"Making the Grade: Railways and Landscape
in Victorian England and Wales"

Robert M. Schwartz
Mount Holyoke College

 

The new railways “slashed like a knife though the delicate tissues of a settled rural civilization. They left their scars on park and copse; they raised high walls of earth across the meadows. . . .Your railroad mounds,vaster than the walls of Babylon, they brutally amputated every hill on their way. John Ruskin

This part of my work will be presented at our seminar meeting on December 5th because it involves some real-time use of GIS.

The main question I take up is whether Ruskin, who hated railways, was always right. Ruskin, I argue, was less correct about railway construction after the 1860s because improvements in locomotive power and other technological advances made it possible for later railways to do less harm to the landscape than before.

In Victorian England and Wales, the first period of railway construction (1830-1860) did indeed represent what Wordsworth, Dickens, Ruskin and others considered "an assault" on the landscape. Although the early locomotives were were capable of moving people and goods at "great" speed, they did so only so long as the track bed was close to being level. For example, the critical or maximum grade for line that linked London and Birmingham (completed in 1838) was 1 in 330. To keep to this grade, Robert Stephenson mobilized the labor of some 20,000 navvies over five years at a cost of 5.5 million pounds to complete massive works of excavation and tunneling.

By the 1880s, however, railway engineers were able to build lines with a critical grade of 1 in 90, thus enabling railways to negotiate more rugged, more remote, and more mountainous landscapes without the vast cuttings, embankments, and tunnels that Stephenson and his colleagues were forced to undertake when locomotives were relatively underpowered.

To take up this issue, I am developing a 3 dimensional model of the landscape (aka digital elevation model) that permits me to calculate the slopes of rail lines that were constructed within four periods: up to 1854, from 1855 to 1876, and from 1877 to 1893. A comparison of the average slopes of lines by period shows that higher slopes were indeed much more prominent by 1876. A closer look at the lines constructed in central Wales during the 1870s will provide an example of work in progress. I'll demonstrate a real time "fly-through" of the virtual landscape of Wales and invite discussion as to whether this capability of 3-D GIS has scholarly potential beyond the cheap thrill of gee-whiz technology.