TAKE THE TRAIN FOR THE BOAT THE RISE AND FALL OF THE BOAT TRAIN
The relationship between trains and boats goes back a long way. In that cradle of railways, North East England, the very earliest plateways and tramways were built to move coal from the mines to either a canal or direct to the coast for onward transport by barge or ship.
Even when railways started to be developed for wider purposes, transport by water was still important. The basic roads of the early 1800s were not designed for moving heavy equipment such as steam engines, with the easiest way to move these from the point of construction to a new railway often involving water – be this canal, coastal shipping or sometimes a combination of both. Robert Stephenson’s famous Rocket, built at Newcastle in 1829, for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway is a good example. After initial testing at nearby Killingworth, the locomotive was dismantled before being hauled overland to Carlisle for onward transport a short distance by canal and then by sea to Liverpool. There Rocket was put back together before going on to triumph in the Trials. Over a third of century later, in 1865, the Talyllyn Railway in mid-Wales received its first locomotive, Talyllyn, by sea from the Whitehaven works of Fletcher Jennings to nearby Aberdovey.
Ironically the railways would go on to seriously erode the role of water transport, especially inland canals because of the much faster journey times they could offer. While the effect on coastal shipping was less dramatic, here too railways were often more competitive. But this article is concerned with how rail and marine worked together particularly for the movement of people.
Steamer services came to be operated by most of the larger railway companies, effectively being treated as extensions of the train service. However, they were remarkably diverse from luxury offerings like ‘The Golden Arrow’ to the much more mundane. In the latter camp were surely the two-coach ‘push-pull’ trains from Brockenhurst to Lymington Pier by means of which you could connect with a ferry to the Isle of Wight. In a slightly different category were the ocean liner feeder services to the major ports such as Southampton and Liverpool. While some, like the Lymington branch trains, were ordinary services which happened to serve a port, many took the form of dedicated trains, often for boat passengers only, epitomised by that institution, now all but lost to the modern railway, ‘the boat train’.
The first passenger trains connecting with a shipping service appear to have been as early as September 1834 when the Leeds & Selby Railway offered through tickets to Hull from Leeds. Trains connected at Selby with boats of the Selby Packet Company along the River Humber, although the tidal nature of the river seriously affected reliability with the boat often running aground! Rather surprisingly, the first ‘international’ train connections were on the 3½-mile long London & Blackwell Railway where passengers transferred from ordinary services to steamers for the Continent at Blackwell Pier. The trains were unusual, initially being cable worked over a 5ft gauge track, until converted to conventional locomotive haulage and re-gauged in 1849. Meanwhile shipping services across the English Channel between Dover and Calais had started as early as 1821with a paddle steamer. However, it was not until the South Eastern Railway reached Folkestone in 1843, and Dover a year later, that travel by train and steamer to Europe became possible this way. Soon, this short sea route would become the busiest of all rail and sea crossings, perpetuated to this day with the Channel Tunnel.
