Railways, Hotels, and Tourism in Great Britain 1839-1914

Abstract

The original purpose of the development of railways in Britain was for the carriage of heavy freight, above all coal. Though passengers were conveyed in horse-drawn coaches on one or two of them, that was an insignificant part of their business. The Stockton & Darlington Railway, opened in 1825, provided for the regular carriage of passengers too, somewhat more extensively; but it kept its steam locomotives for the coal traffic, leaving the coaches still to be hauled by horses. It was the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, that first surprised the world (and itself also) by its immediate success in transporting passengers on a really large scale. In the first year of operation, it carried four times as many passengers as could have been conveyed by all the coaches between the two cities, if every place in them had been taken.' This was not the experience of one company alone. Over the next twenty years the same was true of nearly all the larger railways in Britain. It was not until 1852 that the receipts from freight traffic in the United Kingdom surpassed those from passengers. By that time, the railways had driven the horse-drawn coaches off all the principal trunk roads in England, as well as most of those in Wales and Scotland. They did so because their charges were lower, their services quicker and more frequent. The new means of travel was generally though not universally admired and approved of, but it raised some difficulties, which the railways had to take into account. One merit of the coach, for many of its passengers, had been that it started out from a well-known inn at the centre of a town, called at others on its way, and arrived at another at its journey's end. Those inns might be good or bad (there was a discordant chorus of opinion on that matter), but they were all centrally placed, convenient both for passengers and their