and inefficient way to exchange mail, yet the system was used throughout Victorian times and well into the twentieth century, until 1971.
Throughout the era, the volume of post continued to increase thanks to a uniformity imposed by Sir Rowland Hill, who published his pamphlet Post Office Reform in the year Victoria came to the throne. Hill saw that, thanks to the railways, mail could be distributed with increasing ease across the nation. If the cost was kept low more people than ever would use the service, he predicted. By 1840 the Penny Black stamp, bearing the profile of Queen Victoria and snipped from a sheet with scissors, came into use. Within a few years the first Christmas card was sent. By the mid-1850s pillar boxes were appearing on street corners to aid the collection of mail, and by Victoria’s death there were some 32,500 pillar boxes in the UK. Without the age of the train, it is difficult to see how the postal service would have proliferated.
© 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.
Initially, the town was bounded by walls and fishermen lived cheek by jowl with one another, crammed into streets known as The Rows. For decades it was The Rows that gave Yarmouth its defining features, and they expanded to fill every available inch. Several wider roads ran roughly parallel with the waterfront. Narrower passages extended from those roads at right angles, creating a medieval grid that incorporated housing for rich and poor alike.
The Rows were so narrow that a law was passed to ensure doors opened inwards rather than outwards, to avoid injury to passers-by. Daylight and privacy were at a premium for the inhabitants. Drains that acted as open sewers ran down The Rows, with good community health dependent on prevailing winds and driving rain to drive the steady outpouring of sewage into the sea.
Author Charles Dickens was struck by the bunched-up quaintness:
A Row is a long, narrow lane or alley quite straight, or as nearly as maybe, with houses on each side, both of which you can sometimes touch at once with the fingertips of each hand, by stretching out your arms to their full extent.
Now and then the houses overhang and even join above your head, converting the row so far into a sort of tunnel or tubular passage. Many picturesque old bits of domestic architecture are to be found among the rows. In some rows there is little more than a blank wall for the double boundary. In others the houses retreat into tiny square courts where washing and clear starching was done.
Eventually Yarmouth’s population outgrew the confines of the thirteenth-century town walls and, led by the example of wealthy merchants, spilled over on to nearby land formed when the seaways silted up.
Bradshaw’s guidebook mentions to the town’s fishing industry, also making reference to The Rows:
© Mary Evans Picture Library/Francis Frith
Great Yarmouth, Row Number 60, 1908.
© John Worrall/Alamy
A steam train passes Weybourne windmill on the North Norfolk Railway connecting Sheringham with Holt.
© Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
The Jetty, Great Yarmouth
The old town contains about 150 streets or passages, locally called rows, extending from east to west, in which many remains of antiquity may still be traced … the inhabitants are chiefly engaged in the mackerel, herring or deep sea fisheries which are here prosecuted to a very great extent with much success.
Yet it makes little reference to the holiday trade which was by then beginning to boom. Great Yarmouth had long been a destination for a few well-heeled tourists who enjoyed the fresh air and the perceived benefits of sea water.
It was the arrival of trains that fired up the holiday trade, with trippers coming from London and other cities to sample the delights of the east coast. Without the onset of train travel, it’s doubtful that the national passion for a trip to the seaside would ever have taken root, for travel by coach was slow and expensive by comparison. The town’s first station, known as Yarmouth Vauxhall, opened in 1844, and so popular was Great Yarmouth as a destination that one estimate insists more than 80,000 people visited the resort just two years after that station opened.
Great Yarmouth was once served by four separate train lines, and a clutch of town centre stations and no fewer than 17 other stations were spread around the borough. It was such a popular destination that the Great Eastern Railway produced postcards featuring views of Great Yarmouth to sell to its passengers.
When a suspension bridge collapsed on 2 May 1845, killing 79, the dead surely included some
