2. Westward Advance
The news of Queen Victoria's accession in June 1837 took as long to reach Rome as the dispatches of the Roman governor in London sixteen centuries earlier; yet within a decade reliable transport by rail was commonplace in many countries and thousands of miles of railways were in use in Britain alone. Some measure of this achievement is given by a comparison with the speed at which motorways have been built in recent years and nowhere was the development more impressive than on the broad tracks leading westward from Paddington.
From the beginning of 1839 the Great Western shareholders were united in support of the broad gauge and Brunel could devote his efforts to the great civil engineering works between London and Bristol which still testify to his genius. Over the Brent valley he constructed the Wharncliffe viaduct, brick built, 896 feet long and 65 feet high with 8 arches of 70 feet span. The next major obstacle was the Thames at Maidenhead and for this he designed a bridge with arches so flat (24 feet rise in 128 feet span) that critics forecast it would collapse under its own weight when the scaffolding was removed. It was opened for traffic on I July 1839 and has stood safely ever since. Between Twyford and Reading, Brunel originally proposed a tunnel but changed his mind in favour of the Sonning cutting which has a maximum depth of 50 feet; it required the excavation of 700,000 cubic yards of earth and, such was the scale of the effort, that 35,000 cubic yards were removed in one week. There was no avoiding a tunnel at Box, however, and here Brunel acted with characteristic boldness. The tunnel is nearly 2 miles long and, at its deepest point, is 400 feet below the hill; some 30 million bricks were used in its construction. It is dead straight and falls on a gradient of 1 in 100 towards the west end. The direction is such that the sunrise is visible through the tunnel on Brunel's birthday (9 April) not, perhaps, a coincidence! The imposing entrance portals cannot be appreciated from the window of a passing train but today's travellers have ample evidence of his architectural talents when they arrive at Bristol Temple Meads the oldest station in the world which is substantially in its original form. The whole of the line was opened on 30 June 1841.
To understand broad gauge history it must be remembered that the Great Western consisted initially of only the London to Bristol line. It was some 40 years before all the major railway companies in the West Country and South Wales were absorbed by the GWR (though some used Great Western locomotives and rolling stock from the beginning). It was no fault of Brunel therefore that in later years the company's initials were sometimes interpreted as "Great Way Round".
The Bristol and Exeter company was incorporated as early as 1836. Brunel was appointed engineer and the broad gauge was decided upon in March 1839. The line was laid out exceptionally well with easy gradients and was built without application for additional capital (a rare enough occurrence for a major railway undertaking), opening throughout in 1844. In contrast, the South Devon from Exeter to Plymouth was very much a local line built on the cheap. Brunel advocated the atmospheric system of propulsion from which he expected great power and economy. In consequence the line had steep gradients and sharp curves; in addition it was single track through most of its length, a limitation which was to become an important factor at the end of the broad gauge story. The line opened to Plymouth in 1848 though the atmospheric system was abandoned shortly afterwards and was never used beyond Newton Abbot.
With the broad gauge Brunel had provided the opportunity for high speeds and in Daniel Gooch he had an outstanding locomotive designer whose engines were able to exploit the possibilities to the full. His first engines for the GWR were built by outside contractors and delivery began in 1840. Gooch was able to report that "we had no difficulty in running at 60 miles per hour with good loads".
By 1841 the Queen had taken to using the railway when travelling between London and Windsor and Gooch recorded "I nearly in all cases took charge of the engine myself when the Queen travelled". He also described the day on which Brunel's ship Great Britain was launched at Bristol:
"I took Prince Albert down by special train to the launch on 19 July 1843. It was a lovely day and the sight a beautiful one, As the ship was built in a dry dock, the launch only consisted in floating her out. On the down journey we had some long stops for the Prince to receive addresses, but having no delays on the return journey, it was done in two hours four minutes."
The distance is 118 miles and Professor Babbage, one of the honoured guests on this occasion, wrote afterwards that at one point "my neighbour took out his watch and noted the time of passage of the distance posts whence it appeared that, we were travelling at the rate of 78 miles per hour".
If any doubts remained as to the possibilities of the broad gauge they were removed on 1 May 1844 when an inaugural run was made to open the line from London to Exeter. Gooch was at the controls himself and his diary gives the following account:
"We left London at 7.30 a.m. and arrived at Exeter at 12.30, having had some detention over the hour fixed. On the return journey we left Exeter at 5.20 p.m. and stopped at Paddington station at ten. Sir Thomas Acland, who was with us, went at once to the House of Commons and by 10.30 got up and told the House he had been in Exeter at 5.20, the distance 195 miles. It was a very hard day's work for me, as, apart from driving the engine a distance of 390 miles, I had to be out early in the morning to see that all was right for our trip, and while at Exeter was busy with matters connected with the opening, so that my only chance of sitting down was for the hour we were at dinner. Next day my back ached so much I could hardly walk. Mr. Brunel wrote me a very handsome letter, thanking me for what I had done, and all were very much pleased."
Soon afterwards, at Gooch's suggestion, a regular train was run to cover the distance between London and Exeter in 4.5 hours. This was the first example of public express trains and the idea spread rapidly to other companies. One further example of early high speed running is worth recording. On 6 August 1844 Her Majesty's Ministers were hurriedly summoned to Windsor to be present at the birth of the Duke of Edinburgh and two trains ran from Paddington to Slough in times of 17.5 and 18 minutes. The return was quicker still, as the Illustrated London News reported:
"The journey from Slough to Paddington terminus was accomplished in less time than the distance had ever previously been traversed. The 18 miles only occupied 15 minutes and ten seconds."
With any reasonable estimates of accelerating and braking times we must conclude that most of this journey was made at nearly 80 mph.
In 1845 the GWR proposed a broad gauge line from Oxford to Worcester and Wolverhampton. Although Parliament approved the scheme in June of that year, it immediately set up a Royal Commission to look at the gauge question in general. The ensuing battle will be described in the final article of this series but its immediate effect was to close the ranks of Great Western directors, shareholders and employees and to set the company apart from all other railways for a century.
The Board called for a new locomotive to demonstrate the broad gauge's superiority and Gooch responded with an astonishing feat of locomotive engineering. In his own words: "I prepared one with 18 inch cylinders, 2 feet stroke and 8 feet wheels. As it was important to get it to work before the next session of Parliament when a renewal of the gauge fight would take place I arranged for night and day work upon her, and had her finished in thirteen weeks from the day of getting the order. She was first tried at the end of April 1846 and on 13 June we made a sensational trip with her to Bristol with a load of 100 tons. The distance to Swindon (77 miles) was done in one hour 18 minutes and to Bristol in two hours 12 minutes, including stoppages."
This locomotive was the first to be built throughout at Swindon and was the forerunner of a famous class which survived to the end of the broad gauge era nearly half a century later. The last of the batch, Lord of the Isles, was featured in the Great Exhibition of 1851 and subsequently ran three quarters of a million miles with the original boiler. It was one of two broad gauge locomotives preserved at Swindon until 1906 when both were scrapped to release space in the works.
Despite the opposition to every extension of the system, the broad gauge network increased to a route mileage of over 600 in the early 1850s. In South Wales, Brunel completed the line from Chepstow to Swansea by 1850 but it was isolated from the rest of the broad gauge system so that locomotives and rolling stock built at Swindon had to be shipped across the Severn from Bristol. To link the two portions Brunel had to span the Wye at a point where there is a 70 foot cliff on one bank and muddy flats on the other. In addition to the problem of obtaining satisfactory foundations it was necessary to provide a head way of 50 feet and a clear span of 300 feet for the benefit of river navigation. To solve these problems Brunel used straight tubular main girders from which the bridge deck was suspended. The bridge was opened for traffic in July 1852 enabling through trains to run from Paddington to Swansea for the first time.
An Act for the Cornwall Railway between Plymouth and Falmouth was passed as early as 1846 and in the same year the West Cornwall company was approved to take over a short existing narrow gauge line and extend it to Truro and Penzance. Brunel was engineer to both undertakings but was hampered by lack of capital. The Cornwall was built as a single line throughout and the West Cornwall was allowed to retain the narrow gauge of its predecessor on condition that the civil engineering works were wide enough to permit conversion to the broad gauge at a later date. To traverse the difficult terrain with limited financial resources, Brunel designed a series of spectacular timber viaducts, several exceeding 100 feet in height. Despite their low initial cost they were carefully detailed with an eye to ease of inspection and maintenance, and several survived until the 1930s.
Narrow gauge trains of the West Cornwall line ran between Truro and Penzance from 1852 but progress on the Cornwall Railway was slow. The contractor on the Truro Falmouth section failed and by 1854 over half the shares in the company had been forfeited. Eventually, increased support from the GWR, Bristol and Exeter and South Devon companies enabled work on the remaining sections to be started. It required Brunel's last and greatest structure, the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash, to join the Cornwall Railway to the rest of the broad gauge system. Construction began in 1853 and the experience of the Chepstow bridge was put to good effect. The two archshaped trusses consist of oval tubes, 16 feet 9 inches wide and 12 feet 3 inches high in section, with vertical ties and crossbracing supporting the decking. Each trust is 455 feet span, 56 feet high at the centre and weighs over 1,000 tons. During construction these trusses were floated into the river and raised into position 110 feet above high water level.
Brunel was too ill to attend the opening of the bridge by the Prince Consort in May 1859 and he died four months later at the age of 53. At the time of his death broad gauge arteries stretched out from Paddington to Weymouth, Truro, Carmarthen and Wolverhampton. The technical and economic advantages and the high standards of speed, safety and comfort were clear for all to see and he might well have believed that broad gauge would survive as long as railways themselves.
Syd Urry
About Syd Urry
Broad Gauge Trilogy Part One - Early difficulties
Broad Gauge Trilogy Part Three - A Losing Battle
