Full Steam Ahead: Tourism and Freight

In the second part of our three-part Railways 200 special we go full steam ahead . . .

If the railways and the steamship were virtually born together, they also grew up together. The railways not only facilitated the development of new ports and new markets: together they enabled both domestic and international travel for work, study and leisure. They opened up tourist travel, which percolated down the social classes as workers’ holidays began to gain traction with employers and the law – especially to the seaside, to ‘London-on-Sea’ at Southend and Brighton, and to other resorts. Nowhere was it easier to access the sea by rail than at the Kent resort of Ramsgate, decanting passengers straight onto the beach.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Bristol

Elsewhere passengers started their overseas journeys by rail. Trains provided connections with steamship and ferry services. Bristol is a city which became a transport hub – Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s transatlantic steamer and early ocean liner, the SS Great Western, entered service in 1838, followed by the SS Great Britain in 1845. (A liner is a vessel that provides a regular ocean-going passenger and/or cargo service between two or more fixed points, in this case Bristol and New York.) From 1841 the Great Western Railway (GWR) terminus at Bristol, also designed by Brunel, provided a connection for passengers to and from the liner, with a hotel also built for the convenience of passengers.

In this case the connection was not entirely seamless, as passengers still had to traverse the city, and potentially stay overnight in the hotel, but it is a travel cityscape which sprang from the brain of one man – and one which is still legible in the city today with the Grade I-listed old station next to the present-day Temple Meads (itself built in the 1870s), Grade II-listed hotel (known today as Brunel House) and SS Great Britain in preservation in the city.

How many visitors to Bristol today alight from Temple Meads, with Brunel’s original station on their right, to see the SS Great Britain and realise that they are following in the footsteps (or perhaps train wheels!) of passengers making the original transatlantic connection?

The Port of Liverpool and the Great Western Railway

Another ‘nearly seamless’ integration between the railways and port infrastructure can be seen in the Great Western Railway warehouse and office on the dockside at Liverpool, dating from the late 19th century. The GWR did not actually reach Liverpool itself, but goods could be moved by barge between the GWR’s Morpeth Dock at Birkenhead [1] and their warehouse at Liverpool alongside the Manchester Dock (filled in: now underlying the Museum of Liverpool) – a reminder that the railways also joined up with canal and river traffic in many different locations.

The rise of passenger travel

As the great age of the steam liner expanded, so also did the railways, and the two fed off one another, not only in Britain, but in parallel developments in other countries in Europe and elsewhere. This in turn enabled mass tourism (Cook’s Tours from 1855 to Europe, for example), emigration, and its darker side, colonialism. The liners, linking with railways on both sides of the Atlantic, made it possible for Charles Dickens to connect with his audiences in the United States and for Frances Hodgson Burnett of Little Lord Fauntleroy fame to regularly criss-cross the Atlantic.

In the same way, liners grew not only to serve specific passenger routes such as Southampton or Liverpool to New York, or to serve European colonies abroad, but also to become cargo specialists. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise of cargo liners and of refrigeration, benefiting not only the growth of fish and chips (see Part One) but also enabling meat to be shipped from South America and Australia under refrigerated conditions, for example by the Nelson Line, and despatched onwards by rail. Our records mark the loss of the Nelson Line’s Highland Fling on Enys Rocks, Cornwall in 1907, and Highland Brigade, torpedoed off St. Catherine’s Point, 1918. [2]

Like the coal magnates of the north-east before them (as covered in Part One), the railway companies saw the potential in an integrated market and a seamless experience. They would run passenger trains to the ports: thence it was but a short step towards commissioning the building of steamers, operating ferry services in their own right, and providing onward travel.

Trains and ships in the Lake District

Sometimes the ‘onward travel’ was a new development in its own right and an extension of the leisure experience within Britain. The steam yacht Gondola, the idea inspired by Venetian travels, as well as her name and hull form, was commissioned by Sir James Ramsden of the Furness Railway Company and entered service from 1859. The Gondola allowed passengers alighting from the Furness line at Coniston to enjoy pleasure cruises on Coniston Water in the Lake District, enhancing their holiday experience. [3]

The links between railways and ships were especially close in the Lake District, because trains could also transport small ships like these: the Gondola‘s hull was transported in four sections by rail and heavy horse to Coniston to be assembled locally, a methodology also adopted for the motor vessel Teal on nearby Windermere in 1938. [4] The railway line to Coniston was closed in 1962 so the link between Gondola and the railway that once brought passengers to her has been broken. [5]

The growth of the ferry

Where the railways could most easily dovetail with the steamers and provide the most seamless experience was on what we would today call ‘short-haul’ routes and ferries across to Ireland, France, Belgium and the Netherlands. They built on existing ports and routes with a history of passenger demand. The experience could be completely seamless and was a strong selling point. ‘The train comes to a standstill bang opposite the boat’ at Southampton, as described in promotional literature for the Southern Railway in 1931. [6]

The wreck record illuminates how old some of these ferry or ‘passage’ routes could sometimes be. The Duke of York ‘passage boat’ struck the Goodwin Sands in 1791 en route from Dunkirk to Dover – perhaps even with some refugees from Revolutionary France? (Turner was ‘nearly swampt’ on landing at Calais in 1802 as his painting Calais Pier demonstrates.) In 1669 one of the regular packets between Harwich and Hellevoetsluis (the precursor of the Harwich-Hook of Holland service which still continues today), was wrecked at Dunwich.

Some railway + ferry services were run by prestige named trains, such as the Golden Arrow train of the Southern Railway, which linked with the Southern’s first-class ferry Canterbury at Dover, which in turn connected with the reciprocal Flèche d’Or train which took passengers from Calais to Paris.

In general, the railway steamers had a fairly good safety record, but collisions in fog could and did happen, most notably with the Normandy paddle steamer, belonging to the London & South-Western Railway Company, which was involved in a collision off the Needles in 1870 with considerable loss of life while en route to the Channel Islands. [7]

Another collision in fog which ended more happily was that in the Channel between the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway steamer Seaford, having left Dieppe with passengers for Newhaven, and ‘le cargo-boat’ steamer Lyon, belonging to the French railway firm Compagnie des chemins de fer de l’Ouest, voyaging in the opposite direction under a reciprocal service arrangement. All on board the sinking Seaford were saved by the French ship, which returned to Newhaven, and ‘special trains’ were run for the passengers to get them home, although a few people were sent to hospital with broken legs and ankles. [8]

In 1918 the London & South-Western Railway ferry South Western was attacked by U-boat while on a cargo run from Southampton to St. Malo. More commonly, however, the railway ferries were lost outside both their normal roles and usual routes during both World Wars. They found themselves requisitioned for war service and were sometimes sunk on that service, such as the Southern Railway’s Tonbridge, which pivoted from her cross-Channel service to become a net layer (setting anti-submarine nets), and was sunk by a bomber off Sheringham in 1941.

Railway ferries also played their part both at Dunkirk in 1940 and during D-Day on 1944, including one very special class of ferry which we will take a look at next week in the conclusion to this blog series.

All aboard for Part 3 next week . . .

With many thanks to Andrew Wyngard, railway consultant for this blog.

Footnotes

[1] The Great Western Railway Warehouse and Office, Coastal and Intertidal Zone Archaeological Network (CITiZAN), online; photograph of the warehouse and office, CITiZAN, online

[2] Historic England NMHR records

[3] History of Steam Yacht Gondola, National Trust, online

[4] Gondola, National Historic Ships, online; Teal, National Historic Ships, online; MV Teal, Windermere Lake Cruises, online; ‘Lake Flotilla’, Liverpool Echo, No.17,595, 6 June 1936, p4

[5] Andrews, M and Holme, G, 2005 The Coniston Railway (Pinner: Cumbrian Railways Association)

[6] Leigh-Bennett, E P and Fougasse 1931 Southern Ways & Means (Plaistow: Southern Railway)

[7] Historic England NMHR records. It should be noted that the comment on the safety record pertains principally to records of losses within English waters, which are relatively few by comparison with the regularity of the service and the number of journeys undertaken; however, other wrecks did occur outside English waters, around the other home nations, the Channel Islands, and the coast of France.

[8] Historic England NMHR records; ‘A Channel Steamer Sunk: Loss of the Seaford‘, Morning Advertiser, 21 August 1895, No.32,535, p5; ‘Le Naufrage du Seaford’, La Marseillaise, p3 (in French)

[z] Railways 200 Fridays – PS Waverley, National Historic Ships, online