Free Fire and Steam by Christian Wolmar

TWO
    GETTING THE RAILWAY HABIT
    The grand opening ceremony of the Liverpool & Manchester railway, the meticulous engineering skill and the £1m of capital that had gone into the project were still not sufficient to guarantee its success. Far from it. This was an entirely new idea, completely different in scope and ambition from the coal-dominated Stockton & Darlington. Now that the railway was built, would anyone use it?
    The answer was unequivocally yes, but not in the way that its promoters envisaged. While the original motivation for its construction had come from Liverpool merchants seeking to reduce the cost and time of transporting their goods, the line would become, unlike its predecessors, primarily a passenger service. The people who flocked to the railway proved to be the mainstay of the business as the goods traffic took longer than expected to build up.
    Travelling by train was an utterly novel experience and it is remarkable how many of the customs and practices of rail travel developed in the early days of the Liverpool & Manchester survive to this day. At first, buying a ticket was a major enterprise. For some unaccountable reason, tickets had to be bought a day in advance and passengers had to give their name, address, age, place of birth, occupation and reason for travelling! As one historian of the line suggests, it was ‘more a passport than a ticket’, 1 but the flocks of passengers arriving to take the train soon put an end to this onerous requirement, with simple tickets bearing the passenger’s name being provided instead. All tickets included thereservation of a specific seat, a railway practice that endured for many years until rendered impractical by the sheer number of passengers. On the back of the tickets were heavily printed lines as destination guides to help passengers who were illiterate.
    The initial service was fairly unambitious but as it was the world’s first regular train service between major towns, predicting demand was all but impossible. There were three first-class trains per day departing from the two termini at 7 a.m., noon and 4 p.m., with room for just under a hundred passengers each paying a fare of 7s (35p) single. Second-class trains, leaving at 8 a.m. and 2 p.m., were introduced a few days later with a fare of 4s (20p), still relatively expensive for the working classes whose wages were often less than £1 per week. Services were added regularly so that by 1835 there were nine daily passenger trains in each direction, as well as various specials. There was, as yet, no notion that the great masses, who had mostly never travelled beyond walking distance from their homes, would be able to use the railway. Third class, designed to accommodate them, would only come a decade later.
    However, cannier members of the working class realized that rules are meant to be circumvented. Manchester weavers worked out that they could reduce the time spent carrying their loads to their customers by using the train, but the fare was too high. So groups of three gave their bundles to one of their number to carry on the train until the railway company got wind of this wheeze and restricted passengers to one pack each. The brave weavers challenged the ruling by boycotting the line and eventually the company, eager not to lose their custom, backed down, a rare early victory by passengers in the face of the monopolistic railways.
    Anyone with a few bob to spare must have readily paid the extra to sit in first class. While the first-class carriages were mostly fully enclosed and had leather-upholstered seats, second class, until 1834, consisted of benches in open wagons, squeezing four passengers abreast, exposed to the sun and rain and, worse, to the burning sparks and soot from the engine, risking damage to their clothing and even hair. Oddly, a few of the early first-class coaches were left unprotected on the sides but that was soon changed when too many smart and expensive