventilation and emergency access. To that end the two running track tunnels sandwiched a smaller bore service tunnel with side passages connecting at intervals every few hundred metres. To keep the air circulating in the face of trains potentially passing through at over 100 mph large arch shaped vents were drilled over the service tunnel connecting the two rail tunnels.
Drilling and boring continued for two years, dropping one hundred metres under the surface of the water, following a slightly irregular course as engineers tried to stay inside the soft layer of chalk (which was much more easy to cut through than the surrounding rocks). The first breakthrough of the service tunnel occurred on October 30th 1990. A thin probe drill connected the work faces of the French and British crews. Remarkably the alignment of the works was almost perfect. A month later the crews drilled through until they could shake hands, exchange flags, pose for photographs, and be the first people to step between Britain and the continent since the channel first began to flood in Neolithic times.
Oddly enough for trivia fans, the "Chunnel" was not the longest underwater tunnel, or even the longest underwater rail tunnel in the world. Two miles longer, the Japanese Seikan Rail Tunnel had been the world's longest since 1988, but not many people, even inside Japan knew that. The Seikan had always been a bit of a white elephant. Intended as a replacement for ferries between mainland Honshu and Hokkaido (Japan's northernmost island) and to be a future part of the Shinkansen network, the tunnel was an impressive engineering feat - albeit one that had taken an seventeen vastly overbudgeted years to dig - but sadly underused by passenger trains - nearly everyone who travelled to and from Hokkaido flew. Twenty eight years after it was opened the Bullet Train finally ran in service through the Seikan, as part of a four hour link between Tokyo.and Hokutu, at the southernmost tip of Hokkaido.
By the 1990s Shinkansen has extended all across Japan. To the North of Tokyo; Nagano, Yamagato, Joetsu. To the North East; Tohuku and Akita. To the West, all the way to the western island of Japan, Fukouka, the original Tokaido, extended west as the Sanyo, and Kyushu lines. New lines meant new trains, and the Japanese have continually introduced a plethora of new models with each line. The original 1964 designs lasted until 2008 before being retired for good.
The Japanese have been very generous when it comes to keeping the old Shinkansen trains and many first generation power units have been preserved. A second generation, slightly sleeker in profile, with greater power was introduced in 1980, followed by a third in 1984, and a fourth in 1992. This last series was the last that still retained vestiges of the original bullet train styling and the classic white with a blue stripe livery. From the nineties onward the wind-tunnel took over and the Shinkansen took on ever more curious shapes. The 500 Series took on the aspect of a spaceship with a huge overhanging lozenge of a nose and giant ovoid driver's windscreen. This train also set off a fashion for sticking the headlights much higher up right under the screen. Aesthetically it worked well in this case - in later years the look would be much imitated by some less pretty trains. Another highly influential design is the "Duck Bill "700" series, probably the second-most iconic of the of Shinkansen with it's huge low-slung white beak leading the way close to 200 mph.
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European Unity
The 3 Capitals Train concept became the reality of the Eurostar. Operated jointly by SNCF, SNCB (Belgian Railways) and British Rail the Eurostar ran initially between London's Waterloo station, through the Channel Tunnel to either Brussels Midi Station or the Paris Gare du Nord (one time home to the Nord Railway, pre French nationalisation). The ultimate variation of the first generation of TGV the Eurostar was designed to run on three systems; the French LGV, the Belgian network, and also on the antiquated third rail electric supply of the non-high speed lines of Kent in England - a stopgap until the British could eventually finish a high speed link to London. Eurostar trains featured eighteen coaches, (ten more than the first TGVs) though effectively the trains were in fact two separate sets of nine coaches joined together in the middle. This feature allowed the train to be split in the event of an emergency in the Channel tunnel, where one of the two power cars could pull out half the train with all the passengers on board.
The outside styling got a makeover courtesy of the central driving position. Ironically all these years after the prototypes of the British HST and APT had been shunned by driver's unions for just this feature, research in France had shown that putting the driver in the middle and removing much of the peripheral view was far less fatiguing. Since all British trains had been required for decades to have large panels of yellow on the nose for visibility the Eurostar took up a grey, blue and yellow colour palette. The Eurostar bridged the gap between the 1980s generation of TGVs and the new-look 1990s trains. Out went the "space shuttle" look of the Sud-Est, Atlantique, and another, outwardly identical type called the "Reseau", designed to be compatible with all three French LGV lines and to run on the new LGV Nord line to the channel tunnel. Some of these TGVs also received new branding called "Thalys", a dual French-Belgian operation to run trains between Paris, Brussel and Amsterdam, using yet another new piece of high speed line. This time a 50 mile section running east across the Flemish countryside. Finished in 1997 it meant that it took a whisker under ninety minutes to travel from Brussels to Paris. By which time the first of a startling new type of high speed train had been unveiled.
As soon as the initial TGV line became a roaring success the SNCF had studied whether it would be possible to build a double-decker high speed train. the benefit was obvious; following the lead of such commuter trains, commonly seen in the Isle de Paris and other cities, at least 40 % increase in passenger seats for no extra cost. But the engineering work to make a stable train that was far more top-heavy than before was not the work of a moment. It took nearly a decade to create the "Duplex" coaches, all made from aluminium, and to work on new suspension and aerodynamics. In that time the Japanese beat them to it, with their two level E1 'Max' Shinkansen appearing in the early nineties. Back in France, Atlantique and Eurostar stylist Roger Tallon took on the work, retaining some of small design features of the older trains, but placed on a much smoother, somewhat featureless nose. The higher roofline than on the older TGVs, gave a less svelte apperance on the Duplex trains, so new two-tone, silver on top - blue on the bottom, colour scheme replaced the stripe along the windows.
One Duplex can carry 512 passengers if full - comparable to larger types of Boeing 747 airliners, and there are over one hundred sets. Often two are coupled together. Running alone the top operating speed is 200 mph. This kind of capacity and pace is one reason why since the since the 1990s the amount high speed rail mileage has grown rapidly all over the world. Being proven high speed technology that can be exported to interested foreign countries, the Shinkansen, TGV and ICE aren't only offering an improvement to older existing railway lines (many of which date back to Victorian times) but serious competition, or an alternative to internal airline flights. Not only to trains run from stations in the centre of cities, unlike the airports which by neccessity must be on the outskirts of cities, but they do so without the same carbon emissions and noise as jetliners create.
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Southern Rails
At the tail end of the 1980s France found it's first customer for the TGV technology over the southern border in Spain. Always an European railway oddity Spain still uses a non-standard broader gauge on many routes. In 1942 it's first fast electric train, the Talgo 1 was built, and was perhaps the most extraordinary looking train ever created. Low and wide on the broader Spanish tracks, shaped like half a cylinder. With a front carved into a wind cheating shape it looked like some kind of railway sea serpent, something that should be crawling out of the deep.Underneath the wheel design was also unusual, the company devising an articulated system without axles, where each pair of wheels were held in place on triangular frames, all joined at the point of the triangle. The centipede-style arrangement, with independent wheels allowed the train to have a low centre gravity and be very well suited to twisty tracks. Normally the cone profile of a railway wheel is what allows it to turn corners and it is also self stabilising - one wheel lifts up the rail as the opposing lowers, so, in a left corner the left wheel runs on a smaller diameter part of the hub than the right. But it does mean that railway curves have to be fairly shallow, and there is plenty of wear on wheels. The Talgo system meant the train was literally more flexible, and lack of axles running across the floor also meant the body of the Talgo 1 could be mounted very low, almost running the tracks, hence the serpentine looks. The downside to the design is that the unit has to be fixed, but unlike the more conventional articulated train there is an entire frame with multiple joints underneath that needs maintaining.
An economic upswing in the 1980s (after decades under the dictatorship of Franco), led to Spain's politicians eyeing up the TGV Sud-Est line in France and deciding to do something similar to connect Madrid and Seville. Signed off in 1986, the 300 mile long line took five years to build, with thirty one viaducts and seventeen tunnels it was arguably the most impressive high speed line yet built when it opened in 1991. To keep it compatible with the rest of Europe the line was built to standard gauge. The Alta Velicidad Espana (AVE - also Spanish word for bird) trains were very slightly altered TGV Atlantique units, with only very slight restyling on the nose, and a white paint job.
For a decade Spain's network consisted of the Madrid to Seville line, until in the 2000s a burst of new activity brought about several new lines, connecting to Barcelona via Zaragoza, Valencia, the Costa del Sol, and into France at the far eastern corner to Perpignan. This last connection, brought fully into operation in 2013, and the completion in France of the LGV Mediterranee from Marseilles along the southern departments, meant that a passenger could travel from London St Pancras to Seville on an unbroken stretch of high speed rails, an fantastic achievement in the twenty years since the opening of the channel tunnel.
In 2007 the first half of the LGV Est, from Paris to Strasbourg was opened. The eastern line runs through lightly populated areas of France, with the ultimate destination of the country's seventh largest city. The fact that such a large amount of money and effort were put into the line shows how much the TGV had become an object of national importance to France. Objectively heading east was less important than north and south but it still mattered politcally to balance out the existing lines. In 2007 the TGV eclipsed it's previous record speed from 1990 on the LGV Est, inaugurating the line in style just as had happened previously in 1981 and 1990. As before the train was shortened from standard, consisting of three duplex double deck cars pulled by brand new power cars. Another seventeen years of progress in overhead power design, and superior aerodynamics and power output of the newer TGV over the Atlantique meant another 36 mph over the old record. To date, 357 mph (574 kph) is the fastest any train has travelled using wheels, rails and a railway network.
Italy has long been the dark horse of Europe's rail system. Italy, the long boot shape that it is, is the ideal shape for a high speed line - on the map Turin, Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples all line up one after the other from North West to South East. And the Italians have always done their own thing, building their first electric train capable of 100 mph, the Breda Elettro Treno Rapido (ETR) 200 in 1936. In the late 'fifties the electric ETR 300 Settebello train played a huge part in bringing back 1930s glamour back to continental rails. The front of the train was given over to a passenger lounge with a 180 degree wrap around window. In photos the coaches and paintwork looks just like a Shinkansen, only the Settebello was around ten years before. Inside things were much different, still a product of a time when high speed meant high luxury the train was purely First Class and reservation only.
As a consequence of all the finery inside the units were expensive to build, and in time only three were ever finished. No matter, the train took post war Italy away from the fascist state and into the space age, sitting alongside the FIAT 500 as a symbol of industrial rebirth, even if it's customers sat at opposing ends of the economic scale to the little car. After a long period when all other trains were hauled by locomotives, the first post-Settebello train designed as a single high speed unit, the ETR 450, arrived in 1988 after twenty years of faltering development. The first version, the ETR 401 had been built in the mid 1970s, been put into passenger service, then promptly cancelled with only one built. Too expensive and distracting from other railway services was the verdict from on high, so the sole 401 raced it's lonely way around until 1983. Then, as was common in the short lived Italian administrations of the time, the policy was reversed and the ETR 401 resurrected as the ETR 450. Oddly the 1960s space age external styling the ETR 401 was not updated at all, making this 1980s train look completely antiquated. However behind its dated appearance the ETR 450 did have a working tilt system; With the 'Pendolino', as it became popularly known, the Italians made work what the British had not with the APT. As if to belatedly prove the point many of tilting technology patents were bought by the Italian manufacturers and incorporated into the Pendolino designs. Eventually the Italian train would be sold back to the UK (and many others) for use on the conventional non high speed railways. (This has not been lost of British observers and former APT engineers who.saw all their work thrown away by the UK government in 1987).
Perhaps realising that the looks of the ETR 450 would not be the best advertisement for the new modern Italian railway the styling house Pininfarina - internationally renowned creator of the looks for Fiats and Ferraris - were called in for the new ETR 500 concept. An ICE 1 style 1990s express the new design was to be introduced concurrently with new dedicated high speed lines. Despite the success of the Pendolino the ETR 500 would be a non-tilting train intended for 200 mph running on the dedicated tracks. Pininfarina's artists ran through a cavalcade of different power car concepts before a handsome, chunky chamfered nose painted in a white green and black colour scheme was chosen. Some critics compared the nose shape and windows to the cross-eyed hypnotic snake from the 1967 Disney Jungle Book movie, but it was a much more contemporary look that the old ETR.
After the first concept rolled out in 1988 it took seven years for the 500 to reach passenger service. By 1995 the foreseen high speed lines were still mired in planning, but the non-articulated, fairly conventional design of the new train meant it could easily run on the existing network, including the Diretissima line, Italy's first post-war high speed rail line, built in piecemeal parts in the 1970s and '80s between Florence and Rome, partly predating the TGV by half a decade. Unfortunately for Italian prestige the line never gained much international attention, probably because it took them so long to finish it. Though capable of 180 mph ETR 500 speed was limited to 30 mph below that under the older 1970s vintage power lines. When the first of Italy's new high speed lines (Rome to Naples) was at last finished in 2005, a second generation, dual voltage, ETR 500 had been constructed that could run on new and old lines, and at 180 mph. Concurrently the branding was changed to AV (Alta Velocitia) with 'Frecciarossa' (Red Arrow) branding for the 180 mph trains.
Within five years the high speed network in Italy would expand by 500 miles with new lines connecting Florence, Bologna, Milan and Turin, all in operation by 2010. The next generation train, the ETR 1000, made it's debut in 2015, with a top speed of 240 mph, though the operating speed is only 10 mph more than before. Where it's predecessor had been styled by Pininfarina, another great Turin styling house, Bertone, was called in for this train. Meanwhile, Breda and Ansaldo, the two main Italian train builders, both dating back to the 19th century, and merged in 2001, became part of the Hitachi empire in 2015, becoming Hitachi Italy. The long history of completely independent Italian high speed train design and manufacture came to an end (though the construction itself remains at home).
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Speed for Sale
Germany's ICE wasn't finished by Eschede - The train rebounded with the Series 3, built by Siemens it abandoned the stodgy Lego-brick look of the first two generations and took on more curved features. Out too went the powercar, the individual traction motors now powerful enough to return to a railcar-like appearance with passengers sat directly behind the driver. And, should the driver be feeling generous with their blinds, even able to see the view ahead through a transparent partition. The AVE became the first foreign customer for Germany's third generation ICE, now marketed as the international- sounding Velaro.After the troubled end to the German's 20th Century, the 21st proved more successful; the Velaro became a major part of China's new high speed lines, and sneaked past the TGV builder Asthom to become the second generation Eurostar. With the expansion of the AVE system came several modern descendants of the Talgo 1, built by the same company, designed to similar principles, with a lower floor and centre of gravity, though the looks are a little more conventional. These modern Talgo HST units have a unique party piece that appeals greatly in their homeland. Their gauge changed from the standard to the broader Iberian gauge still used across the country, and, with the latest trains this change can be implemented in minutes in a gauge changing facility without stopping.
Not all was harmony in the 2000s for high speed in Europe. In 2013 an AVE Talgo 250 set derailed on a sharp curve in a cutting in the city of Santiago de Compostela. Seventy nine passengers were killed as the coaches overturned onto their sides and piled up. The cause was as old as railways; the driver had not slowed down for a speed limit. The newer parts of Spain's network were all fitted with automatic safety systems to prevent speeding, but coming into the ancient pilgrimage city the train rejoined the old lines, only equipped with warning alarms, and by the time the driver did apply the brakes, it was too late. The whole disastrous event was captured for the world to see on a track security camera. Tragedy also came to the TGV network two years later when a test train on the final section of the LGV Est derailed, killing eleven passengers. Though not on a revenue service, the crash was a major shock for France, having operated the TGV for thirty years without a death caused by the train itself. The cause again was excess speed in a corner, the likely reason being distraction in the cab given all the guests being shown the train.
In the 21st century the really extraordinary story has been in China. In 2003 there were no high speed railways in the country. In under twenty years the China Railway HighSpeed (CRH) became by far the world's largest network, both in terms of mileage and passenger numbers. China's boom recalls the 19th century "railway mania" of Europe and North America and also recalls an earlier colonial time when the western industrialists made a mint on building trains for all corners of the world. With sixty five cities with a population over one million people, mostly grouped in the eastern half of the country, a single party state and lots of empty space, the conditions have been perfect for a boom in rail building.
The first high speed line in China began operations in 2003 over 250 miles between the cities of Qinguangao and Shenyang. In 2008 the Olympic year saw Beijing and it's neighbour Tianjin connected. The capital was joined with Shanghai three year later. With it's crisscrossing so-called "Four Vertical and Four Horizontal" layout China's network covers the country in a way that other countries can only dream of. The other end of China's boomtime is that much of the technology they are using is bought in from those other countries, and the network could only be built with heavy reliance on outsiders. Most of the trains are altered versions of Shinkansen and Siemens trains, often barely distinguishable from the originals. As of 2017, China has the fastest operating top speed of any conventional railway route in the world; 217 mph (350 kph), and these "Rejuvnenation" trains, running between Shanghai and Beijing are home made. Naturally the Chinese are eyeing up the export market. It could be an uphill task - European powers have many deep connections with their trading partners and former colonies. France has sold the TGV technology to their former colony Morocco for a Tangier to Casablanca line. Saudi Arabia has bought into Spanish technology. Turkey has gone for the German Velaro.
China also boasts the fastest average speed of any railway. On the Wuhan to Guangzhou line the journey, one that once took ten hours, non-trains averaged 194 mph to do the job in three. The gold rush did not go without incident; a fatal collision in 2011 in the city of Wenzhou killed forty people, and the government slapped speed limits on many lines, bringing some services, including the Wuhan-Guangzhou back below 200 mph to more manageable speeds. It was only a temporary aberration, and the numbers in the early 2010s were becoming mind-boggling compared to anything that had gone before. The budget for building new lines closed in on 100 billion US dollars, and thousands of miles of new connections, more than halving journey times between cities, would appear each year. As well as the speeds in China, the duration of journey's have been impressive - the world's longest high speed service, around twelve hours, is yet another Chinese record.
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Flying without Rails
In the 21st century, if the traveller wants to find the absolute train journey in the world they wont find it in the shape of a modified French TGV, but on a Chinese 'MagLev' train. The concept of using magnetism to create floating trains has been around in engineers minds since the dawn of the 20th century. Remove the obvious source of friction, the rail meeting the wheel rim, and the speed will go up with less effort required. Anybody with some basic construction skills can build a working demonstration of a Maglev in their house, if they so wish. Using electromagnets creates what is a called a Linear Induction Motor (LIM), in it's most basic form a conducting plate hovering above a magnetic plate is pulled towards and then shot off the other end of the plate. Actual working magnetic trains using the power of two repelling magnets have been in operation since the early 1980s. Funnily enough, the first one was in Britain - the birthplace of conventional railways - at Birmingham airport. It could travel at 25 mph.Thirty years later a MagLev at Shanghai airport makes a 19 mile journey in eight minutes, topping out at 270 mph, the fastest maximum, and average speed of any commercial passenger railway. Of the ten fastest speeds acheived by trains capable of carrying a crew and passengers, eight are by prototype maglevs (only the 1990 and 2007 TGV runs are interlopers in the over 500 kph club). Japan has been building magnetic high speed test trains since the 1970s, and holds the current record of 375 mph (603 kph), set in 2015. This design is intended for use on a new Shinkansen line connecting Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, supplanting the original 1964 coastal route by running almost as the crow flies, burrowing straight through the mountains.
Magnetic technology has produced an astonishing performance by any standard. And yet, it has been in constant development for decades without producing many tangible results, especially compared to the railed high speed train. The Japanese Yamanishi Maglev Test Track was opened in 1997 - when there were still only three LGV lines in France, and still years before the first Chinese high speed train first ran. Even older was the German TransRapid - builder of the Shanghai MagLev, The first ever TransRapid train ran in 1971. Thirteen years elapsed before a purpose built long-distance test track was built for the German maglev. 25 miles long, it did not go anywhere; there was one station and two loops at each end. In 2006, five years after receiving the commission to build the Shanghai airport train, a TransRapid train crashed on the test track after colliding with a maintenance vehicle. Just like the Staplehurst crash a century and a half earlier, the consequences of poor communication between maintenance and railway operations were similar; 23 people were killed. A few years later the TransRapid track was demolished.
Much like the electric prototype locomotive that first trundled along a Scottish railway in the mid 19th century eventually became one of the dominant forms of transport, Maglev has at times seemed like a technology who's day will one day come, if only it could become more accessible, and cheaper. One way to be cheaper is to use air pressure rather than magnetism to achieve levitating trains. In the 1970s the development of the TGV had come partly at the expense of the Aerotrain, a well developed series of French prototype monorail trains of the sixties and seventies. Aerotrain worked much like a hovercraft on the water, the first passenger prototype had a large fan on the tail for propulsion and to push the train off the trackway. Promising great speed with less complication the French developed the Aerotrain during the sixties until the project had built 18 kilometres of raised track near Orleans, and an eighty seat jet Aerotrain, the I80, ran to a speed of 430 kph (267 mph) in 1974.
Extremely impressive, fascinating and beautiful to watch in effortless action, the I80 went no further than this. Already the limitations were clear; the Aerotrain's only problem was that it wasn't really a 'train' , there was only one car. And when a TGV can carry hundreds of people, eighty wouldn't cut it economically no matter how fast they were going. Some Aerotrain projects got the go ahead - linking the two Paris international airports was one plan- but sadly the brains behind the operation, one M. Bertin died suddenly in the mid seventies, and the political will switched to the TGV, a much more flexible technology. Unfortunately the fascinating remnants of the Aerotrain were left to decay where they were abandoned and the record setting I-80 destroyed by a fire before anyone could save it.
One hundred billion US dollars is the estimated cost of the first stretch of the Chuo Maglev Shinkansen. In Japan, it state has covered at least 30% of the price of any of the new rail lines, and in China, of course, there is nothing but the state, but such prices are unlikely to appeal to many countries. The cost has been justified in Japan because of the particular circumstances of the new line - the existing Shinkansen runs around the coast, but running the track straight to Nagoya could make it effectively part of the satellite commuter belt of Tokyo, even though Nagoya is 180 miles away. The high speed network has turned Tokyo into a giant megalopolis, with commuters flocking into the city from all along the lines. This has not always been seen as a good thing; smaller communities and the countryside railways in general have withered in the face of long distance commuting. The isolated nature of the Shinkansen makes it a natural fit for the self contained maglev line, but these are not always what countries want; European high speed lines are built to be integrated into the existing network and major stations. Maglev technology has potential, but risks being stuck between a rock and an airliner - too short a journey, and a conventional, cheaper railway will suffice, too long, and even 500 kph plus is still not as fast as an aeroplane. Maglevs are expensive, and impossible to integrate into any existing network. There is also the problem of maintaining the tracks - though existing rail networks are quite intensive for labour use too.
Many modern high speed trains take rather noticably odd forms. In particular the "Duck bill" look that debuted on the Shinkansen 700 had become a popular look. The 2000s Talgo models have it, as do several types of Shinkansen variants exported to China. This odd shape is designed to reduce The so called piston effect in tunnels. At 200 mph the air in a tunnel becomes a powerful shockwave piling up in front of the train, and at the tunnel exits the train is preceded by a loud explosive bang as the wave blasts out. Not ideal in the middle of tranquil countryside or mountains, where high speed tunnels are most likely to be.
A concept long bandied about is sealing trains into a vacuum tunnel. Ever since Newton explained that objects in motion keep moving unless something acts against them, and on Earth that 'something' is air resistance, inventors have been fascinated with vacuums and the theoretical ease of travel without much pesky air in the way. It is why jet airliners have been so successful, they can fly far above the thicker air in the atmosphere, going faster and using less fuel. Suck all the air out of a tube and a train inside can work like a space ship, ie; all it needs to go very quickly is a burst of power to accelerate, and the same thrust to stop. The train could even be compatible with a standard railway station, as long as there is some kind of airlock system outside the vacuum tunnels.
In the 2010s, the 'Hyperloop' has become a buzzword for a proposed combination of air cushioned track and sealed tube pods. Championed by the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk as a future project for connecting major Californian cities, the idea is years from being a practical proposition, though the a prototype Hyperloop track has been demonstrated in full size tests. As with all pretenders to conventional railways, whether again or the potential speed and low energy use can justify the enormous cost of laying down the track remains to be seen. Such a system would be much more straightforward to bring into use as a cargo carrier than for passengers, where clearly there would be a major safety concern running people under mountains or the seabed in an airless tunnel - there would have to be a failsafe supply of oxygen. But then, once upon a time the same concerns were to the fore about railway tunnels of a few miles.
Funnily enough, as with so many forms of railway technology the idea has been pondered since the dawn of the railway age. In fact no less than Brunel himself planned to eventually build his own hyperloop, of sorts. He started in 1848 with a twenty mile stretch of 'atmospheric railway' between Exeter & Newton Abbot. This was the first step.and it worked by building a metal cylinder along the middle of the track, then pumping the air out with stationary engines at three mile intervals. A cylinder affixed to the train cars sat in the tube, the gap sealed by leather strips. The experiment worked - purely under atmospheric pressure the trains were pushed (and pulled) at 70 mph. But gradually problems began to set in - the leather was not very weatherproof and maintaining the vacuum seal with early Victorian levels of maintenance and construction was practically impossible. After a year the costs forced the railway to bring in locomotives and the atmospheric railway buildings found other uses.
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All Destinations
After nearly two hundred years any upstart technology faces the difficulty of overcoming the status quo. Broad gauge, vacuum pipes, maglevs... they have all tried, all are feasible, but little used. Railway technology has been, and is still, dominated by conventional tracks and trains, using the same blueprint set down by George Stephenson in 1829; maintenance, operation, safety, familiarity, it all has very deep roots, passed down from one generation to the next. One day, though, the Brunel's of the world may have the last laugh. A vacuum tube or magnetic high speed line may become the next breakthrough to be embraced around the world. The development of railway technology has been a long story of continual development, often against the odds, and with previously overlooked ideas coming to fruition long after some bright spark first tinkered with theories and prototypes.First it was steam engines, at first frightening and dangerous, then awesome and revolutionary, being made over to become glamourous pin-ups. Then overtaken and left to be abandoned and scrapped, fading away into history... almost. Many preserved steam engines now outlive their replacements. They are, after all, self contained units, entirely mechanical, requiring no overhead wires or computerised signalling to run. What external infrastructure is needed can be provided on modest heritage lines, though many preserved steamers are now oil fired rather than coal powered. In the 1980s and 1990s increased safety regulations for old boilers sent many steam engines permanently to static display in the museum. Those that do run have often had whole new boilers fitted - much like historic flying aeroplanes, the 'old' engines are often much newer than they look under the surface. Also like aeroplanes, costs are very high to keep old trains running. Parts are specialised, labour is intensive and time consuming, and larger, faster locomotives are more expensive. The long saga of the Flying Scotsman is illustrative - after being pensioned off by British Rail it ran through three wealthy private owners before finally being bought by the National Railway Museum, nearly a
hundred years after it was built. It's replacements - the Deltics - were mostly scrapped in the early 1980s, but two working examples survive, based in the Stephenson era Barrow Hill Roundhouse in Chesterfield, with a prospective third working restoration being built in the same workshops. Not too far south a fully functioning unstreamlined Princess Coronation, the Princess Margaret Rose, lives on at the Midland Railway Museum. An upside of privatisation is that private extends to anyone - previously BR banned any other train operations on the main lines. All told Britain has around three thousand retired but operational steam and diesel locomotives.
As well as preserving the old there is also the possibility of resurrecting extinct types. Though no Baldwin PRR T1s survived their brief working lives, and a project is afoot to build a new example. As the original T1 could hit 100 mph and supposedly more, even with it's wheel slipping habit, the enthusiasts building a new one plan to fix the problems claim the world steam record officially. Scraping together enough cash and resources to build such a monster from scratch is not the work of a moment, and the estimated completion date for the new T1 is sometime in the 2030s. The precedent has been set for a successful completion of such a project, across the Atlantic in Britain. Amazingly, over a period of twenty years, a team of enthusiasts in Britain managed to build an all new Gresley 1923 A1 Pacific. Though the Flying Scotsman avoided the scrapyard, it had already been upgraded to an A3 design. Every single example of the original A1s had been lost. "Tornado", as the new A1 is called, has been a huge success for it's owners, and they soon set to work building another lost Gresley design. This time the 2-8-2 P2, the largest of British passenger engines, originally built in small numbers, and entirely lost to posterity as all examples were scrapped after the Second World War.
The perversity of all this is clear; Britain and the United States were once at the forefront of railway developments and have now become backwaters. Britain in particular still seems to have the deepest affection and enthusiasm for it's creation. Britons hand over the money to resurrect old engines to run alongside a huge cast of preserved steamers, diesels and even old electric locomotives on countless heritage railways, yet has fallen completely away from the front of the field in the modern rail race. Maybe the two things are not entirely unrelated. Enthusiasts of engineering are simply pleased to see anything built in Britain running down the rails again, even if the design is one hundred years old. Like the automotive, aeroplane and shipbuilding industries, the British carriage and locomotive industry declined and died completely in the 1980s and early 1990s. After the APT was thrown on the scrapheap, some of it's technology went into new electric trains for the electrified main lines, but the signalling and track improvements that were supposed to allow 160 MPH running, and thus gave the brand name "InterCity 225" (in KPH) to one of the train sets, never came, and the new trains sat alongside the HST, barely outpacing the old stopgap stalwart of British Rail.
Privatisation of the rail network in 1993 was the last straw for the home grown works of British Rail Engineering - most was bought up, with majority ownership abroad. The truncated remains of the last operational APT sits quietly by the side of the railway in a place called the Crewe Heritage Centre. The Crewe works, once a giant of the world's railway industry, where the LMS built many of their great steam engines, is now reduced to just another maintenance shed. The former British Rail share of Eurostar was retained by the UK government for many years after privatisation but was eventually sold to French-Canadian investment company. Some trains are built in Britain, partly out of political necessity, and partly because the narrow loading gauge does not allow direct importing of whole trains. But the latests generation of electric units intended to replace the HSTs and Intercity 225s are Hitachi designs from Japan.
Not all has been doom and gloom, however. In the 2000s the Channel Tunnel rail link, or 'High Speed 1', after a wobbly start that saw planning only begin after the Tunnel was in use, and only a year before the Belgians finished their link to Brussels, opened it's southern section in 2003. Replacing much of the old route that was limited to 100 mph and saw the Eurostar's running from the antiquated third rail. Because of the potential for problems tunnelling under much of north east London the line was constructed in two parts with the easier section from the channel tunnel into Kent connecting with the old lines south of London. Making good with the new line a Eurostar set immediately set a new British speed record of 203 mph on it, with the operating maximum of 186 by far the quickest in the country. The northern half, including a 12 mile tunnel under parts of the city came in on time and within budget four years later, finally connecting London directly with high speed lines to Paris and Brussels.
For all of the new construction the pride of the line is the refurbished St Pancras terminal. Originally built in the 1860s for the Midland Railway the grand terminal, with a giant arched single vault roof to rival Paddington and spectacular gothic fairytale architecture on the frontage, was picked for HS1 for its connections to the North of the country and its underused and unloved state. By the 1980s it's once grand hotel had been abandoned and half the platforms stood quiet. To accommodate Eurostars the train shed was extended with a new northern annexe for national trains and where the Sheffield and Leeds bound HSTs once stopped became the Eurostar platforms. The whole roof was refurbished, the derelict undercroft, once the freight stores in the days of steam, opened out into a plaza. The whole, station and line, was reminder that, when it came to railways, Britain could still do it when it tried, and when it comes to restoring railway heritage for the modern day, nobody does it better... at least nowadays.
Naturally the success of HS1 finally put some impetus into a High Speed 2 line, running up the spine of England to Birmingham and the industrial great cities of the North, decades after the late Victorian era Great Central Railway, once intended as a grand connection to a channel tunnel, was bulldozed. The plans for High Speed 2 call for using the nearby Euston station. A bigger contrast to St Pancras is hard to imagine. In the peak of the BR modernisation mania of the 1960s, the original Euston, dating from the 1840s, was completely obliterated and replaced with an airline terminal style minimal modernist box befitting the new electrified age. To say there was outcry would be an understatment - at about the same time the Penn Station building in New York City, modelled around the Baths of Caracalla in Rome, and the equal aesthetically of the nearby Grand central, was torn down and the concrete rotunda of Madison Square Garden plonked down on top the, now underground, station.
These two events kick started a renewed appreciation for Victorian architecture (and the lisiting of St Pancras when threatened with the same fate) and a massively increased cynicism toward governments and railways proposing shiny and new projects. Ironically, in the 21st century similar objections have gained ground over the planned wholesale removal of the 1960s Euston for another whole new station, though not nearly at the same level.
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Staying On Track
In the middle of the 20th century railways looked to be doomed in the age of cars and aircraft, but development of electric and diesel engines provided great power and speed with less expense. As environmental concerns, particularly around carbon emissions have come ever more to the fore in the minds of governments, the precision engineered high speed line became seen as a.genuine alternative to more highways and short haul airlines. Railway passenger numbers, once slumped in the mid to late 20th century, have climbed back up again as developed countries become more and more urbanised, car ownership and road freight traffic grown far beyond the capacity of roads to handle them. Now the high speed railway has become almost a status symbol for the newly developed far eastern countries, following their Japanese neighbour's lead hoping to stimulate growth with whatare effectively super fast intercity commuter railways.
Will the the future be full of high speed rails? China may be the best litmus test of all. Many observers wonder how much longer the single party Chinese state can continue to build new infrastructure and cities. What happens to all the construction companies and rolling stock makers when every line is finished? Does China head for the same bust as the USA in and 1930, when the great steam loco builders suddenly found their order books dry? There are other concerns; safety across the vast network has been a concern since the fatal 2011 crash, many more trains keep being added to schedules, adding to the risk of more collisions. There are complaints that the greater expense of tickets is increasing divisions between the haves and have-nots in China, replacing affordable stopper sleeper trains with fast trains that bypass smaller communities. There have also been dissatisfied rumblings from Japan that China may have, "borrowed" some of their Shinkansen technology without permission, helped by lax national intellectual property rules, and are now muscling in on the international business. Lastly, there is the future problem that as the lines age over the years the maintenance costs will inevitably climb, and there is a lot of mileage to keep running in the future.
China is a monopoly, run by one company beholden to the state. By contrast Italians have opened up all their lines to competition, the first country to do such a thing with it's high speed lines (though technically the privatised British rail network includes passenger trains on HS1 that are not the Eurostars) The NTV company runs alongside and against the state-owned Trenitalia, holding an interesting trump-card - the French "AGV" train. Built by Alstom as the successor to the TGV, the "Automotrice de Grande Vitesse" does not improve much on the TGV when it comes to speed, but is supposedly more efficient, more spacious, and flexible - able to be fitted with almost any voltage supply and also with a tilting mechanism if desired. Efficiency is the big selling point. With much greater competition compared to the days when France ruled Europe and sold the TGV to Spain and South Korea, the manufacturers need to sell the same speeds with less cost. Like the ICE-3 design the AGV, as it's name suggests, is descendent of the 1930s railcar and the 1964 Shinkansen, with the power car locomotives replaced entirely by motors underneath the coaches.
France, too has started to find that despite all the effort put into the TGV there is still competition, with prices being undercut by budget airlines. Nationally the TGV is popular, and short haul international journeys such as the Thalys are competitive, but on longer hauls planes still have the lion's share. The SNCF are following the lead of Italian railways by opening the rails to competition. The TGV name as a brand has already been replaced on low cost services called 'OuiGo' (Yes Go - a divisive name even many French admit that the name may not be the easiest for non natives to pronounce).
The dream that all of Britain would be able to board trains heading non-stop to the continent is still a long way off. Britain's High Speed 2 line is now under construction, but connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield is estimated to take until the 2030s, if all goes well. HS 1 came in within schedule partly because it was really just an extension to the French LGV Nord, using the existing technology and the signalling system. HS2 will be much more of a 'clean sheet' design, with one bold intention for it being a high degree of automation, including robotic maintenance machinery monitoring the tracks. Even in the brief time between the planning and construction of HS1 and HS2 the amount of media coverage of any public project has ballooned and successive governments have been boxed into ever tighter corners, needing to specify every detail of the route down to the last blade of grass. Such rigidity does not encourage problem solving in the field and doing things economically and on schedule. Opposition to the new line has been high, with questions whether the estimated £56 billion it will cost would-be better spent upgrading all the existing lines. Unfortunately the option of simply reinstating the Great Central Line with improvements is not an option; much of it's right of way was sold of to development soon after it closed.
In America too, the California high speed project to link San Francisco to Los Angeles is underway, with a projected price tag of $64 billion. It is a journey that takes a working day's length to drive, and thus is dominated by air travel. The project envisions a route running through the central valley inland, north west to the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento. The aim is to cut the journey time from the Bay Area to LA to around three hours. Still not as fast as an aeroplane of course, but as the Japanese first realised with the Shinkansen, with the train stations in the city centres, and without lengthy check-in and security times, the door to door time for passengers can be very similar. As well as providing an alternative to air travel the route is.also aimed at boosting the 'flyover' cities and towns in the middle of the state, the Fresnos, Stocktons and Modestos and all the overlooked millions who live ordinary lives well away from Beverly Hills, Sausalito or Malibu. Though the project began work in the 2010s, it still faces challenges and potential political and financial derailments. This.is the upside and downside of trying to build a railway in a modern democratic state.
On the plus side there is far more oversight - unlike the one party Chinese state there is far less danger of people being evicted and moved on to clear way for a rail line. On the minus side the whole process becomes mired in legal challenges and costly bureaucracy. And it invariably becomes a battleground of political ideologies in a defacto two party state. The Left are broadly in favour of public transit, of reducing carbon emissions from air and car traffic, and subsidising infrastructure with tax payers money. While the Right believe in personal freedoms, the freedom to drive or fly, and don't think that billions should be spent on a specialised form of transport, especially by the government and taxpayers. This country that has always been wary of 'Big Government' interfering with private enterprise has struggled with passenger railway development since the 1960s, the Amtrak system lagging far behind the rest of the similarly developed world (the vast wildernesses of Australia and Canada are also lacking in passenger trains, though there are far fewer large cities compared to the USA, and only a few in close proximity). The Acela, a 21st century replacement for Metroliner on the northeastern corridor routes, is the derived from Pendolino and TGV technology and is the USA's only 110+ mph train. Acela trains provide evidence that America could return to the days when some cities had quick rail connections between them, but the money and political will has to be there.
The issue was more clear cut in the 19th century, when there was no competition, but now that the passenger train has been out of vogue for so long in America, it is hard to convince doubters that it is worth the billions to build the California route is worth it. The fact that Europe and China have made the concept work seemingly has little effect - pointing out that a Communist state has the largest high speed rail network in the world is not be the best way to entice most Americans to back railways again. Such reticence isn't only an American problem; similar divides exist in England over the High Speed 2 route, though the skeptics aren't quite so united by politics. Any potential alterations to the Ancient English countryside are an emotive issue. And unlike in America there are still thousands of miles of conventional lines in use - "spend the billions there" even many ardent railway fans are heard to say.
Maybe the HS2 proponents can take solace from history - when the Midland Railway built through the English Peak District in the 19th century the poet and critic John Ruskin famously decried the Headstone Viaduct; "The valley is gone, and the Gods with it", A century and a half later the exact same viaduct - now sans rails, another victim of Beeching - is treasured as one of the most picturesque views of England. The French would never dream of a country without their TGV, even though it partly caused the contentious death of the Aerotrain, nor the Japanese of a world without the Shinkansen, even though the father of the concept, Japan Railway chairman Shinji Sogo resigned from the project for overspending before it ever opened.
Times and minds do seem to change when HST projects are successful. China has been transformed into a developed nation almost overnight, and a large credit for that must go to the train. Critics in America and Britain point toward Maglevs and the Hyperloop concept and say that money should be spent there not on conventional railed trains. The opposing view scoffs that these ideas are the Pie in the Sky and unworkable. Either way, consider that the same billionaire who is proposing the Hyperloop has successfully launched the heaviest rocket since the Apollo era with a view to taking crews back to the moon. The future of high speed rail travel might be arriving faster than we think.
