How the Steam Railways Came to Surrey
by
Rupert Matthews
Published by Bretwalda Books at Smashwords
Copyright © Rupert Matthews 2010
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ISBN 978-1-907791-17-8
Contents
Introduction
Steam Comes to Surrey
Building the Main Lines
The Surrey Industrial Boom
The Leisure Lines
The Coming of the Commuters
The Great Wars
The End of an Era
Introduction
When I was a boy I lived on the north facing hill outside Esher that overlooks the main line from London to Portsmouth and Southampton. It had been built in 1838 by the London and Southampton Railway, later to become the famous London and South Western Railway (LSWR). From our front garden you could see the trains thundering back and forth along the embankment that ran like a stripe across the landscape. By then, of course, the glory days of steam in Surrey were long gone. It was electric trains that raced back and forth. But the odd steam train did go by, the plume of smoke drifting up into the air to disperse over the landscape.
Years later I was living down by the River Thames and commuting up to London by train from Surbiton along that self same LSWR mainline where I had grown up. Day after day I trudged up the hill to the striking inter-wars station to get on to one of the many commuter trains running up to Waterloo. By then all the steam trains had gone, but the mark of them was everywhere. The site of the water tower, the blackened undersides of the bridges and the engine sheds. I often wondered what Surrey had been like back in the days of steam.
My Uncle George had been a senior fireman on the LNER line running north from London. He used to tell me about his days on the footplate. He told me how he had started off as a teenager in the shed scrubbing and cleaning, gradually working his way up to be a fireman, first on shunters, then on local trains and finally on the great express trains that thundered along the main lines, belching smoke and steam as they powered up and down from London to York, Newcastle and Edinburgh. But I think he had preferred the country lines with their quiet stations, bunnies hopping in the fields and old-style station masters.
Surrey had been like that once. The railways came to Surrey in the 1840s and they were still being built in the 1930s, making Surrey most unusual among the counties of England. Across most of the country, railway building had ground to a halt long before the line to Chessington was opened in 1939, complete with suitably modernistic station architecture. Moreover, Surrey suffered only one line closure in the Beeching years, leaving over 90% of its railway lines open and operating into the 21st century. Surrey is most fortunate from the railway point of view.
Those railways were to have dramatic impact on the landscapes, people and economy of Surrey. Indeed, the Surrey that we see today has been largely created by the railways. It is no exaggeration to say that more than any other county in England, Surrey has been built on railways.
This book sets out to describe How the Steam Railways came to Surrey. That age of steam in Surrey is remembered fondly by thousands. The fans of steam recall the many different locomotives that hurried along the lines, the travellers recall the grimy grit of smoke and steam filling carriages in summer when the windows were down, and all county residents look back on a less hurried time when the demands of a globalised world were still in the future and the good folk of Surrey could potter about their own business in their own way. I have spoken to dozens of them while researching this book. I am sorry that I missed the heyday of steam in Surrey, but glad that I did at least come in for the last few glimmers that reflected the glory days of long ago.
Since 1965 the county has lost the rough square shape that it had for most of its history. The northeastern corner of the county was in that year sliced off and handed over to London on the grounds that it had been covered by a vast suburban sprawl that belonged more to outer London than to Surrey. The county originally stretched along the south bank of the Thames to Southwark and Rotherhithe, but now stops before it reaches Croydon or Sutton. Even the County Hall, seat of the County Council, is outside of Surrey these days as it stands in Kingston upon Thames, now a London borough. This book deals with Surrey as it is now.
Chapter 1
Steam Comes to Surrey
Before the steam railways come to the county of Surrey, it was neither a comfortable nor a prosperous place. Economic decline, depopulation, crime and social dislocation all stalked the county.
The area that had suffered most was the Weald, the low country to the south of the chalk downs. The local iron industry had lasted 2,000 years, relying on the local iron ore and on the forests that produced the charcoal needed by the smelting process. But then a method of using coal to smelt iron was found. The industry moved to areas with coal mines. By 1800 the Surrey iron industry was dead. Some people sold charcoal to London markets, while others exported timber. But neither really prospered due to the high transport costs.
The economy of the chalk hills of central Surrey was likewise in decline. This had been good sheep country for centuries, but from the 1820s onward imports of both wool and meat from the Americas and Australia undercut the price of the Surrey producers. The only bright spot was on Epsom Downs where horse racing was a growing activity. King James I had come here to test his horses in the early 17th century, and by the early 19th century classic races such the Derby and the Oaks were attracting crowds, as well as supporting a number of race horse businesses.
Epsom was also a minor health resort. A spring poured forth a salty water that had a laxative effect if drunk and soothed skin complaints if used in a bath. The wonder ingredient was later found to be a magnesium salt that has been commercially marketed as Epsom Salts.
The northeastern end of the county was covered by fertile alluvial soils laid down by the Rivers Thames, Mole and Wey. By the early 19th century the lands were producing fruit and vegetables for sale in the London markets. These were loaded on to carts and sent lumbering off over the roads toward the city, or loaded on to river barges and floated down.
Efforts had been made to solve the transport problems that had bedevilled Surrey for centuries. As early as the mid-17th century the Wey and Mole rivers were being widened, dredged and straightened to make them suitable for barge traffic that could carry goods up the Thames from the port of London.
The maintenance of roads and paths was a responsibility of the parish authorities. They tended to make the roads only as good as they needed to be for the locals to move their livestock about, haul wagons of hay or grain from field to farm and the like. In the early 18th century some major roads were taken over by private companies that charged a toll and used the money to pay for the road to be properly maintained. The Portsmouth Road was the first in Surrey to be made into a toll road, but others were to follow by the end of the century.
Meanwhile, a rival system of improving a road was being used elsewhere in places where heavy industrial loads were frequent. These would have been too heavy for the toll roads, tearing up the surface and rutting it. What these big, heavy wagons needed was a surface that was as hard as iron. So engineers began to make them out of iron. These iron roads were formed by fixing parallel pairs of iron tracks to the ground. The carts were then pulled along the tracks by horses or mules.
The construction of these iron railways was often hampered by the need to purchase land for the purpose. It thus became usual for an Act of Parliament to be passed that compelled the landowners to sell the necessary strips of land to the railway company in return for a fair market price. Debates in Parliament often revolved around which precise route should be taken, with both the rail companies and landowners using any influence they might have with MPs to try to get the route built as they wanted.
In 1801 an Act of Parliament was passed to build an iron railway running from the River Thames at Wandsworth to the busy market town of Croydon. The Surrey Iron Railway company began construction work on the eight mile route at once. In 1803 a separate company, the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone Railway Company, was formed to build an extension to the line to stone quarries at Merstham and Godstone.
The new lines opened in 1805 and were an immediate success. The open-topped, four wheeled trucks carried all sorts of heavy loads, including building stone, bricks, grain and iron goods. Customers could either pay for a truckload to be hauled by the rail company, or they could pay a toll for their own horse and truck to use the railway.
The rails of the Surrey Iron Railway and the Croydon, Merstham and Godstone Railway were of the type known as plate rails. These consisted of rails with an L-shaped cross section. The wheels of the trucks ran on the horizontal section, which rested on the ground. The upright section of the rail was on the inside of the wheels and served to make sure that the wheels stayed on the rails. The system was perfectly adequate for wooden trucks being pulled at low speed by horses or mules.
The companies flourished. The new iron roads were able to function in all weathers and enabled a horse to pull a heavier load than it could on a conventional road. It seemed as if the future of transportation in Surrey was being settled. Routes used by humans would be developed by Turnpikes, long distance through routes for heavy goods would be by canal while shorter more local trade routes would be catered to by horse-drawn iron roads.
However, events were taking place many miles to the north that would disrupt these carefully laid plans. Within a few years all three of these promising methods of transport would be rendered obsolete, ineffective and bankrupt by a new invention. The steam railway was on its way.
While most of the people involved with the transport business had been concentrating on road surfaces — whether they were of stone or iron — one group of northern industrialists were rather more interested in motive power. It was this interest that was to bring the steam railways to Surrey.
It was the steam engine that was getting them excited. At first all steam engines were stationary and used to turn factory machinery or to pump water out of mines. As the technology of steam engines improved, they could be made smaller, lighter and more powerful. Finally, in 1804 a Cornish engineer named Richard Trevithick produced a steam engine that was small and light enough to mount on a truck. He linked the power output of the engine to the wheels of the truck and so produced a self-powered vehicle. In 1806 he sold a locomotive, complete with trucks and rails to a mine owner on Tyneside. The railway train, as it now became known, proved to be highly effective at hauling coal from the mine to a nearby dock to be loaded on to ships which then carried the coal to London for sale. Soon every mine owner wanted a steam railway to move his coal.
Other engineers soon moved in to take up the task of building railways, the most famous of whom were the father and son team of George and Richard Stephenson. In 1825 the two completed the landmark Stockton and Darlington Railway. This nine mile long railway linked several coal mines to docks on the River Tees.
The Stockton and Darlington Railway introduced several technical innovations — including a purpose built passenger carriage that was hitched to the back of some coal trains to carry humans in some comfort. The gauge was of 4 feet 8 1/2 inches and the train wheels were flanged to run on I-section rails, as do all modern trains. The tracks were laid on a course as close to level as possible as Stephenson found his locomotive would run dangerously too fast on downhill slopes, and would struggle to get up hills.
The advantages of a steam railway over canals and roads were immediately obvious. Steam trains could go much faster — speeds of 30 mph were common — and the high speeds could be maintained over long distances. The railways could carry heavier loads than any cart, and by 1830 had a carrying capacity equal to that of canal and river barges. Moreover, the operating costs in terms of how much it cost to move a ton of goods over a given distance were low compared to those of carts and barges.
The only drawback to the new transportation system was that the costs of building the line in the first place were enormous. Anyone paying out for the building of a railway had to be very confident that there would be enough demand for transportation along the route to turn a profit and repay the construction costs. It was for this reason that most early railways were built to carry freight. It was relatively easy to predict how much coal a mine might produce to be moved to a nearby dock.
Chapter 2
Building the Main Lines
The first steam railway to be built in Surrey was primarily a goods line which opened in 1839. This was the London and Croydon Railway, which ran from what is now London Bridge station to what is now West Croydon. This line is now entirely within Greater London.
Much more difficult was the task of anticipating how many passengers might want to travel a particular route. Despite this it was a line built with passengers in mind that was the first to strike out across Surrey on a route from London to Brighton. The fact that part of the route ran through Surrey was merely coincidental.
The idea was first suggested in 1825 when a group of businessmen formed a company called, rather optimistically, The Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Somerset Railway. They employed the famous bridge architect John Rennie to survey what they intended to be the first route of an extensive network, that ran from London to Brighton. No sooner had he begun work than the plan was dropped. Four years later Rennie was hired again, this time to survey two different routes. The first was to take in the intermediate towns of Dorking, Horsham and Shoreham, while the second was to run direct between London and Brighton. This time he completed his work, but the company foundered due to a lack of funds and interest.
In 1835 the London and Brighton Railway (L&BR) was founded and bought up Rennie’s work. This new company favoured the direct route, but the matter had to go before a Parliamentary committee, which took months to pore over the various options before finally deciding that the L&BR had been right all along. Rennie’s direct route was therefore adopted, even though it would involve the building of several expensive tunnels and bridges that could have been avoided on the longer route.
As with the earlier horse-drawn iron roads, the new railways required an Act of Parliament to compel landowners to sell, gain the right for the railway to cross rivers and other legal matters. The L&BR act was passed by Parliament in July 1837, but the MPs had introduced some variations. The railway was not to have its own London station, but to use that of the already existing London and Croydon Railway. The line would begin at Norwood and then follow the Rennie direct route, with branch lines authorised to Lewes and Shoreham.
The MPs also introduced an amendment that the L&BR had opposed. The Members of Parliament were at the same time considering a proposal to link London to Dover and Folkestone put forward by the South Eastern Railway (SER). For some reason the parliamentarians felt that there would not be enough trains coming into London to justify the bother of having two lines. They therefore stipulated that the SER and L&BR should share a line from Norwood south through the North Downs. The two railway companies would have their own lines only after that.
In the House of Lords, the railway found itself confronted by the influential Lord Monson. Monson had nothing against railways, in fact he was generally in favour of them. However, the proposed route would run very close to his home at Gatton Hall, southwest of Merstham. The house stood on a south facing slope looking across a shallow valley in which had been constructed an artificial lake to improve the view. And the railway route would be on the far side of the lake and in full view of the house. In order to mollify any objections that Lord Monson might have to this, the railway placed Merstham Station immediately outside the gates of Gatton Hall on Battlebridge Lane, almost a mile away from Merstham itself. The villagers were able to watch the trains passing within 50 yards of their homes, but had to face a lengthy walk to get on the things.
Such considerations would bedevil the building of the railways across Surrey and lead to some decidedly odd situations. At least in Merstham’s case the situation was later sorted out when the station was moved to its present location in the village centre.
Despite these problems, construction began in 1838 under the guidance of engineer John Urpeth Rastrick. At the height of the works, in the summer of 1840, Rastrick had 6,206 men, 962 horses, five locomotives and seven stationary engines under his control. The building of this line was Surrey’s first introduction to railway building, railwaymen and to railways in general. It was not an altogether happy experience. Because of the need to keep the track as level as possible, the route through the North Downs called for a deal of major engineering works. The most important of these was the tunnel between Coulsdon and Merstham. The tunnel was 1 mile 253 yards long, with an extensive cutting over 100 feet deep leading into its northern end. The chalk excavated from the cutting and tunnel were used to build embankments that served to flatten out the slope up to the tunnel entrance.
The tunnelling through the Downs was hampered by the fact that the hills were pocked by old mine workings. One of these old tunnels had filled up with water and when the railway workers broke through a flood followed. One man was killed and large quantities of equipment destroyed.
The building work meant that, for the first time, Surrey was the temporary home to large numbers of navvies — 6,000 of them in all. These navvies, or workmen, were a distinguishing feature of the railway construction period. Without them there could have been no railways, yet they were a constant source of trouble and frustration. The word “navvy” is derived from “navigators” and referred to the days when gangs of workmen moved about the country building canals, or inland navigation waterways. At this date there were no mechanical diggers, bulldozers or trucks. Everything had to be done by hand or by horse power. The navvies were equipped with picks and shovels to do the digging, and had horse-drawn carts to haul the rubble away from the site. The amount of muscle power needed to dig a cutting 100 feet deep through solid chalk was enormous, which was why so many men were employed on this and other railway projects.
By the nature of the job, the men moved about constantly. As each rail line progressed they moved along with it, in the case of the LB&SCR/SER line they started just outside London and moved slowly south over the passing months. And when one railway line was finished they had to move right across the country to start work on the next one. They lived in temporary wooden shacks, little more than sheds that were dismantled and moved on as the worksite moved. It was no life for a family man, so nearly all navvies were unmarried young men who came to work the railways for a few years to earn money before returning home to settle down, or finding some less physically arduous job. At this date, most navvies were Englishmen with the majority coming from economically depressed areas — such as Surrey.
Inevitably, with huge numbers of young men encamped together things could sometimes turn a bit rough. The most reliably difficult day was Saturday, when the men were paid. Thirsts were great among the navvies and huge quantities of beer could be consumed. This led to frayed tempers, imagined slights and frequent recourse to fisticuffs among the men. When efforts were made to limit the amount of beer available on a Saturday evening a strike followed. Generally the works in Surrey passed off without any serious incident — largely due to the fact that the route did not pass through any major towns. The navvies were not, therefore, tempted to pour into a town to drink the pubs dry and get into altercations with locals as happened elsewhere.
In an attempt to curb disputes with locals, the railway building contractors took to providing everything the men would want. This process was still in its infancy as the LB&SCR/SER lines were built, but would later give rise to some highly sophisticated organisations. The company provided cookhouses where three meals a day were served. These meals were paid for with tokens which the navvies were given in place of some of their cash wages. The navvies could also arrange for part of their pay to be held back and either sent to their families or invested in a bank. The idea was to encourage the men to use their wages wisely, saving for the future or helping their kith and kin instead of spending it all in the local pub.
As events fell out, the branch line from Brighton to Shoreham was completed first, in May 1840. This short section ran as an isolated little line for some months before it was linked to London. The main line was opened in two sections: the Norwood Junction to Haywards Heath section, which included the Surrey section, was opened on 12 July 1841 and the Haywards Heath to Brighton section the following September. A special inaugural train for the company directors and investors left Brighton at 8.45am on 21 September and arrived in London one hour and 45 minutes later. Nobody had ever travelled between the two towns so quickly before. The branch line to Lewes was not to be completed until 1846.
Because the line was intended for passengers, not freight, efforts were made to make it rather more attractive than was normal. The noted architect David Mocatta was hired to embellish the stations, bridges and tunnel entrances. He opted for an Italianate style that drew its inspiration from Renaissance Florence. Some of his work remains at Brighton, but at other stations it has been swept away in subsequent rebuildings.
There were, at this time, a large number or railway companies each operating their own individual lines. It was not long before the directors of the companies realised that they could save money, and therefore boost profits, if the companies shared locomotives, rolling stock, personnel and stations. In some cases the companies pooled resources but remained separate, but in the case of the L&BR the directors opted for a merger. On 27 July 1846, the L&BR merged with the London and Croydon Railway, the Brighton and Chichester Railway and the Brighton, Lewes and Hastings Railway to form the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway (LB&SCR). Operating profits rose accordingly.
Meanwhile the shared line through the North Downs had been causing friction between the L&BR and the SER. The joint line ended at an empty field a couple of miles east of Reigate. Thereafter the L&BR line ran south to Horley and then out of the county into Sussex. The SER line headed east through Godstone toward Tonbridge and thence to the Channel ports. At the junction the L&BR built a station that they named Reigate. Passengers who were hoping actually to go to Reigate were faced with a fair walk from the station to the town. Such a situation was unfortunate, but had been dictated by the geology of the route. What was slightly ridiculous was that the SER built a completely separate station a few hundred yards away. Not wanting to give it the same name as the L&BR station, the SER chose to name it after a nearby landmark: Redstone Hill. The increasingly acrimonious disputes about who could run which train when over the shared line were inherited by the LB&SCR.
The various delays constructing the line to Brighton meant that, in fact, the first passenger railway to open in Surrey was actually the London and Southampton Railway (LSR) line which opened partially in 1838 and completely on 11 May 1840. Unlike the L&BR, the LSR was originally envisaged as a freight line. The line was supported by the merchants and town council of Southampton. During the recent Napoleonic Wars they had seen many ships sailing up the Channel to London being attacked and sometimes captured by French raiding ships. They believed that they could make Southampton more attractive to sea captains if the port offered a safe method of moving goods from the docks there to London. At first they contemplated a canal link to the upper Thames, but in 1830 they turned to the railways.
The idea was first put forward by Abel Ros Dottin, the MP for Southampton. He put together a group of rich men who paid for a formal prospectus which was put before a packed public meeting in Southampton in February 1831. The meeting resulted in the founding of the Southampton, London and Branch Railway and Dock Company. The line was to run from Southampton Docks to a site at Nine Elms, upstream of London, where docks were to built. Goods were to be unloaded from ocean going ships at Southampton, taken by rail to Nine Elms and then transferred to canal barges for onward shipment down the Thames to London or up the canal network to the Midlands and North. The company hired engineer Francis Giles who surveyed a route from Southampton by way of Winchester, Woking Common and Kingston to Nine Elms. By this time the directors had changed the company name to the rather snappier London and Southampton Railway (LSR). The Act of Parliament authorising land acquisition and the like was passed on 25 July 1834.
Construction began under Giles immediately, but he proved to be unsatisfactory to one influential shareholder and was replaced by Joseph Locke. As with many early railways, the new line was opened in stages. Nine Elms to Woking Common opened on 21 May 1838, thus beating the L&BR to opening the first steam railway in Surrey. The second section, from Woking Common west out of Surrey, opened in September 1838 and by May 1840 the line had reached Southampton Docks. By this date the company had changed its name again to become the London and South Western Railway Company (LSWR). This railway company proved to be highly successful and soon extended its lines far beyond Southampton.
The LSWR avoided the need for expensive and time consuming engineering works by skirting north of the chalk Downs all the way to Hampshire and then taking advantage of a natural break in the hills to turn south to the coast. The only big cutting necessary came when the town council of Kingston refused the line permission to cross their lands for fear that the railway might harm the prosperous horse fair in the town. The wrangle with Kingston Council lasted months and consumed much Parliamentary time. In the end, the company agreed to divert the line south in order to get the Act passed. The railway built a station named Kingston upon Rail at the nearest spot to the town for those wishing to visit. Some years later a branch line was built to Kingston and so Kingston upon Rail took the name of a nearby hamlet: Surbiton.
I should tell you that for some years in the 1990s I served as a councillor representing Surbiton. By then Surbiton and Kingston town councils had merged into one. Those of us from Surbiton used to greatly enjoy teasing the Kingston councillors (who greatly outnumbered us) whenever the subject of transport came up for debate. The shortsightedness of the Kingston Town Council in having turned away the railway was always brought up as a reason why we Subiton councillors should be listened to. It never worked out that way, of course, the Kingston councillors insisted on having their way. Go to Kingston these days by car, bus or train and see what they have made of it. But I digress.
The directors of the LSWR proved to be rather inept at the naming of stations. The first stop west of Kingston on Rail was called Ditton Marsh. It did, indeed, stand on the edge of that boggy marsh but the later name of Esher, after the nearest village, was rather more appealing. Further down the line a station named Woking Heath was built utterly isolated on the sandy upland of that name, about a mile and a half from the village of Woking. It was two years before somebody built a hotel next to the station.
The directors of the LSWR soon noticed something rather odd. All sorts of people from Surrey were getting on their trains at the little local stations to go up to London. It had been thought that these stops would be used primarily for dropping off freight that would then be distributed to the local area by horse and cart. But passengers were starting to take over from freight. Some went on business, others for pleasure, but they were travelling in ever increasing numbers. Extra carriages had to be bought and hitched up and soon passenger-only trains were running. But there was one great source of complaint. The terminus at Nine Elms meant that the London bound travellers had to walk or take a horse-drawn bus to get into central London.
In 1844 the LSWR went back to Parliament to ask for a new Act that would enable them to push their lines right into the heart of the metropolis. The resulting Act of July 1845 authorised a line from Nine Elms to London Bridge, with intermediate stations at Vauxhall and Waterloo Bridge. The company raised £950,000 and began construction. By 1848 the line had reached Waterloo Bridge and the station there — and the one at Vauxhall — was opened on 11 July. The engineering works had cost rather more than expected, so the LSWR directors called a temporary halt to construction. The rest of the line to London Bridge, they decided, could be finished off later.
In the event, of course, the rest of the line never was finished. The terminal has remained at Waterloo Bridge, later renamed just Waterloo, to the present day. For many years, however, the station layout was that of a through station with tracks running on past the platforms. As a result the ever expanding station with its additional lines and platforms came to acquire a notoriously complicated layout. As each new platform was added it was given a new number or name that bore no logical link to the ones next to it. Some were even on a different level to the main platforms.
The confusion that passengers encountered at this old Waterloo station were humorously described by the writer Jerome K. Jerome in his classic book “Three Men in a Boat”. Along with a friend Jerome describes how he tried to catch a train to Kingston from Waterloo.
“We got to Waterloo at eleven, and asked where the eleven-five started from. Of course nobody knew; nobody at Waterloo ever does know where a train is going to start from, or where a train when it does start is going to, or anything about it. The porter who took our things thought it would go from number two platform, while another porter, with whom he discussed the question, had heard a rumour that it would go from number one. The station-master, on the other hand, was convinced it would start from the local.
“To put an end to the matter, we went upstairs, and asked the traffic superintendent, and he told us that he had just met a man who said he had seen it at number three platform. We went to number three platform, but the authorities there said that they rather thought that train was the Southampton express, or else the Windsor loop. But they were sure it wasn't the Kingston train, though why they were sure it wasn't they couldn't say.
“Then our porter said he thought that must be it on the high-level platform; said he thought he knew the train. So we went to the high-level platform, and saw the engine-driver, and asked him if he was going to Kingston. He said he couldn't say for certain of course, but that he rather thought he was. Anyhow, if he wasn't the 11.5 for Kingston, he said he was pretty confident he was the 9.32 for Virginia Water, or the 10 a.m. express for the Isle of Wight, or somewhere in that direction, and we should all know when we got there. We slipped half-a-crown into his hand, and begged him to be the 11.5 for Kingston.
“‘Nobody will ever know, on this line,’ we said, ‘what you are, or where you're going. You know the way, you slip off quietly and go to Kingston.’
“‘Well, I don't know, gents,’ replied the noble fellow, ‘but I suppose some train's got to go to Kingston; and I'll do it. Gimme the half-crown.’
“Thus we got to Kingston by the London and South-Western Railway.
“We learnt, afterwards, that the train we had come by was really the Exeter mail, and that they had spent hours at Waterloo, looking for it, and nobody knew what had become of it.”
Not until a general rebuilding in the 20th century did Waterloo gain its modern form with parallel platforms numbered consecutively.
Meanwhile the SER was progressing with its line from Redstone Hill to the Channel ports. The SER expected that their main business profits would come from goods and passengers heading from London to the ports. Not much traffic was expected from stations along the way. For this reason only one station was built in Surrey: Godstone. As so often, this was something of a misnomer for the station was located 3 miles from the village in the midst of Wealden woodland. As at Woking a hotel was added some years later, though at Godstone it was more by way of a small pub with a couple of rooms.
West of Godstone, the navvies had to build a tunnel through Pound Hill. The tunnel was to be 1,326 yards long, but construction proved to be difficult. Pound Hill was composed of heavy clays interspersed by sandstone boulders and fragmented layers. The work took far longer than expected, so that the navvies’ camp at Seven Acre Wood began to take on some of the attributes of a permanent village. After the work was completed in 1844, the chief engineer, Frederick Walter Simms, wrote a book based on his experiences that he called Practical Tunnelling. The volume became one of the standard reference works for civil engineers and remained continuously in print until 1896.
Back at Reigate, the two railway companies managed to reach an agreement in April 1844 and built a new, joint station to replace their individual stops. By this time a village had sprung up around the railway junction, it was to continue to grow over the coming years and would eventually become a sizeable town.
The economic benefits of having a rail link to the outside world were by this date becoming obvious. Railways could prosper not only by taking over freight and passenger traffic that had previously gone by road or barge, but could actually create traffic for themselves simply by offering a fast, cheap and convenient service. If Woking Common and Godstone stations remained in rural isolation for some years, others did not. The station then known as Reigate was rapidly acquiring a settlement. It began to occur to town councils, landowners and businessmen that they could expect to reap rich profits from a local railway.
In Surrey the first people to wake up to this fact were a group of businessmen in Guildford. They got the support of the town council for a railway line to run from their town to the LSWR station at Woking Heath. Accordingly the Guildford Junction Company (GJC) was formed and moves began to have an Act of Parliament passed. Obviously there would need to be co-operation with the LSWR.
The GJC opened talks with the LSWR with a view to having a platform at Woking Heath dedicated to the GJC line. In the event, the LSWR went much further. The company studied the proposal and recognised the potential profits that might be had from a line to Guildford, and already foresaw that the route could be pushed through the gap in the Downs at Guildford into the lands beyond. They therefore offered to buy out the original investors in the GJC, build the railway and operate it. The business community in Guildford was delighted. They were going to get their railway without needing to go to all the bother of building it or running it. They signed without delay. The line to Guildford opened on 5 May 1845. It proved to be such a success that it was upgraded to a double line in 1847. Two years later the line was pushed on to Godalming. In 1859 the LSWR continued the line through Godalming to Haslemere and so to Portsmouth. The line was thus upgraded to being a major through route with more frequent trains than had been envisaged.
What had happened at Guildford caused something of a sensation. It was now clear that a group of private citizens or a town council could promote a railway venture of interest to themselves in the hope that if they were able to demonstrate the financial viability of the scheme it would be bought up and constructed by a larger company.
It would not be long before dozens of different railway schemes were being promoted by all manner of individuals and organisations who had no real desire to build or run the railway themselves, but were keen to get an existing railway company interested. Most of these schemes resulted in branch lines over only short routes aimed at linking a specific town to the main rail network.
One such scheme in Surrey that proved successful was the Thames Valley Railway. This was formed by W.S. Lindsay, lord of the manor of Shepperton, to link that village to the main rail network. Lindsay was quite open about his intentions not to operate the railway himself but to interest another company in doing so. Shepperton lay north of the LSWR line to Southampton and south of the Great Western Railway (GWR) line through Staines to Reading. Lindsay tried the GWR first, but he found their terms for running the line to be unacceptable, so he turned to the LSWR. They offered more generous terms, but on condition that the new line linked to their main line at Twickenham. Lindsay agreed and the Shepperton branch line opened on 1 November 1864, being dualled in 1878.
Rather less successful, at least at first, was the Caterham Railway Company. In this instance the independent company, backed by local landowners and business interests, actually built the rail line that ran from its terminal at Caterham along the narrow, steeply-sided valley in the Downs to link to the LB&SCR at what is now Purley. The line opened in 1856, but was not a financial success, and the LB&SCR was not interested in buying it. In 1859 the SER offered to take the loss-making railway off the hands of the promoters. The sum paid was barely half what it had cost to build the railway in the first place. The SER, with more experience of running railways, introduced new working practices and managed to scrape a profit. The line would later become more profitable, but for reasons unforeseen in the 1850s.
Meanwhile the large rail companies were pushing ahead with schemes of their own. The most significant of these was the LB&SCR with what was to become known as the Mid-Sussex Line. This began as a line from Croydon to Epsom, opened in May 1847. The LSWR then built a line to Epsom from Wimbledon, opening a second station in the town. This encouraged a consortium from Leatherhead to form the Epsom and Leatherhead Railway in 1856 with a view to persuading one of the larger companies to build an extension stretching the 4 miles to Leatherhead. The company built a single-track line, which opened in 1859 and then quickly sold out to the LSWR. Six years later the LSWR and LB&SCR signed an agreement under which the line to Leatherhead was jointly owned and trains from both networks could use the rails.
Meanwhile, the LSWR announced plans to build a line west from Leatherhead to Guildford, a scheme that would be completed in 1885. The same men who had first raised the idea of a line from Epsom to Leatherhead now began promoting a line from that town to Dorking. The LB&SCR took up the idea and began work in 1867.
The only feasible route for a railway from Leatherhead to Dorking was along the Mole Valley, across land that was owned by Thomas Grissell. Grissell was not only a vastly wealthy businessman but was also the owner of a large construction company that, among other things, was building railway lines elsewhere in the country. Grissell announced that as part of the price for selling his land he wanted to have a railway station built close to his grand house at Norbury Park. Not only that, but he wanted it built to his own designs. The result was the magnificent West Humble station, now Box Hill and West Humble. Now a listed building, the station is a riot of neo-Gothic arches, coloured tiles and patterned brickwork on a truly astonishing scale for what was and remains a little used halt.
Having thus got through the barrier of the North Downs, the LB&SCR decided to extend the line to Horsham, which they did in 1867, and on to other towns in Sussex. This Mid-Sussex Line followed a winding route that no sensible company would have followed if the ambition from the first had been to link Horsham to London, but which had resulted from the piecemeal way in which it was developed.
The completion of this line brought to an end the first rush of railway building across Surrey. The county was now crossed by main lines heading from London to Brighton, Southampton, Portsmouth and Horsham. There would be much later construction work for various reasons, but the initial boom was over.
Chapter 3
The Surrey Industrial Boom
The arrival of the railways made it possible to travel further, faster and cheaper than ever before. This in itself was to have profound consequences for Surrey and the people who lived there, as we shall see, but it was the ability to transport goods and products that had the most immediate and obvious impact on the county. Surrey rapidly experienced a boom in prosperity made possible by the railway.
Dorking was one of the first towns to find that its local industry received a boom from the coming of steam. Since at least the Tudor period, Dorking had been known as the home of a particular type of domestic fowl, the Dorking Hen. This bird was, and is, pure white in colour with a long body and short legs compared to other breeds.
The good folk of Dorking and surrounding villages had long made it their business to produce eggs, for the Dorking Hen is a prolific layer. These eggs were packed in straw, then loaded on to carts and taken north to London where they were sold. When the railway came it was suddenly possible to send eggs to market so fast that they could be served on a London table the same day that they were laid in Dorking. The numbers of eggs leaving Dorking daily increased dramatically.
Moreover, the speed and smoothness of the journey made it worth sending to market not only eggs, but young birds as well. Before the trains came, poulterers in Dorking sent most eggs to market and kept only as many birds as they needed for the laying flock. Now they could profitably keep some birds until they were adult, then send them to market as young fowl suitable for roasting. There was for a while in London a heated dispute as to whether town-bred or country-bred birds were of better eating quality, but it was not long before the public came to prefer the country-bred fowl. Dorking’s poulterers had a new business, and it was booming. The importance of the fowl trade to Dorking is now commemorated by a 20 foot tall metal statue of a Dorking Hen on a roundabout at the junction of the A24 and A25 just east of the town centre. The trade has since declined as mass production of battery chickens in other counties came to dominate the business in the later 20th century.
Dorking was not alone in enjoying a railway-driven business boom. The Tillingbourne stream rises on Leith Hill, then flows northwest through Abinger and Gomshall to Shere and Chilworth after which it empties into the Wey at Shalford. The stretch around Gomshall flows over a sandy bed, which makes this pure water ideal for the growing of watercress. The local farmers had known this for centuries, and had always grown small quantities for local consumption. But then the railway line from Guildford to Reigate opened on 15 October 1849, with a station at Gomshall.
The local farmers noticed, and dammed the Tillingbourne at intervals to produce wide, shallow beds in which watercress could be produced. Several of these remain to this day. In the days before domestic fridges had been invented, watercress had to be fresh to be worth eating. The Gomshall growers became adept at sending their workers out into the wet fields at dawn to pick the cress, having it divided into bunches and set into wooden crates, then sent off to be on sale in London markets by lunchtime.
By 1880 the village was sending some 400 tons of watercress up to London by rail every year. The scale of the trade then remained fairly constant, climbing to around 450 tons by 1939. The Second World War and the upheavals its caused effectively ended the trade and the exports by steam railway. This did not come as so much of a blow to the railways as might be expected. Watercress is a bulky, but low weight freight. The wooden boxes took up a large amount of room both on stations and in wagons, yet the railways charged for freight by weight. Moving watercress was less profitable for the railway companies than almost any other type of industrial or agricultural produce.
Both the Dorking Hens and the Gomshall watercress businesses were located in the Weald, south of the chalky uplands, but the sandy heaths north of the chalk benefited as well. The thin acidic soils were not much good for conventional farming, but they were favourable to the raising of ornamental shrubs that preferred well-drained, light soils. Several nurseries had sprung up in the area to grow such shrubs for the gentry interested in gardening — but it had always been a small scale, specialised business. The age of steam changed that in two dramatic ways. First the building of a railway through the area in the 1850s, expanded with branch lines in the 1860s and 1870s, meant that any shrubs grown in the area could be shipped out speedily to their destination. This meant that the plants were out of the natural soil and in tubs for a much shorter period of time than had ever been possible in the days of cart and canal. The shrubs were much more likely to survive long journeys in a fit condition to take well in their new homes.
Perhaps more important was the fact that railways made it possible for people to live some miles from where they worked, and thus the concept of the suburb was born. For the first time even quite humble city folk had a small garden. And they wanted ornamental plants to grow in them. Business boomed and by 1870 around two tons of plants in pots were leaving the area by rail every day.
It was not only agricultural businesses that benefited from the coming of steam. Although the central hills of Surrey are predominantly chalk, there are sections composed of Upper Greensand, a form of sandstone that is easily worked and highly resistant to heat. It was, therefore, ideal for use as domestic hearthstones. Given that every home in England was heated by open fires until well into the 20th century, the demand for hearthstones was huge. The very first rails laid in Surrey, those of the horse drawn Surrey Iron Railway, had been built to access the quarries at Merstham and Godstone. When steam trains came, the rate of production boomed as well. When gas and electricity began to replace open fires as a form of domestic heating the business declined and had vanished by 1960.
Some businesses were so dependent on the steam trains that they had their own branch lines. Such a one was the chalk extraction works at Betchworth, owned by the Dorking Lime Co. In 1866 a branch was built by the SER from behind the north platform at Betchworth Station to run to the works where it joined the privately run, standard gauge network of tracks within the works themselves. The extensive works not only quarried chalk, but also burnt it into lime — a product useful in all sorts of industrial processes. Rather surprisingly these internal railways, complete with their six steam engines, continued in use until 1960 when motorised trucks took over the tasks. They were, therefore, the last steam engines to be in regular employment in the county.
Another, though smaller, chalk and lime works was also so busy as to deserve its own branch line. This was the Brockham Brick, Stone and Coal Co works at Brockham. The SER opened a side line in 1866. The works also had an internal rail network, though here it was a 2ft gauge light railway. The works closed in 1936. Two other chalk and lime works operated at Merstham and Oxted, both of which had private lines linking them to the public rail network. All of them boomed as a direct result of the age of steam arriving in the county.
The damp, low lying Weald concealed in places a clay substrata that was ideal for making bricks. These had not been much exploited before the age of steam for the simple reason that bricks are heavy to transport, and so could not be taken far over the poor roads of the area. The coming of the railways changed everything and soon there were several booming brickworks in the county. The Sussex Brick Co. opened a large works north of Lingfield which had two private sidings off the Oxted to East Grinstead line. The railway not only carried the bricks out, but brought in the huge quantities of coal needed to fire the brick kilns.
Nutfield also had a brickworks built alongside the railway, as did Godstone, Ockley, Brockham and Shalford. North of the Downs, Epsom had two brickworks in the later 19th century. Both had private sidings, but neither seems to have moved many bricks out by rail. The railways brought in the coal for the firing process but the bricks were mostly used locally in the building boom that was then taking place.
A novel twist to the brickworks-railway combination was provided by the John Earley Cook works just outside Oxshott. This works had a private siding through which coal was brought in and bricks taken out. The unique aspect of the works was the fact that vast quantities of domestic rubbish from London were brought in by rail to be burned on the site. The resulting ash was then mixed in with brick clay to produce a lighter, cheaper form of brick.
There was one industry in Surrey that very definitely avoided the advantages of the age of steam — at least to start with — it was one centred on the banks of the Tillingbourne stream just east of Shalford. Established by the East India Company in the 1600s this works produced gunpowder. No iron or steel was allowed on the site, nor were fires. All the movement of heavy loads of charcoal, sulphur or saltpetre around the site was made in wooden trucks running on wooden tracks with the metal fittings and components made of brass. Perhaps understandably, the management of the gunpowder works wanted little to do with steam railways which not only had high temperature fires throwing out sparks, but relied on steel tracks and iron trucks that might create a spark at any moment.
Similar precautions were taken at the nearby Chilworth Gunpowder Mill, but on at least one occasion they were not enough. On 12 February 1901 one of the workrooms was torn apart by a massive blast that sent a column of smoke hundreds of feet into the air. Working inside the building had been three men, all of whom were killed. Bits and pieces of their bodies were found as much as 100 feet away from the demolished workroom. Pushing a wooden cart past at the time had been three other men, all likewise killed. A subsequent inquiry was held and found that all safety procedures had been in place and were being followed carefully. Perhaps it had just been bad luck.
In 1885 the SER built a siding to supply the works with materials and to take out the finished explosives. Even then, the materials were moved from the siding to the works in the traditional wood and brass vehicles. Not until new forms of explosive, such as cordite, began to be made did steam power enter the works itself. These new explosives were more stable than gunpowder and so accidents were less likely.
A similarly explosive business was opened adjacent to Holmwood Station in 1933. This was the Schermuly Pistol Rocket Works which produced flares, verey lights and similar devices. Gunpowders was brought in by special train in sealed, spark proof trucks. The finished products were taken out again in similarly careful conditions.
Not all industries did well out of the age of steam. One of the first to suffer was the charcoal business. This had been a lucrative trade in the forested Weald and on the wooded lowlands north of the Downs for centuries. Charcoal had been produced on a near industrial scale during Roman times and by the later medieval period was again a prosperous trade. The main market for Surrey charcoal was the local iron industry, but after that collapsed charcoal was shipped to London. There the charcoal was widely used for cooking and craftwork purposes. In the better houses charcoal was used for heating, but more humble dwellings burned logs. And log-cutting was another profitable business in the Surrey woodlands.
The age of steam brought such businesses to a sudden halt. Coal brought down by ship from Newcastle had long been a rival to more local wood and charcoal, but the price difference had not been so great as to give coal the edge. The advent of steam operated railways made coal much cheaper to transport from mine to market. There was a sudden collapse in charcoal and firewood sales to London. As the railways pushed out into Surrey itself, coal became much cheaper across the county. The charcoal business came to a sudden end.
In the later decades of the 19th century, mined coal grew to be the main source of heat in all domestic properties across Surrey. The transport of coal for domestic heating and cooking ranges was to be one of the most profitable aspects of the steam railways for much of their existence. When most homes switched to electricity and gas, the demand for coal slumped and with it profits for the railways with far reaching consequences.