Chapter 2 - The First Three Lines: London & Birmingham; Bedford; Dunstable

Summary

The Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened 1830, showed the way England was to go. The Stockton & Darlington Railway had indeed been in operation for five years, but it was still chiefly a mineral line, and now it was the turn of the big cities. Manchester needed faster transport to bring in the cotton and to take out the manufactured goods. Liverpool was a port with an increasing capacity for shipping; a railway connecting the two was an obvious necessity. The interests of the big cities could be served by (to quote L. T. C. Rolt) ‘Self-propelled vehicles of great weight covering long distances at high speed on rail-prescribed courses’. The business-houses of London wished to be connected with the ports of Bristol and Southampton and with the manufacturing centre of Birmingham. Thus by 1833, the two Rennies and Robert Stephenson had surveyed rival routes between London and Birmingham and were waiting the decision of the Board of Directors. The Board cautiously engaged another engineer of repute, J. U. Rastrick (who later built the London & Brighton Railway) to give his opinion on the two proposed routes, and he eulogised Stephenson’s by saying ‘Let nothing deter you from executing the work in the most substantial manner and on the most scientific principles so that it may serve as a model for all future railways and become the wonder and admiration of Posterity’.

Later in the same year Robert Stephenson staked out the route, and before the first train ran, five years later, he was to walk the distance between London and Birmingham fourteen times. The first turf was cut near Chalk Farm in 1834 and the railway is of particular interest to Bedfordshire because it came so close (its station just across the border in Linslade was called Leighton Buzzard) and the branches it threw off from Bletchley in 1846 and Leighton Buzzard in 1848 were the first lines to serve this county.

It cost the company ￡500,000 just to get their bill through Parliament and to buy off opposition, and work all along the line started in 1835, employing 20,000 men.