The London and Birmingham Railway

The textile moguls of Manchester and Liverpool engaged the Stephensons to complete their link to the capital.

1838

Queen Victoria 1837-1901

Furness No. 3, designed by Edward Bury, Manager of the Locomotive Department on the L&BR. This pioneering 0-4-0 locomotive served on the Furness Railway from 1846 to 1899. Bury introduced similar locomotives to the London and Birmingham Railway: though Robert Stephenson built the line, his competitor in locomotive design provided the motive power. Furness No. 3 is now preserved at the National Railway Museum in York.

Introduction

After the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was linked to Birmingham by the Grand Junction Railway, it made sense for the business tycoons of the North West to extend this exhilarating new form of transport to London, and George and Robert Stephenson were given the job.

by Clay Lane

THE London and Birmingham Railway opened on September 17th, 1838, connecting Euston to Curzon Street via Rugby and Coventry in five and a half hours. At Curzon Street, passengers could change to the Grand Junction Railway for Manchester and Liverpool, whose cotton-merchants and mill-owners had paid for the link to the capital.

The railway’s engineers, George Stephenson and his son Robert, eventually secured Parliamentary approval with generous compensation payments to landowners and some re-routing, but even so, until 1844 trains were not hauled out of the capital by fire-breathing locomotives, but winched out by rope as far as Camden over a mile away, because of fears over smoke and noise on the steep incline.

Construction began on June 1st, 1834. The railway took five and half million pounds and four years to build,* and was not quite complete by Queen Victoria’s coronation on 28th June, 1838, owing to the troublesome Kilsby tunnel near Rugby. A stagecoach bridged the gap for the historic day.

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Measuring Worth would suggest that the ‘opportunity cost’ (basically, the hit taken by the economy) of a £5.5m project in 1837 would be roughly £600m today. HS2, a proposed upgrade to the line intended to cut the journey time from 81 minutes to 49, was expected to cost the taxpayer about £30bn in September 2015 (Independent).

Précis

In 1837, wealthy merchants of Liverpool and Manchester who had made their money in textiles engaged the Stephensons to establish a railway connection all the way to London, with a line from Birmingham to the capital. It was completed in 1838, just too late for Victoria’s coronation in June, and opened that September at a cost of over £5.5m.

Sevens

Suggest answers to this question. See if you can limit one answer to exactly seven words.

Who were the chief financial backers of the L&BR?

Suggestion

Wealthy businessmen in Northwest England’s textile industry.

Jigsaws

Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.

Businessmen in the Northwest wanted a railway to London. Their money came from the textile industry. They employed the Stephensons.

Clay Lane The Copybook

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