Timekeepers. Simon Garfield

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      Speed records on trains tend to be maintained for a long time: you push the absolute limit for a few miles, and then safety concerns or a basic lack of ambition seals the record shut for decades. The London to Aberdeen run, for example, took 8 hours 40 minutes in 1895 and didn’t get any faster for 80 years. In the mid-1930s it took about 2 hours 20 minutes from London to Liverpool, and we have shaved barely 15 minutes from this. But in the twenty-first century the train is once more beholden to records and speed. The birthplace of the railways has come relatively late to this party; HS2, the first phase of which is due to open in 2026, will cut the journey between London and Birmingham from 1 hour 24 minutes to just 49 minutes.

      Elsewhere in the world, progress has been faster. In Spain in 2010, the 205 mph AVE S-112, a train shaped like and nicknamed ‘The Duck’, cut the time it takes to get from Madrid to Valencia by more than two hours, to 1 hour 50 minutes. In the same year, travellers between St Petersburg and Helsinki managed the cross-border trip in 3 hours 30 minutes, two hours faster than before the Sm6 Allegro arrived from its works in Italy. In China, the CRH380, new in 2011, travelled at 186 mph to cut the journey from Beijing to Shanghai to less than half the journey time in 2010: from 10 hours to 4 hours 45 minutes. And, with a certain inevitability, Japan has gone a little faster than everyone: in April 2015, on a test track near Mount Fuji, its Maglev (‘magnetic levitation’) train, hovering 10cm above the track, carried 49 passengers at a speed of 374 mph, smoothly outgunning the French TGV. It is expected to begin service in 2027 between Tokyo and Nagoya, a journey of 165 miles that it should manage in 40 minutes, half the time of the current Shinkansen bullet train.

      But for the most extraordinary advance of all we need to go back to the birth of the idea of the train, and a sooty dawn in pre-Victorian north-west England.

ii) Was Ever Tyranny More Monstrous?

      On the day it opened in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway revolutionised the way we thought about our lives. The fact that it linked the thriving cotton mills to a major shipping port about 30 miles away is almost incidental. The steam engine both shrunk and expanded the world; it enhanced trade; it hastened the spread of ideas; it fired global industry. And more than any other invention – save the clock itself and possibly the space rocket – the railways changed our appreciation of time.

      The train wasn’t like the computer: its early champions knew fairly well what they were unleashing on the world. Proposing the idea of the Liverpool and Manchester line to prospective backers and nervous crowds in the late 1820s (people thought their lungs would collapse, that cows would fail to milk, that the countryside would be set alight), the line’s secretary and treasurer Henry Booth spoke of how the passenger journey time between the cities, previously only possible by horse-drawn coach over turnpike roads, would be cut in half.⁴ ‘The man of business in Manchester will breakfast at home,’ Booth predicted, ‘proceed to Liverpool by the railway, transact his business, and return to Manchester before dinner.’ (In 1830, dinner was at lunchtime.) Booth, a man who should be more remembered than he is, foretold the impact of the railway far more eloquently than the Stephensons or Brunel. The railway, he correctly suggested, would change ‘our value of time’. ‘Our amended estimate of the occupation of an hour, or a day’ would affect ‘the duration of life itself’. Or, as Victor Hugo would later claim, ‘All the armies in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.’⁵

      The Liverpool and Manchester railway was the biggest mechanised engineering project the world had seen. It was, of course, at that time also the fastest railway in the world, covering the 31 miles in around 2 hours and 25 minutes.⁶ Within a few years of its opening, there were accidents all over the country, but also a huge sense of industrial adventure and release: the destiny of the world’s economies was now hurtling on iron wheels, and the minute hand had found its vital and indispensible purpose.

      British steam engines were being shipped throughout the world. In February 1832 a new publication called the American Rail-Road Journal carried news of a rail alongside the Erie and Hudson canal, and plans for imminent openings in New Jersey, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Passenger railways opened in France in 1832, Ireland in 1834, Germany and Belgium in 1835, and Cuba in 1837. In 1846 the whole of Britain was being dug up or drilled through or laid upon: there were 272 railway acts that year.

      With the openings came another innovation – the passenger timetable. In January 1831, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway dared list only its departure times, although its journey time was shortening. The company now hoped that the trip between the cities ‘is usually accomplished by the First Class carriages [in] under two hours’. The first-class coaches did indeed seem to travel faster – more coal, perhaps a more efficient engine – and there were two distinct schedules: first class, costing 5 shillings each way, ran at 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 4.30 p.m., with late departures for Manchester tradesmen at 5.30 on Tuesdays and Saturdays; second class, costing 3 shillings and sixpence, left at 8 a.m. and 2.30 p.m.

      But what happened if you wished to travel further afield, perhaps from Lancashire to Birmingham or London? This was already possible by the late 1830s, although the competing rail companies – the Grand Junction Railway running north-west from the Midlands, the London and Birmingham Railway, the Leeds and Selby Railway, the York and North Midland Railway – failed to coordinate their schedules to oblige a passenger keen to use more than one line in a day.

      The first popular railway timetable combining several lines appeared in 1839, but carried an inbuilt flaw: clocks throughout Great Britain were not synchronised. Before the railway network few saw the need. If the clocks in Oxford ran 5 minutes and 2 seconds behind London time, or those in Bristol 10 minutes behind, and those in Exeter 14 minutes behind (this was indeed the case with all three westward cities in the 1830s, each enjoying a later sunrise and sunset than London) it was simply a matter of adjusting your timepiece when you arrived.⁷ The clock at the town hall or main church tended to be the master timekeeper for the local community, the time still set according to the midday sun; a relatively static populace cared little for the time elsewhere in the country so long as their own local timepieces ran at the same time. If road or waterway journeys were undertaken, the time differences would either be adjusted en route (some coaching companies provided adjustment lists), or be judged to be commensurate СКАЧАТЬ