BOOKS Romantic landscape with express
REGINALD HERRING
No more with a railway than with a battle can the commander hope to do it again and get it right. A railway throughout its life bears the stamp of its first makers; and on the Great Western, whose chief maker was Brunel, the stamp is especially distinct.
J. C. Bourne published his account of the Great Western in 1846 (Bourne's Great Western Railway, accompanied by 'a plan and section of the railway, a geological map, and by numerous views of the princi- pal viaducts, bridges, tunnels, stations, and of the scenery and antiquities in its vicinity, from drawings taken expressly for this work and executed in lithography', now republished by David and Charles at 12 gns), only five years after the first train had run from London to Bristol. But already he saw that 'There is this particular feature in the ceconomy of railway making in which it differs from the ceconomy of an ordinary manufacturer; a railway must be as perfect as possible at starting . . A ribbon-weaver or lace-maker may at any time convenient to himself purchase expensive but more oeconomical machinery, and produce a better or a cheaper article; but a railway company cannot do this. If their line be not originally well selected, and one capable of being worked cheaply and safely, they can scarcely hope ever effectually to amend it.' In the spring of 1833 Brunel had ridden eastwards from Bristol to select his line. He was then twenty-seven years old. Four years later he was to appoint as Super- intendent of Locomotive Engines a lad not yet twenty-one, and a marvellous appoint- ment it proved, for this was Daniel Gooch. But the Bristol merchants who picked Brunel had made a bolder choice, for they knew his judgment would have to be backed for millions in the money of those days. (The first estimate was that the rail- way would cost £2,800,000 to build, and the real cost was more than twice that.) So this young man set out, accompanied only by a surveyor called Townsend. They rode first over a southerly route through Devizes and Newbury, returning northabout along the Vale of the White Horse. Once the northern line was accepted Brunel was out with a whole team of surveyors, travel- ling by night, directing the work (and try-' ing to pacify landowners) by day, unresting. 'Often,' said his son, 'he sat up writing letters and reports until it was almost time for his horse to come round to take him on the day's work'.
The railway that Brunel made comes to us, in Bourne's Great Western Railway, with the freshness of morning. Bourne's lithographs have made the book rare and dear; like Ackermann's Oxford, it is broken up for the print-sellers. What we now have from David and Charles, though a handsomely produced book—like their many other graceful reproductions of clas- sic works otherwise unobtainable-o-is not a complete facsimile. The plates are grouped together; and sections of Bourne's book which bear scarcely at all on his theme have been left out. Readers will, in any event, turn first to the plates, and rightly. But Bourne was not only an illustrator, and his text shows his sympathy with what Brunel was about. He explains how the line was engineered to have only one summit, at Swindon, and to be evenly graded through- out, apart from the two 'inclined planes' at Dauntsey and Box.
'The unusually favourable gradients, the absence of objectionable curves, and the high proportion of passenger traffic' pointed to high-speed working; and the stability this demanded led to the broad gauge. Why more passengers? 'The existence of such a city as Bath, or such a town as Chelten- ham, supported entirely by persons living upon their incomes, is peculiar to the west. These circumstances held out promise of a class of passengers, if not so numerous, yet indulging in higher comforts than the general population of such cities as Birmingham and Manchester.' No wonder Lord Icken- ham could praise the reposeful gentility of Paddington, and its ladies in tailored suits who look like horses.
The Great Western, as Bourne describes it, is a railway running through a gentle- mal's landscape, bordered left and right with country seats, and with antiquities and curios;ties. On the left, as your train pulls out of Paddington, are fine views across to the woods of Holland Park, and to Worm- wood Scrubs, 'the well-known cavalry ex- ercising ground.' Slough is a station of marked importance because the Sovereign herself makes use of it: in the plate, an escort of Household Cavalry can be seen waiting for the Royal train to arrive. (This was before the days of the Windsor branch; now closed to Royal trains, forcing the Sovereign back on Slough.) But Bourne's plates for the most part show, not the view from the carriage win- dows, but the railway itself and Brunel's engineering works. Two of the finest litho- graphs show two of the greatest works. 'The Maidenhead Bridge' is seen from down- stream: across thee picture stride the two long, shallow spans — thought when first built to be impossibly daring and sure to fall into the river. A toy-like train, cross- ing the right-hand span, gives scale. Yet the whole subject-matter is compressed into a horizontal band, taking perhaps a quarter of the picture-space: all below is river, all above cloud. The railway sweeps across. How different is 'Box Tunnel, west front' the strong and stately design of the tunnel- mouth, the upright form of a tall fantastical signal echoed by the signalman beside it, one-tenth its height; and onto this formal scene the down express exploding out of the darkness!
Both Maidenhead Bridge and the tunnel- mouths at Box remain to be admired, and so indeed do most of the major works that Bourne shows: the Wharncliffe viaduct at Hanwell, the plain, massive arches that carry the line high over Chippenham, the delicate footbridges for Sydney Gardens in Bath and the broad sweep through the city. Brunel's most eccentric tunnel-mouth—out- side Bristol: some of a castellated front was destroyed in a landslip, and Brunel, deciding that the effect• was of picturesque ruin, trained ivy up it—has gone. But his original terminus at Bristol survives, though now only a grubby backwater of Temple Meads station: the paint peeling from the seventy-four foot clear span of his hammer- beam roof.
Bourne's gift is to make the Great Western both old and new to us. Many of his scenes are familiar to those who know the line—though he has surprises even for them: does Keynsham station really con- tain a tesselated Roman pavement taken from the villa at Newton St Loe, and re- presenting 'Orpheus playing upon his lyre, and around him a circle of beasts, leopards, stags, and bulls, supposed to be attracted by the harmony'? What is unfamiliar is Bourne's sense of the railway as a new but wholly congruous part of the pastoral or, still more, the romantic landscape. Of the Great Western lithographs, the 'View from above the tunnel, Box' shows this most clearly. But hear Bourne put his own case.
'Let the reader' (he writes) 'place him- self in imagination upon the margin of those broad dales of England, such for ex- ample as that of Barnsley in Yorkshire, of Stafford, or the Vale of Berks, up each of which a great passenger railway is carried, and over which the eye commands an ex- tensive view. In the extreme distance a white line of cloud appears to rise from the ground, and gradually pass away into the atmosphere. Soon a light murmur falls upon the ear, and the glint of polished metal appears from time to time among the trees. The murmur soon becomes deeper and more tremulous. The cloud rises of a more fleecy whiteness, and its conversion into the trans- parent air is more evident. The train rushes on: the bright engine rolls into full view, now crossing the broad river, now thread- ing the various bending of the Railway, followed by its dark, serpent-like body. The character of the sound is changed. The pleasant murmur becomes a deep intermit- ting boom, the clank of the chains and carriage-fastenings is heard, and the train rolls along the rail with a resonance like thunder .
Romantic Landscape with Express! Even today, when the Bristol Pullman, passing Shrivenham at ninety, reaches that short stretch of track where experienced pas- sengers know they can drink their coffee without a spill, the express still fits the landscape, following Brunel's beautifully graded line across the Berkshire vale. But, oddly, the clearest picture Bourne evokes is a Landscape with Horseman: of a dark young man riding out in the spring, pick- ing his way across the country on which he was to impose his masterpiece, 'as per- fect as possible at starting'; the Great Western Railway gradually taking form in his minds
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