Karen Farrington - Great Victorian Railway Journeys - How Modern Britain was Built by Victorian Steam Power

© Royal Mail Group Ltd/The Bridgeman Art Library

A parcel-sorting centre on the Great Western Railway.

There were victims that fell to the age of rail, including stagecoaches, a sound road system built by Turnpike Trusts that eventually went out of the business, numerous ancient sites ploughed up for rail beds, and the rural economy. But the trains brought progress apace. At Victoria’s death, The Times contemplated the achievements won in her lifetime and in its first breath addressed the expansion of railways.

Viewing that reign in its incidents, what a chronicle it offers of great national achievement, startling inventions and progress in every direction.

The first railway was constructed before Victoria came to the throne but the universal development in the appliance of steam and electricity took place in her time and it profoundly altered the conditions of political and social life.

More than just a method of getting from A to B, the railways imbued the country from top to bottom with a sense of ‘can do’ that had for the most part been sorely lacking. No aspect of life was left untouched by trains, and the interwoven railway lines that webbed the country were springboards for still more social and economic progress in the twentieth century.

There’s an argument to say that every train trip of the nineteenth century fell into the bracket of ‘great Victorian railway journeys’, for there were sights, sounds, smells and tastes that are rarely re-created today. More than a series of sentimental journeys in pastoral England, the following five expeditions echo the eccentricities and evolution of Victorian railways, glimpsing an age of lines and locomotives the legacy of which is still evident today.

At Fenchurch Street Station.

© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

THE GREAT WESTERN RAILWAY TERMINUS AT PADDINGTON STATION.

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