Rob Fisher

Entrance to the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden

I visited the London Transport Museum in January.  On display was this letter from “Ill-Used Traveller” to the editor of the Times.

Your excellent suggestion in a leading article this morning to have more frequent trains into the country, in order to develop residential traffic, will, I much fear, have little or no effect with the traffic managers to whose care our travelling convenience and comfort on the Mid Kent line are unfortunately entrusted, unless you can so agitate this matter, so important to so many of us now who live out of town, that Parliament will step in and free the national highway, as the railway now is, from the selfish obstructions thrown in our way by the quarrels of rival companies and other causes.

The letter was written in 1864.  Demands for the government to solve problems go back further than I thought.

Also at the museum I learnt about compensation to watermen on the opening of Westminster Bridge in 1750, Parliamentary trains, and Metro-Land.

Brian Micklethwait

At my personal blog, I have a clutch of British railway viaduct photos, many with trains that you can just about spot!

The usual commentary about such viaducts is all about how much better they were at doing viaducts then, not like it is now, blah blah.  But engineers now do good stuff too, I think.  Better, arguably.  Just not for railways.

I mean, you might just as well say that they were very bad at making vehicles go up steeper gradients in those days.  The only reason they had to build all these viaducts is because railways had to be so very flat.  And that’s now changed, hasn’t it?