If you could go back in time and build Britain's railways from scratch...

[DCMarvel]

This premise is based on having no railway infrastructure at present and to start from scratch, but then we wouldn't have the current high tech high speed trains would we? We would be starting from scratch so the same caveats regarding motive power constraints would apply as they did in the 19th century. We couldn't copy the French as if we hadn't invented railways yet, then they wouldn't have them either. Alternative timelines would affect everywhere.

Chances are we would do exacly what the Victorians did and build tracks to industrial areas and holiday resorts. The only thing that would be done differently would be due to reversing the original timeline where roads took over from trains and reverse this movement taking the freight back onto the rails....assuming that we had still invented the car/truck.

[Michael Hodgson]

If I were designing the British railway system from scratch, it would of course be a network radiating from a single London Central Station, which would obviously by now need even more platforms than Grand Central Station in New York, so it clearly needs a lot of ground.

 

Unfortunately there wouldn't be space for it in the Square Mile, so I'd have to find a suitable nearby location for it - I would start by knocking down those old buildings by Westminster Bridge and in those side streets off Whitehall.  I suppose the current tenants would need to be relocated, ideally to somewhere in the middle of the country, so they'd be closer to the people they work for and more in touch.  Wolverhampton or Rotherham perhaps.

[burgundy]

As far as I understand, UK is very much the exception to the model followed in many European countries for developing their railway networks. 

UK chose to leave the process entirely to private companies, intervening only to the extent of approving an act of parliament for each route. The norm in mainland Europe seems to have involved a system of franchises with the government retaining step-in rights and the right to assume operation at the end of the franchise. State ownership seems to have happened much earlier for most mainland systems - often when companies became insolvent. 

Many mainland European nations "encouraged" the development of the system by guaranteed rates of return to private companies. In Britain, I think this was only the case for some lines in Ireland and Scotland.  

Many mainland nations stimulated railway development for particular reasons - variations of strategic military or economic development.  

I don't think any other country's railways indulged in the mechanical archduchies that existed in each of the UK private companies, insisting on bespoke locomotives and rolling stock in relatively small quantities, built in their own workshops to the designs of their own CME.  

Although loading gauges were not harmonised for many years, the advantages of something more generous than the UK's seems to have been obvious to other countries very quickly. 

Best wishes 

Eric  

 

 

 

 

[Michael Hodgson]

9 minutes ago, burgundy said:

Although loading gauges were not harmonised for many years, the advantages of something more generous than the UK's seems to have been obvious to other countries very quickly. 

 

The disadvantage of being first in the field. 

 

It wasn't obvious to Geordie Stephenson, who thought the purpose of the railway was to carry tubs of coal that had been dug by hand.   We're lucky to have as much much headroom as we have - you didn't have as much in the colliery.  He would not really have needed much headroom, and of course the higher overbridges are, the more labour it costs to build ramps leading up to them.  So it's just as well that by comparison his locomotive engines were so massive and he and Isambard needed to stand on board them wearing a topper.

[mdvle]

The only real thing that would make a difference if one went back to the beginning of the railways in the UK would be to somehow convince them to build to the European loading gauge - but left unsaid in that is how to achieve it.

 

But in terms of making things better for the current 2022 users of the railway it might be better to not go back quite as far and instead look at influencing things in the early years of BR.

 

Create a think tank to "influence" both the people running BR and the politicians funding it.  Advocate that the land for any lines abandoned be banked for the future, avoid the mistakes of the modernization plan, advance a rolling electrification plan, make it so all governments view funding BR (both operating and capital improvements) was just as important as funding motorways to the economic well being of the UK.

 

From a 2022+ perspective my feeling is those things could achieve far more than any attempts at fixing things pre 1900.

 

[Nearholmer]

A lot of sense, but the trouble is that by the 1950s the burden of Victorian Bloat, and Victorian legislation, had already been weighing the railways down for decades, and needed to be dealt with much before that.

 

How about we nationalise in 1923, as was seriously advocated by people from a surprising breadth of the political spectrum, and put Sir Herbert Walker in charge of the whole ruddy lot?

 

He was an arch moderniser, and a man who really understood how to take costs out of railway operation while still providing viable services.

 

If we give sufficient capital to permit real investment in “spend to save”, as well as in tapping emerging markets, which is what he secured on the SR, we might really get somewhere, but watch out for early use of motor lorries and buses, taking over local goods distribution and the least sensible branch lines. Some of the common carrier obligations will need to be lifted, and a lot of the capital will be in the form of low-interest, government-backed loans, aimed at maintaining employment in industry, through modernising the railways.

 

More taking a good set of pruning shears to the thing, and making sure it is properly fertilised and watered, than the axe that eventually had to be used because it was all too out of hand.

[Nearholmer]

PS: he was well switched-on to the issues of wasteful duplication and mutually self-destructive competition, having been involved in pre-WW1 tentative discussions between the LSWR and GWR about those very things in north Cornwall. 

[Michael Hodgson]

5 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

How about we nationalise in 1923, as was seriously advocated by people from a surprising breadth of the political spectrum, and put Sir Herbert Walker in charge of the whole ruddy lot?

 

He was an arch moderniser, and a man who really understood how to take costs out of railway operation while still providing viable services.

I seem to recall similar descriptions being applied to Richard Beeching.

[Nearholmer]

The difference being that Sir Herbert Walker had, by 1923, accumulated a solid track record of actually doing that, and went on to accumulate an even more solid one while leading the SR, whereas Dr Beeching was parachuted in, then airlifted out again shortly thereafter, so never had the chance (which he may or may not have wanted) to accumulate any useful track record of managing a railway.

 

As it happens, my view is that things had got into such a mess by the time that Dr B did touch ground that he had to be fairly swift and brutal, and that a great deal of what he set in train(!) was both necessary and beneficial.

 

My 1923 suggestion for the time traveller is based on dealing with the problems before they got so totally out of hand that swift and brutal became pretty much the only option.

[34116 Broadwoodwidger]

18 hours ago, mdvle said:

 

Working within the current rail spacing the Pennsylvania Railroad got 96,000 lbf of tractive force, so no need to go wide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad_class_I1s

 

But the question becomes why?  Where in the UK would there be enough freight traffic to justify such a loco?

 

 

They only did so with wide fireboxes, cast frames and huge outside cylinders which gave their locos poor ride quality, a rolling gait and very uneven draught on the fire which in turn caused half the coal to go up the chimney unburnt. By comparison, the GIPR/NWR 2-10-0, as with the Indian Pacifics, had four average size cylinders, 135-degree crank spacing, giving eight equally spaced exhaust beats per wheel revolution, resulting in a very even draught on the fire, reduced noise and generally very smooth running.

[34116 Broadwoodwidger]

19 hours ago, mdvle said:

The Government wasn't going to fund something speculative like a national railway network when it was unproven technology with no proven need, and as always the Government's of the day had other priorities for spending money on.

 

Go with the European gauge simply because it is the best combination of size vs weight.

 

Going bigger inherently means heavier (volume increase is challenging) and that in turn increases every other cost - bridges/viaducts/rail size and even the energy to move the train.

 

We see this in North America where high speed rail traditionally has been problematic for a variety of reasons but as significant problem is the cost of moving such heavy trains.  Large trains only benefit the moving of freight, passenger movement is best with smaller/lighter (to a point) thus the European standards appearing to be the best compromise for passenger operation.

 

Maybe.  But I can't help but think that not just your suggestions but other suggestions tend to look at a map of the UK and assume everything is flat.  In a large part the existing rail network exists as it does as a result of geography, and going back in time isn't going to suddenly make geography irrelevant.

 

But then you throw away rail access to the resort towns of south Devon that drove so much rail traffic until the car and motorway network came along, and thus throw away rail access to the most populous part of Devon.

 

 

Which ignores that historically we didn't know that the "bad" locomotive designs were bad until they got built.  When you are building locos pre-modern computing trial and error was simply part of the learning process of discovering what worked and didn't work.

 

 

There are a few points here which are incorrect.

 

Firstly, with broader rail gauges, the efficiency of haulage goes up, not down, which is why 5ft 6in was adopted as the standard across the Indian subcontinent, from the Afghan border to Sri Lanka, as well as most of South America. Wider locomotive frame spacing means you can fit bigger inside cylinders and maintenance access is somewhat easier, while wider vehicles means that, for any given tonnage of payload (be it freight or passenger), the rolling resistance is lower.

 

The problem with getting railways built in the US is one of capitalism and the powerful airline and automotive lobbies campaigning against any kind of improved rail services.

 

Here in the UK, the Victorian governments frequently DID fund railway schemes, providing loans to investors, many of which were never repaid as schemes foundered or companies went bankrupt.

 

The railway map of the UK looks the way it does not because of geography but because of ego and greed. The SER/LCDR idiocy is just one example. Brunel showed that he could overcome and subjugate geography when he wanted to, and it wasn't long before locos capable of climbing the Devon Banks, or Shap, came about. Yes, I know about the failed Atmospheric experiment in South Devon, the legacy of which is a tightly curving line which even HSTs and IEPs remain speed restricted on, hence my desire to seek an alternative route to Plymouth.

 

Also, trial and error with locomotive designs generally did not work. An infamous example is the Midland Railway - by the late 19th century, their locomotive architecture (wheelbase dimensions, axlebox sizes etc) was already inadequate, and their designs only became ever more obsolete and unreliable with the passage of time, culminating in the truly dreadful 7F 0-8-0 of 1927, which was just the biggest parallel boiler they could fit in the loading gauge atop an eight-wheeled version of the standard six-wheel locomotive chassis they'd been using since the 1850s. The 4F 0-6-0 and 2P 4-4-0 were almost as useless. Bear in mind that the "Austin Sevens" arrived over twenty years after the Churchward 2-8-0 which remained the mainstay of the GWR for fifty years for the simple reason that, until the 9F, nothing better existed! Equally, the GWR got stuck in its ways - it never really understood the importance of high superheat, and the application of four-row superheaters to Castle boilers in the 1950s transformed their performance.

[burgundy]

1 hour ago, 34116 Broadwoodwidger said:

 

Here in the UK, the Victorian governments frequently DID fund railway schemes, providing loans to investors, many of which were never repaid as schemes foundered or companies went bankrupt.

 

I should be genuinely interested to know of examples where the British government funded railways in the UK - other than in Ireland and Scotland. 

Best wishes 

Eric  

[mdvle]

2 hours ago, 34116 Broadwoodwidger said:

Firstly, with broader rail gauges, the efficiency of haulage goes up, not down, which is why 5ft 6in was adopted as the standard across the Indian subcontinent, from the Afghan border to Sri Lanka,

 

Nonsense.

 

In 1947 5'6" was 46% of the route distance in India while close behind at 44% was metre gauge.

 

Given the choice of the 2 converting the narrow gauge to the 5'6" makes sense (because only just over half the Indian railways needed to be converted) but it didn't become standard due to any inherent superiority over standard gauge.

 

But it does clearly demonstrate the higher costs of building to wider gauges - there was a reason why almost half of India was built to narrow gauge.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Unigauge

 

2 hours ago, 34116 Broadwoodwidger said:

, while wider vehicles means that, for any given tonnage of payload (be it freight or passenger), the rolling resistance is lower.

 

Rolling resistance is dependent on the weight on the wheel, not the width of the vehicle.

 

But we come back to the "perfection is the enemy of good" - your wider gauge may or may not be the perfect gauge but it would have unnecessarily increased costs.

 

2 hours ago, 34116 Broadwoodwidger said:

The problem with getting railways built in the US is one of capitalism and the powerful airline and automotive lobbies campaigning against any kind of improved rail services.

 

The original Amtrak Accela suffered from issues because of their weight, not because of your claims of interference from the airlines or auto makers.

 

Thus the reason why the FRA now allows trains that meet European regulations to operate in the US - because weight matters.

 

2 hours ago, 34116 Broadwoodwidger said:

Brunel showed that he could overcome and subjugate geography when he wanted to, and it wasn't long before locos capable of climbing the Devon Banks, or Shap, came about.

 

The railways were still subject to geography.  There are still hills that are too steep, routes that require too much leveling, routes that require too many bridges over obstacles.

 

2 hours ago, 34116 Broadwoodwidger said:

Yes, I know about the failed Atmospheric experiment in South Devon, the legacy of which is a tightly curving line which even HSTs and IEPs remain speed restricted on, hence my desire to seek an alternative route to Plymouth.

 

In which case the GWR conveniently created one for you prior to WW2, a route that still serves the important population centres and destinations in south Devon.

 

2 hours ago, 34116 Broadwoodwidger said:

Also, trial and error with locomotive designs generally did not work.

 

Yep, examples of failures abound - aka the error in trial and error.

 

But until modern knowledge of physics and powerful enough computers to model the physics came along trial and error was all that we had.

 

 

[Nearholmer]

7 hours ago, burgundy said:

I should be genuinely interested to know of examples where the British government funded railways in the UK - other than in Ireland and Scotland

The only publicly funded public railway, outside of LPTB, in the pre-nationalisation period that I know of was the North Devon & Cornwall Junction. I can’t recall the details off hand, but the county council subscribed most of the shares under some sort of government backed scheme - the treasury may actually have subscribed itself, I can’t remember.

 

Street tramways were complicated, but at least some parts of them were built with public money.

 

I have a feeling that the War Department might have part-funded some LSWR public railway branches that served military needs, but I’m not totally certain. There was a tight symbiosis between LSWR and WD in the 1910s.

 

But, before public ownership, public funding of railways in England was indeed highly exceptional.

 

I don’t know about Scotland, but even in Ireland much of the public funding was at local, rather than national level too. IIRC, the mechanism was through compulsory charges, both capital and revenue support, on the equivalent of district or county councils, funded through the rates, which was quite enlightened, because most people didn’t pay rates, only the better off.

Edited June 28, 2022 by Nearholmer

[johnofwessex]

The Welsh Highland relieved some funding from Local Authorities.

[Nearholmer]

6 hours ago, mdvle said:

But until modern knowledge of physics and powerful enough computers to model the physics came along trial and error was all that we had.

Yes, no, and maybe.

 

The reason the USA shot ahead in locomotive development in the late C19th was that they applied scientific method and extensive instrumented testing, including building test houses.

 

Of course progress, including further understanding, and the application of computing power, has made it far less difficult to apply engineering science, but the idea that it all had to be trial and error before Turing is very wide of the mark - the better versed engineers were knee-deep in calculations long before that, and were dead keen on dynamometer car testing.

 

I’m not so into steam, but I collect electric railway engineering text books, and have volumes going back as far as 1880 …… they are stuffed full of maths almost from the outset, some of it really hard to follow because the units and symbology weren’t settled until the 1890s. Locomotive steam was, and remains to this day, harder, because it involves so many variables, but the old stationary (power station) steam books that I have are also maths fests.

Edited June 28, 2022 by Nearholmer

[Michael Hodgson]

On 28/06/2022 at 01:07, mdvle said:

 

In 1947 5'6" was 46% of the route distance in India while close behind at 44% was metre gauge.

 

Given the choice of the 2 converting the narrow gauge to the 5'6" makes sense (because only just over half the Indian railways needed to be converted) but it didn't become standard due to any inherent superiority over standard gauge.

 

Try telling the gentlemen travelling on the roof of a broad gauge train that what they need on the subcontinent is smaller trains.

[Flying Pig]

On 27/06/2022 at 21:47, 34116 Broadwoodwidger said:

culminating in the truly dreadful 7F 0-8-0 of 1927, which was just the biggest parallel boiler they could fit in the loading gauge atop an eight-wheeled version of the standard six-wheel locomotive chassis they'd been using since the 1850s

 

I like the Austin 7s.  With decent bearings, a proper cylindrical smokebox, a Horwich cab and sensibly sized tender, they'd have been fine for the job they were built for.

[DenysW]

On the OP, a jaunt through Wikipedia infers that the time-traveler has to go back and convince the creators of the Killingworth tramway (simplified version: employers of the young George Stephenson) that the future lies in 2-horse trams instead of 1-horse to get the coal to the staithes, giving a rail gauge around 6ft-7ft. If George in this reality was the same as in our reality he creates a loading gauge at twice the track gauge, so 12-14ft.

 

However, having solved the gauge problem, the next three problems are:

 

-   The ultimate starting power of a locomotive is set by the axle loading  (in tons/axle) and the number of axles, the latter limited by the practical limit of the rigid wheelbase. Most of the UK was built to a maximum of 18 tons/axle, and increasing this means re-doing the rails, the sleepers, and the strength of the bridges and viaducts. In the 1920s better data increased this on existing structures to around 20 tons/axle. We typically ignore that the big US locomotives, as well as a bigger loading gauge, got 30 (or even 40) tons/axle infrastructure.

-   The ultimate speed of a railway route is set by the curves of the track, hence modern 'high-speed' only being achieved on new, straighter routes

-   The original railways in the UK were often borderline for affordability when engineered by Stephenson (see the history of the North Midland), and there was always some-one willing to compromise on this to save money and get the line built (see the Lickey Bank saga)

 

So our time traveler goes back, gets George Stephenson to design track for modern 250 mph trains, the cats refuse to be herded given the staggering cost, and the current system gets built anyway, just with a less claustrophobic loading gauge.

[Nearholmer]

Oddly enough, the alignments and gradient profile of the Stephenson and Brunel era do make their routes largely suitable for very high speed trains (Berkhamsted is an exception), because they built for locos that couldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding. It was when locos got slightly better that routes became squigglier and lumpier.

[Mike 84C]

Regarding duplication of routes, a real eye opener for me was reading  The Railways of Great Britain a Historical Atlas by Col, M.H.Cobb pub by Ian Allen. In Victorian industrial Britain duplication and even triplication of routes.

  For those with an interest in locomotive builders The Baldwin Locomotive Works 1831-1915 by J.K.Brown pub,by John Hopkins Uni, Press

is an interesting read and illustrates the very different commercial attitudes across the Atlantic in those times.

The Pennsylvania I1 was not, nick named Hippo for no reason! In my younger days I had a pen friend whose father was an engineer on the Pennsy and he told tales of I1's waddling along! It  could pull a house down though!

 The hands off attitude of Edwardian govt; in this country in some areas held back development/improvements eg, continious  brakes and automatic couplings  both of which would have helped the railways fend off competition and made them safer.

 

  

---

 

[DenysW]

The duplication/triplication of routes was a consequence of  the worshiping at the altar of the great god Competition (from the earliest days to Grouping) that wasn't replicated outside the UK. The duplicates/triplicates have mostly gone, especially those that made no sense except to steal another company's coal suppliers. The Great Central from Sheffield to Rugby was a triplicate and never commercially successful. The Great Northern's Derbyshire Extension only made coal sense (for GN) as also Heads of Valleys (for LNWR). Further, many of the Joint Committees (Midland & Great Northern, Somerset & Dorset, etc.) were early to get Beechinged because they were built or taken over to allow one of the bigger operators to encroach into another's territory, often with line built with uneconomically steep gradients.

 

Separately I wonder about the response if the GWR had publicised its services as the safest once it had automatic recognition of signals, and had followed this up successively with air brakes (not vacuum), steel coaches, etc. etc.

[Vistisen]

I wonder whether MotorRail could make a comeback. One of the drawbacks of electric cars is their ability to do long journeys. I would have thought that a MotorRail service from one end of the country to the other where your car is charged up on route could be a financial success. You arrive fresh and rested and so does your car.

[Nearholmer]

Self-driven cars can achieve the same, with less hassle, and possibly less energy consumption, given that the dead-weight of a motor-rail wagon must be appreciable and  that EV’s typically run on very hard tyres to reduce rolling resistance.

[DenysW]

Self-driven does not solve the current problem of range-anxiety: present range for generally affordable electric-only vehicles is up to 250 miles, only. Recharging takes a long time, especially under the present status of inadequate numbers of rapid charging points, meaning you add queuing time to charging time. I've seen this already at busy motorway services. Yes, pay £100k for a Tesla and you can get further between charges, but a much smaller fraction of us regards that as affordable.

 

I suspect Motor-rail might, again, bridge a 20-year gap between what the EV/car technology can achieve and what its users would like it to achieve.

 

SWHMBO points out that present all-electric technology does not do Leicester-Pontyprydd without a re-charge ( our challenge to get to visit our distance-relatives) and that only 7kW charging points (cheapo builders install 3kW) will recharge an EV overnight. 3kW more like 28 hours.

 

HM Govt included hybrids in its 'no new ones after 2030 objective', to industries' shock.

 

We shall see whether the battery technology (and charging-point regulations) moves fast enough to meet expectations.