"Carriages Upon the Road"

In the echoing train shed behind the grimy Greek fac,ade of London's Euston Station, Driver Ambrose Grant climbed into the cab of locomotive Number 5508. The bells of London joined the shrilling of train whistles to welcome a new year. Guard Arthur Smith switched his lamp from red to green, waved the "go ahead" to Driver Grant, and swung into the guard's van. At two minutes past midnight, Number 5508 chuffed out of the station for the run to Crewe. It pulled the first nationalized train to leave London.

Henceforth the railway system which handles more passengers than any other in the world would be owned & operated, along with all other public transport, by the British government. For about $4 billion worth of shares, railway shareholders received an equal amount of new gilt-edged securities bearing 3% interest guaranteed by the government; the change was not as bad as many had feared.

Age of the Cock. The vast machine which now huffed & puffed for British Socialism was a monument to the steam-powered, grandly gambling free enterprise which had made Victorian England rich. It started in the 1780s, when a friend wrote to James Watt about a fellow inventor: "He has mentioned to me a new scheme which ... he is afraid of mentioning to you for fear of you laughing at him. It is no less than drawing carriages upon the road with Steam Engines. ... He says . . . that there is a great deal of Money to be made by it."

One of the first to discover the truth of this conjecture was a Yorkshire linen draper. Shrewd, crude George Hudson, who married the boss's daughter, came into a -L-30,000 legacy and swelled it, temporarily, into a railway fortune. In Hudson's heyday, he was able to play with $120 million of Britons' money./- "There he was," said a bitter rival, "crowing like a cock upon his own dunghill. . . ."

The "Railway King" teamed up with great technicians like George Stephenson, spread arteries of iron through the Northeast and Midlands. Wrote the weekly John Bull: "The whole face of the Kingdom is to be tattooed with these odious deformities . . . the noise and stench of locomotive steam-engines are to disturb the quietude of the peasant, the farmer and the gentleman. ... If [railroads] succeed they will . . . destroy all the relations which exist between man and man . . . and create, at the peril of life, all sorts of confusion and distress."

Era of Competition. After soaring speculation came the crash; British railways settled down to healthy competition. In World War I competing railways had to cooperate, under national control. Then Britain's 123 lines were amalgamated into four great groups (the London, Midland & Scottish, the London & North Eastern, the Great Western, and the Southern). A mellow, golden age began for travelers on British trains. Unlike their U.S. counterpart, British railways have consistently made money from passengers, consequently gave them attentive service. British first-class compartments were among the most comfortable in the world. Dining cars offered deferential waiters, seats without queuing and even good food. The management provided such extra amenities as luncheon baskets and hot water bottles.

The gigantic strains of World War II changed all that. Barnacles of grime hid the chocolate and gold of Great Western carriages, the maroon of the L.M.S. Overage locomotives wheezily pulled overlong trains. Sixty-five hundred passenger carriages, 200,000 "goods wagons" (doll-size freight cars) were war casualties. Lamented Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton in 1946: "Those dingy railway stations, those miserable unprepossessing restaurants, all this apparatus for sleeping and eating make one ashamed. . . . The railways are a disgrace. . . ."

Most Britons realized that Dalton was exaggerating (in the hope of cutting the price the government would have to pay for the railways). Many prewar amenities (reserved seats, cross-Channel sleeping cars) were slowly coming back. At any rate, as bureaucracy took over, some reassuring anachronisms remained.

As in George Hudson's day, when landowners exacted hard terms from the companies for permission to let their green hills be overrun by steel and smoke, the Duke of Beaufort still has the right at will to stop any trains of the Great Western at Badminton. The Duke of Marlborough enjoys the same privilege at Blenheim.

/- Hudson became important enough to consort with Britain's great. Once he helped the Duke of Wellington's sister out of a railway share "difficulty." The duke asked the rough Yorkshireman how he could return the favor. "You might," suggested Hudson, "call on my daughter at school, where t' girls give 'er cawld shawlder." The hero of Waterloo personally delivered a bouquet to Anne Hudson, for whom many cawld shawlders warmed thereafter.

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