Book Review

Asked to name the greatest Briton of all time in 2002, participants in a BBC poll put Isambard Kingdom Brunel in second place, right after Sir Winston Churchill

Described as ‘one of the most ingenious and prolific figures in engineering history’ workaholic Victorian inventor Brunel became a legend both during and long after his lifetime, his name a household word for ingenuity, excellence, enterprise and style.

As a young man he had helped his father Marc build the Thames Tunnel, the first subterranean crossing of a navigable river, and within a few years his problem-solving designs for bridges and tunnels had taken the accepted laws of physics and nature to their very limits – with spectacular results. He also designed the SS Great Britain, the first propeller-driven ocean-going iron ship, which, when launched in 1843, was the largest ship ever built.

Visitors still flock to admire it in its permanent berth upstream of Clifton Suspension Bridge, another of his projects (but one that he did not live to see built).

Yet one of Brunel’s greatest achievements survives today only in the routes it opened and in the remaining architectural relics of its infrastructure – the broad gauge Great Western Railway.

Aged just 27, Brunel was appointed to build a trunk route linking London with the great transatlantic port of Bristol. As with his other engineering exploits, Isambard wanted only the best from the start. He ripped up the rule book and set to work drawing up ambitious blueprints for his great iron road to the west. He hoped too that his new steam-powered vessels would enable passengers to continue onwards – from Bristol to the United States. In researching his latest project, Isambard visited the world’s first public steam-hauled railway, the Stockton & Darlington, and the pioneer inter-city line, George Stephenson’s Liverpool & Manchester Railway. However, he was less than impressed with the shaking on the latter. He wrote: ‘The time is not far off when we shall be able to take our coffee and write while going noiselessly and smoothly along at 45mph – let me try.’

And try he did. Stephenson’s railways were built to a gauge of 4ft 8½in, said to have been derived from the average space between the wheels of horse-drawn carts in his native north east. Isambard was having none of it.

Starting with a blank sheet of paper, he drafted plans for a railway of a wider 7ft gauge, which would be capable of handling bigger carriages and wagons, and therefore bigger payloads, behind much larger locomotives with the capacity for greater speeds.

However, Isambard’s undoubted excellence in engineering architectural features did not make him a great judge when it came to choosing steam locomotives for his lines, let alone designing them. His decisions in this regard were less than perfect.

However, it was again a case of youth saving the day. For his line’s locomotive superintendent he appointed 21-year-old Daniel Gooch who, as it transpired, more than made up for Brunel’s deficiencies when it came to matters of locomotive design.

This was the age of spectacularly oversized locomotives with gleaming copper steam domes, stovepipe chimneys, wooden boiler cladding, no protection from wind, rain, snow or summer heat for the driver and firemen and, to begin with, third-class passengers travelling in open wagons. Yet Brunel and Gooch worked in tandem to beat the world.

In March 1840, Fire Fly, the first of Gooch’s 62-strong class of Firefly class 2-22s, hauled a two-coach train carrying 40 passengers and a truck from Paddington to Reading, covering a 31-mile stretch at 50mph – a speed unheard of in those times.

At the completion of the next line to be engineered by Isambard, the Bristol & Exeter on 1 May 1844, Gooch himself drove Firefly class Actaeon, heading the first train over the 33 miles from Paddington to Exeter and back, averaging 41.5mph. The express that ran between the two cities from 1847-52 was nicknamed ‘The Flying Dutchman’ after the racehorse which won the Derby and St Leger.

Word beaters indeed. Yet Brunel’s magnificent new railway fell victim not to the laws of science, but to those of marketing.

Remember the era of the domestic video recorder? VHS dominated the market because although the tapes were big and bulky affairs, it ‘got in there first’ always edging out Betamax, even though the latter’s followers maintained that it offered better quality. History shows that the best does not always win.

And so it was with Brunel’s broad gauge. Yes, he built a network of GWR and associated lines covering the west and south-west of England and south Wales, but his broad gauge never penetrated further north than Wolverhampton. By contrast, a network of lines built to Stephenson’s narrower gauge covered the rest of the country. As a result, it was impossible to run through passenger and freight trains on or off the GWR network on to other lines. Passengers would be forced to change trains at stations where both systems met, and freight needed to be unloaded and reloaded at great cost for onward travel where the two incompatible gauges met.

From the 1840s onwards, the powers that be decreed that future lines should be built to Stephenson’s gauge for reasons of standardisation. Brunel died in 1859, but nonetheless his broad gauge empire soldiered on until 21 May 1892, when an army of 4,200 trackmen worked round the clock to convert the fabled GWR Paddington to Penzance main line to 4ft 8½in gauge. VHS had finally won.

Brunel’s Big Railway: Creation of the Great Western Railway by Heritage Railway magazine editor Robin Jones tells the story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s arguably superior broad gauge from start to finish, and although it ultimately lost the ‘gauge war,’ by then it had elevated the GWR to one of the finest and most respected railway companies in the world.