Today we might minimise or even overlook the railway’s significance, because it is such an established part of our lives. Yet at its height the industry employed more than half a million people across Britain and Ireland, and played a huge role in shaping national and international affairs.
Railways existed long before steam traction. Horse-drawn routes like the 1722 Tranent–Cockenzie Waggonway in East Lothian, Scotland, moved goods (often coal) along wooden and later metal rails. Freight was a key driver, and early railways were concentrated in areas that produced or used minerals. Some passenger services like the Swansea and Mumbles Railway in South-West Wales, from 1804, were horse-drawn.
Static steam engines, such as beam engines for pumping water, provided knowledge and experience that engineers like Cornishman Richard Trevithick (1771–1833) made mobile. In 1804 Trevithick successfully demonstrated a steam engine on the Merthyr Tydfil tramroad from Penydarren to Abercynon in South-East Wales. All of this was vital for what was to come.
On 27 September 1825, what’s understood as the first modern passenger steam-train journey took place on the Stockton and Darlington Railway in north-east England. The idea took off, and the first actively planned ‘intercity’ steam-powered railway, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened five years later.
‘Navvies’ – navigators, often of Irish origin and with experience working on canals – were employed to dig railway tunnels, cuttings and embankments. It was hard, physical labour employing thousands of men and their families as railway building gathered pace from 1830. An intense bout of financial speculation, known as ‘Railway Mania’, in the mid-1840s saw many thousands of miles of railway planned – much, but not all, of which was built.
In Britain, railways were financed and constructed privately, with expansion driven by commercial demands, unlike in mainland Europe where many railways were state-constructed and state-run. And expand in the UK it certainly did – from a route network covering fewer than 100 miles in 1830, to about 6,600 miles of track by 1850.
Railway travel was soon normalised, largely thanks to a process of familiarisation. Our ancestors were exposed to railways in all sorts of ways – sometimes by using them themselves, but it might be through seeing them or hearing about them from others. Railway guidebooks gave people practical advice on how to get tickets, and what to see on their journey. Timetables and ‘railway time’ – a standardised, nationwide time that gradually replaced local times – all spread the idea of steam-powered travel.
Cultural products – games, music, stories, engravings and more – promoted the idea of the railways. And thanks to the easier distribution of goods and news, as well as the widening of sports fixtures because players could go further afield, people of all classes saw themselves benefiting from the network. By the mid-1850s, more than 100 million passenger journeys were being made annually in the UK. Railways also made a significant mark globally, including as a tool of empire for Britain and other colonial powers.
Once the navvies had performed their vital work, a vast array of people kept the railways moving. Without the dedication of railway staff, none of this success would have been possible. For much of the past 200 years, working on and for the railways has been seen as a respectable job – and certainly before 1939, it might have been a job for life.
The roles were incredibly varied. We might immediately think of drivers, or firemen shovelling coal into a firebox, or the station masters or porters – but the nature of railway work was far more complex. The bigger companies, like the London and North Western Railway or the Great Western Railway (GWR), made and operated virtually everything in-house. This meant that they had workshop staff – machinists, foundrymen, skilled metal workers, and carpenters – alongside the operational workers, such as the locomotive crews, guards, permanent-way (track-maintenance) staff, labourers, shunters (someone coupling and uncoupling wagons) and signalmen. Railway companies had extensive interests beyond stream trains, too. They operated ships, docks, hotels, road vehicles (horse, electric and later internal-combustion engine) and more. As a result there was a place for virtually anyone in the industry, including women. By c1914, roughly 13,000 women were employed by the railways, albeit usually only in roles that were deemed to be ‘appropriate’ for their sex.
Railway employers were paternalistic, and claimed that they could look after their staff. They certainly provided a range of benefits beyond pay alone, including tied accommodation, social benefits such as clubs, and in some cases access to medical care. The understanding, however, was that staff would accept the sometimes rigid discipline that was imposed by quasi-militaristic foremen and managers. Since the companies were often spread out geographically, they needed to use bureaucratic methods of keeping tabs on staff. As a result, some very valuable records have survived for today’s researchers. Many are now available on Ancestry.
The companies’ power was challenged by trade unions: the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF), set up in 1871 and 1880 respectively. Until the 1910s, companies refused to recognise or work with the unions – but the unions supported railwaymen MPs who advocated on behalf of colleagues in public environments.
That advocacy was needed on many grounds, not least of which was safety. Manual railway roles – especially those that required staff to work at track level, among moving trains – were very dangerous. In 1900, for example, five staff were injured or killed for every passenger who was hurt in a railway accident.
The tragically high number of worker accidents has produced a significant body of records, however, which are very useful to family and local historians and other researchers. These are being transcribed by the Railway Work, Life & Death project, an initiative between the University of Portsmouth, the National Railway Museum and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick, and made freely available to all on the project’s website.
Given the relative stability and respectability of much railway work, extended families worked for the railways across generations. Female relations played significant roles in the railway world, albeit not often formally recognised, caring for families and enabling male employees to get to work. From the late 1890s, employers and trade unions alike drew upon the metaphorical idea of the ‘railway family’, to cement loyalty in and outside the immediate workplace. This involved thinking about a wider community involvement.
The state took over the railways during the First World War, as part of the war effort, only returning them to private control in 1921. Wartime conditions brought hardship to the railways and their staff, but also opened up new possibilities for tens of thousands of our female forebears who took up roles as men joined the armed forces.
The railway industry was restructured in 1923, when the existing 120-plus railway companies were combined into a handful of major firms – the ‘Big Four’: GWR; the Southern Railway, the London, Midland and Scottish Railway; and the London and North Eastern Railway. The challenge from road traffic mounted, and passenger journeys declined from more than two billion in 1919 to 1.2 billion in 1938. The firms tried to cut costs, not least in periods of economic downturn, including by closing unprofitable services. They also innovated, not least getting involved in the nascent airline industry in the 1930s.
The state again took control of the industry during the Second World War, and the railways played a key role in the war effort. Maintenance and investment were postponed, for understandable reasons – but this left the private firms with an even worse situation when they resumed running the railways after the war was over.
In the end, following a landslide election victory in 1945 the Labour government nationalised the railways, and on 1 January 1948 British Railways was born. However, nationalisation was no panacea; the decline in passenger travel continued, particularly when petrol rationing was lifted in 1950 and motor vehicles became even more widespread. It didn’t help that steam trains were increasingly seen as dirty, slow and old in an era looking to the stars.
Two key moments tried to turn this around. First, in 1955 a Modernisation Plan promised to phase out steam and introduce diesel and electric traction by the end of 1968. Second, in 1963 the chair of the British Railways Board Richard Beeching published a report that proposed radically reshaping Britain’s rail network, something many still remember with disdain and even disgust. It identified nearly 2,400 stations and 5,000 miles of track to close. Protests saved a few lines. However, in the face of declining passenger numbers, nostalgia didn’t pay the bills, and most routes were shut as proposed.
With those closures, staff numbers employed on the railways declined and arguably the status of railway work went with it. At the same time, changing systems and technology – the end of steam and the end of much freight service – plus the mechanisation of manual jobs, including aspects of track maintenance, altered the nature of railway work forever.
From the 1980s, British Rail (as it became in 1965) was something of a political punchbag for the Conservative government. As a nationalised industry – like coal – it sat uncomfortably with free-market ideology. Therefore from 1994 British Rail was sold off and privatised. The period after 1990 saw challenges and successes – some high-profile safety incidents, but also the construction and completion of ‘High Speed 1’ and the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.
Thinking of our relations in the railway industry – particularly staff – it’s valuable to ask who we miss in the story if we rely on the formal records produced that have made it into preservation. Most immediately, those who are still living and whose privacy is safeguarded by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules leave little archival footprint (at the moment), although we can hopefully discuss their railway work with them in person.
As in other walks of life, the further back we go, the more that traditionally under-represented people and groups are hidden from view – they don’t tend to make it into the archival record. That includes not only women and people of colour, but also LGBTQ+ people and disabled people. Sometimes these marginalised workers can be found in the records, if we spend time looking for them and are attuned to the nuances of the time in which the sources were written.
Railway 200 is an interesting moment, since it both looks backwards and considers the future of the industry. Events going on throughout Britain, including the touring exhibition train Inspiration, and resources available from the Railway 200 website, have been set up with this bridge between past, present and future in mind. What will the railway of 2225 look like? Just as those in 1825 would have been hard pressed to imagine a future 200 years away, it’s difficult to say – but the railways will still be here, staffed and used by our descendants.
