The London, Brighton, & South Coast page 2

The Crystal Palace was opened in 1854, and to it the branch was run from Sydenham, which began working on the 10th of June in that year, then the only means of access by railway. The continuation of that branch to New Wandsworth opened on the 1st of December 1856; on the 29th of March 1858 the line was opened to Battersea, afterwards Battersea Pier, a passenger station, like New Wandsworth, that no longer exists; two years afterwards it reached Pimlico, and soon after that it was at Victoria. Pimlico has gone, like many other stations, for there is no company that has made more changes in its stations and their names. Dartmouth Arms became Forest Hill; Jolly Sailor, Norwood Junction; Godstone Road, Caterham Junction and now Purley; Greyhound Lane, on the line from Croydon to Balham, opened in 1862, has become Streatham Common. Yapton, between Barnham and Ford, has gone; so has Woodgate, between Chichester and Ford; so has old Littlehampton, between Angmering and Ford; so has Keymer Junction, and quite a number of old stations have been absorbed in new ones, the last and largest being Victoria.

In 1847 the branch was opened from Croydon to Epsom. This went on to Leatherhead in 1859. Meanwhile Horsham had been reached through Three Bridges in 1848; from Horsham to Petworth had been opened in 1859, and from Hardham Junction, near Pulborough, to Ford in 1863. From Petworth to Midhurst the connection was made in 1866, but the endeavour to reach Southampton having failed, the line was run south from there to Chichester in 1881 to form the western boundary. All that remained to be done on this side was to join up between Leather-head and Horsham in 1867, and the company obtained their Mid-Sussex route to Portsmouth.

In 1865 the line was opened from Sutton to Epsom Downs. This gave the company a route to the Derby, etc., up to then a monopoly of the South Western, and it went right on to the course, an improvement of which the public were not slow to take advantage. Seven other racecourses are on the Brighton system, Lewes, Lingfield, Plumpton, Gatwick, Brighton, Portsmouth, and Goodwood, so that the racing folks, and the horses, add an appreciable item to its revenue.

The line to Guildford from Horsham through Cranleigh was also opened in 1865. On the other side the route to Eastbourne started with the line from Eastbourne to Hailsham as far back as 1849, and the line from Lewes to Uckfield nine years later. These joined at Redgate Mill in 1880, the Uckfield and Groombridge line having been completed in 1868. The next step was to connect Groom-bridge with Oxted, the Oxted & Croydon being the joint property of the Brighton and the South Eastern. Thus the system serves Surrey and Sussex with just a little strip of Kent and a corner of Hampshire; and you are told by its coat of arms that its chief towns are London, Hastings (the Cinque Port), Portsmouth (with the moon and star), and Brighton (the two dolphins), which is in the county of Sussex (the shield of martlets on which the inescutcheon of Brighton is borne).

It starts in Middlesex, at Victoria, and its trains have run for brief periods into Cannon Street and into Padding-ton, and they also appear north of the Thames under a partnership in a railway that has no shareholders, no loans or debentures, and publishes no accounts. In 1836 there was incorporated the Birmingham, Bristol & Thames Junction Railway from Harlesden Green to the Kensington Canal, which entered the Thames at Chelsea Creek. The engineer and projector was William Hosking, and it was his intention to continue the line east from Kensington Crescent to Knightsbridge as the terminus, and south to Wandsworth so as to join up the North Western, Great Western, and South Western. On its way from Harlesden it ran under the Regent's canal to cross the Great Western on the level, and the arch by which it did so, now blocked up, can be seen on the right hand as you leave Paddington, just as you pass under the West London Railway bridge.

After a precarious infancy it became the property, in 1840, of the Great Western and North Western, who used it as their link between north and west. They did away with the level crossing, and brought the line over the canal and over the railway and made a junction with the Great Western metals on the south side; and they changed its cumbrous name to The West London. As no one cared about the part south of the junction, there was no hurry in finishing the line, and it became a stock subject for Punch to print paragraphs about, and came in useful for the atmospheric trials and similar things. In 1863 it was completed to Addison Road to meet the West London Extension that went on from there with the mixed gauge to Clapham Junction.

Of this line the North Western owns a third of the capital, the Great Western a third, the South Western a sixth, and the Brighton a sixth; and there is no rolling stock, the West London being, officially, worked by the Extension which is worked by the owners. The Brighton was the company most interested in the matter, as they had no other route across the Thames, while the South Western could get across more conveniently farther up, and the other companies were a long time finding out what could be done with this useful link, though they put certain restrictions on their junior partners.

Through the Thames Tunnel (that is the old tunnel of the Brunels) runs the East London, by which the Brighton also crosses the river. This line is leased to the Great Eastern, the Brighton, the South Eastern & Chatham, and the Underground, and the reason of all this is coals. It is down the lift at Whitechapel and through the tunnel that the coals come south. People who complain about the expenses of the Brighton forget that it runs to no coalfield and pays for the freight of all the fuel it uses, which means that it has to pay maybe half a sovereign a ton more than the north-going lines; and half a sovereign per ton represents about £125,000 per annum, equal to £1, 2s. 6d. in dividend on the ordinary shares. Coals, household and otherwise, and heavy goods, it deals with also at Deptford, as it does miscellaneous freight at Battersea, its two riverside terminals.

It has its ports, of course, but they are not large. The most important of these is Newhaven; Shoreham is in a small way; Littlehampton, from which the company's steamers used to go to the Channel Islands and Honfleur, does but little trade; and Portsmouth is mainly used for communication with the Isle of Wight. At one time something was to be done with Langston Harbour, the trains being run on to the Carrier and ferried across Spithead to Bembridge, but that clumsy-looking boat was useless in anything of a breeze, and is chiefly remembered as a curiosity up Newhaven river. In short, though the Brighton serves every seaside place between Hastings and Southsea, its only port worth mentioning is Newhaven; and altogether it deals with only about 1½ million tons of merchandise and 3 million tons of minerals, which together produce under £900,000 out of a revenue of nearly 3½ millions.

The Brighton is what most people think a railway ought to be. Its passenger element is predominant, and its goods trains and coal trains do not obtrusively interfere with its passenger service. In merchandise traffic the public take no interest, and will not understand its importance to the company's welfare; and nearly all the talk is of passenger engines, passenger trains, and passenger fares.

It depends, then, on its passengers, and it really does its best for them; and the way it brings its patrons into London and distributes them in the evening to the country places it has encouraged throughout its territory by meansof its season-ticket system, deserves more praise than it gets. The policy of the season ticket is clear enough. In the first place, it secures the holder for the line and ensures a regular load for the trains; in the second place, the difference between its cost and that of the necessary ordinary tickets is the sprat that catches many a mackerel. It means that the holder's family, the friends of the holder's family, and the tradesmen who supply that family will all become customers of the line.

The revenue from the Brighton season tickets averages £643 for each of the 487 miles of its system. How it comes to be possessed of such a mileage, considering that the distance from Victoria to Brighton is 50 miles 52 chains, and from London Bridge only 21 chains more, is rather a puzzle, until it is remembered that it has no less than seven outlets to the south coast, ten coastal termini, and a road right across the middle from Tunbridge Wells to Guildford. The main line is the easiest south of London, rising to Merstham, dropping to Horley, rising to Balcombe, dropping to cross the Ouse viaduct and rising to the Clayton tunnel, the longest grades being 1 in 264. Out of the fifty miles it rises generally for thirty with a few short lengths that are rather steep, the worst being the 1 in 64 for three-quarters of a mile to cross the Thames. The other roads are not so favourable. There are gradients of 1 in 60 between Sydenham and the Crystal Palace, and between Sutton and Epsom on the Portsmouth Road, and the worst is the two-mile rise of 1 in 50 between Mayfield and Heathfield on the eastern boundary, south of that little spur line where the engines go to become cold and dead and covered with leaves like the babes in the wood.

The old troubles due to the South Eastern using the same track to Redhill were done away with when the new line was made from South Croydon to Earlswood, a pretty piece of engineering with its substantial bridges and deep cuttings and the new Merstham tunnel of 2113 yards, 283 yards longer than the old one though not the longest on the line. Two tunnels, both of the same length, 2266 yards, are a little longer, these being Oxted and Clayton, the latter of which was lighted by gas until the accident there in 1861, to which we owe the introduction of lights into railway carriages. The widening of the line to Croydon has also had a good effect on the running, which will be still further improved by the changes at Clapham Junction to clear the way for the full operation of the new methods introduced in the transformation of Victoria.

Old Victoria, with its wonderful arrangement by which every line seemed to cross every other line, covered 8½ acres; the new Victoria covers nearly 16. It is 320 ft. wide, 1500 ft. long, and has 2¼ miles of platform. In its making the features that will be best remembered were the driving of the piles over the old circulating area, 1200 pine balks 14 in. square and from 38 ft. to 45 ft. in length driven down with a 27 cwt. monkey to give a firm foundation for the new offices and the hotel extension on the brashy, treacherous ground where there used to be the basin of the canal; the damming of the Grosvenor Canal at Ebury Bridge, and the filling up of its bed; and the clearance of the eight acres of land along the Buckingham Palace Road before the building of the handsome wall and noble arch that are among the sights of London.

The lofty, well-lighted booking hall and waiting and refreshment rooms are of a new type; and the circulating area of over half an acre is equal to more than double the space owing to the admirable arrangement of lifts and subways by which the luggage disappears below as soon as labelled in the hall and only comes into view again opposite the van in the train. Worked in the same way is the capacious cloak-room with its 28-ft. counter and partitioned shelves that would very greatly have astonished the stationmaster at Bath who began the left luggage system seventy years ago. In short, the transit of the porter with the truck is invisible at Victoria.

As is the fashion nowadays, there is a clock-face indicator - eighteen faces, one to each platform - and an inquiry office to relieve the booking-clerks and ticket-men from the seeker after knowledge whose mission in life is to block the way. And the clearing of the platforms half-way by the Eccleston Bridge prevents half the arriving crowd from hindering the departing.

With platforms of such length, and three sets of rails between them in the outer half, the eighteen trains thus accommodated can be worked in and out without delay. The thirteen lines become five outside the station and over the Grosvenor Bridge, which used to be the widest we had, and has been further widened by the Brighton on one side and the Chatham on the other. The fifth line is a carriage and engine road from the sheds, and soon after the bridge is crossed the roads become the standard four.

When Mr. C. L. Morgan was planning the new station, which took seven years to complete and cost over a million of money, the statistics he collected showed that the greatest number of trains dealt with in a day was 700, that the old station was used by 18 millions of people in a year, of whom 58,474 passed through in the twenty-four hours during which the count was made; and he has doubled the accommodation and more than doubled the facilities, quite irrespective of the gain made by the new signalling.

This is on Sykes's electro - mechanical principle, first used at St. Enoch's. The electrical levers being smaller than the mechanical, the signalman has them more easily within his reach, and, there being no signal wires, the cabins can be half the size of the corresponding ones of the old style. So compact is the arrangement that it is difficult to understand how so much can be got into the space. There are three cabins, the North Box, the South Box, and the Shunting Box. The North Box, which is 28 ft. by 10 ft., contains no less than 106 levers, of which 83 are electrical; the South Box is 60 ft. by 14 ft., and contains 269 levers, of which 163 are electrical; the small Shunting Box, 16 ft. by 12 ft., has 22 levers, of which half are electrical. The man in the North Box is the watchman of the station, it is his duty to observe and control the whole of the platform movements; while the man in the South Box does the sectionising, and the Shunting Box deals with the marshalling in the sidings, where a prominent feature is the big turntable 60 ft. in diameter. All the passenger roads have electrical fouling bars distributed in such a way that every train standing in the station must be on one or more of them, and these control the signals for opening or closing the road, a novel feature being the movable diamond crossings worked from the South Box, the movements of which are also detected by the signals. In each box is a plan of the station, and there is also an indicator with a double row of miniature arms, nine in a row, the upper arms being for the inner station, the lower arms for the outer. The inner home signals have distants below them, and if the road is full up, both work, if only half the road is engaged, the upper one is down. The signals have what is known as a red banner carried on a disk with an opal glass at the back, behind which is an oil-lamp that can burn for a week, if necessary, without attention; and the opal glass allows the signal to be seen as well by night as by day. The semaphore signals are pulled off by an electric motor. In the illuminated signals the spindle is not in the centre, and consequently the banner moves back to normal as soon as the current is broken. The neatness and quickness of it all need not be enlarged upon. On the first day the new signalling came into operation there was confusion owing to the fouling bars requiring adjustment, and passengers learnt to their sorrow what a railway without signals was like; but this was soon put right, and there has been no trouble since.