Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs
    The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs
    The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs
    Ebook151 pages40 minutes

    The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs

    By Anthony Dawson

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The steam locomotive, ‘the most potent symbol of nineteenth-century civilisation’, is perhaps the image that best sums up the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The year of Victoria's coronation saw the completion of the first links in the iron chain that made up the West Coast Main Line, and the opening of the first section of the Great Western Railway. By the time of her death sixty-three years later, the railways had not only spread to every corner of Britain, but across the globe. The travelling public were first both entranced and terrified of the new means of transportation, with many dire predictions about boiler explosions and suffocation in Brunel’s Box Tunnel. This fascination with railways, coupled with the growth of photography, meant that the railways became subjects for the photographer’s art, and, thanks to cheap printing later in the century, an excellent means of publicity through sets of collectable postcards issued by the likes of the London & North Western or Great Central. These images not only showed technological improvements on their lines, but prospective destinations for the traveller.Here, Anthony Dawson presents Victorian and Edwardian photographs and postcards showing the railway at home and abroad, in all its splendour, with locomotives, carriages, stations and destinations giving a flavour of what it was like to travel during this golden age of the railway.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAmberley Publishing
    Release dateNov 15, 2019
    ISBN9781445679747
    The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs
    Author

    Anthony Dawson

    Anthony Dawson is an archaeologist and historian who has made a special study of the history of the British army in the nineteenth century. He spent two years as a post-graduate research student at the University of Leeds where he gained an MRes. As well as writing articles on the subject in magazines and journals, he has published Napoleonic Artillery, French Infantry of the Crimean War and Letters from the Light Brigade: The British Cavalry in the Crimean War.

    Read more from Anthony Dawson

    Related to The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs

    Related ebooks

    Modern History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      A Golden Age

      Jul 4, 2022

      A Golden Age
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      District Line 150

      Mar 12, 2019

      District Line 150
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Down the Tube

      Sep 6, 2019

      Down the Tube
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Leicestershire's Railways

      Aug 15, 2024

      Leicestershire's Railways
      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      St Pancras 150

      Sep 17, 2018

      St Pancras 150
      9 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Railways Of midhurst

      Jul 18, 2024

      The Railways Of midhurst
      22 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Norfolk’s Railways

      Mar 17, 2022

      Norfolk’s Railways
      20 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Flying Scotsman

      Feb 1, 2023

      Flying Scotsman
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Readers' Forum

      Oct 17, 2024

      Letters intended for publication should ideally add extra detail to our articles (or offer corrections of course!) and not be too long, consistent with the detail they offer. As always, we are sorry that space and time prevent us from printing them a

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      STPANCRAS 150th ANNIVERSARY

      Sep 30, 2018

      STPANCRAS 150th ANNIVERSARY
      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lament For A Branch Line

      Feb 15, 2022

      Lament For A Branch Line
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The ‘Big Four’ Begins

      Jan 3, 2023

      The ‘Big Four’ Begins
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The RCTS: Then And Now

      Apr 1, 2024

      AMONG the large membership of the RCTS are individuals particularly interested in just about every aspect of railways, from locomotives and train services to historical development and station architecture, all of which feature regularly in the pages

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Second Coming Of St Pancras

      Oct 22, 2019

      The Second Coming Of St Pancras
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Off The Shelf

      Jun 25, 2018

      By Irene Hawkes (hardback, Crecy, 160pp, £30, ISBN 978 0 86093 674 9). THE Metropolitan Railway 150 celebrations brought the history of the world’s first underground system to life for a new generation, and set the stage for steam specials to run ov

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Liverpool Spring Meeting

      Mar 16, 2023

      The Liverpool Spring Meeting
      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lincolnshire's Railways

      Feb 15, 2024

      Lincolnshire's Railways
      18 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Victorian and Edwardian Railway in Old Photographs - Anthony Dawson

      First published 2019

      Amberley Publishing

      The Hill, Stroud

      Gloucestershire, GL5 4EP

      www.amberley-books.com

      Copyright © Anthony Dawson, 2019

      The right of Anthony Dawson to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      ISBN 9781445679730 (PRINT)

      ISBN 9781445679747 (eBOOK)

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

      British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Typesetting by Aura Technology and Software Services, India. Printed in the UK.

      Contents

      Introduction

      A note on the illustrations

      Chapter 1 - Railway People

      Chapter 2 - Locomotives

      Chapter 3 - Carriages and rolling stock

      Chapter 4 - Royal Trains

      Chapter 5 - Trains and Stations

      Introduction

      The period between 1880 and 1910 is often described as the ‘Golden Age’ of rail travel: ornately painted locomotives pulling trains of sumptuous rolling stock; smartly turned-out staff and station masters in their silk hats. The railway was the creation of the Victorian age, and indeed the most potent symbol of that age was the railway locomotive. For a people addicted to the idea of progress, the railway heralded the first great conquest of ideas of time and space. Henry Booth wrote of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway:

      The sudden and marvellous change which has been affected in our ideas of time and space. Notions which we have received from our ancestors, and verified by our own experience, are overthrown in a day, and a new standard erected, by which to form our own ideas of the future. Speed – Dispatch – Distance are still relative terms but their meaning has now totally changed … what was once thought quick is now slow; what was distant is now near.

      When Victoria came to her throne in 1837, the mainline railway was only seven years old but growing rapidly: the Liverpool & Manchester had opened in 1830. The first trunk-line, the Grand Junction Railway, which joined the L&M near its mid-point and ran almost due south to Birmingham in 1837. In the following year, it became possible to travel by train from London Euston to Liverpool Lime Street (albeit with a change at Birmingham) following the opening of the London & Birmingham Railway in September 1838. The first stage of Brunel’s broad gauge Great Western Railway opened in the same year, but wouldn’t reach the far-west until 1859. In 1830 a Manchester cotton broker could travel by mail coach to London in a little over nineteen hours, but in 1838 he could catch the 6.30 am train from Manchester and be in London eight hours later. That great Victorian guru of self-help Samuel Smiles (himself the secretary of the Leeds Northern Railway) believed that the railways had ‘effectively reduced England to one sixth its size’.

      Thus, the bulk of the southern portion of what would become known as the West Coast Mainline was in existence in the year of Victoria’s Coronation (1838) largely thanks to three men: George Stephenson, Robert Stephenson and Joseph Locke. George Stephenson, the erstwhile ‘father of the railways’ was a self-taught mechanic and engineer, responsible for the Stockton & Darlington and the Liverpool & Manchester railways. His son, Robert, had a formal education at the University of Edinburgh and was apprenticed to Nicholas Wood at Killingworth Colliery. Not only was he a skilled civil engineer but a locomotive engineer too. It was Robert who had done much of the design work behind the famous Rocket of the Rainhill Trials, as well as develop the pioneering Planet and Patentee class locomotives of the 1830s. Joseph Locke, a scion of Barnsley, had been apprenticed to Stephenson senior, but the tensions between the two that developed during the building of the Grand Junction led to a break in their

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1