We grumble about our railways, believing that the Golden Age of rail travel is long behind us.
Despite strikes, delays, cancellations and a general slump in the standard of service, it’s worth remembering that, even in the late 20th century, closed compartments, without access to corridors, gave passengers, especially lone travellers, justifiable anxiety – as the extract, below, from Simon Bradley’s book demonstrates.
On 21 September 1871, passengers in a second-class carriage of a Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway train between Wigan and Liverpool overheard an argument in an adjacent compartment, followed by some loud bangs.
When the train stopped at Kirby, the guard and a porter opened the door of the compartment, which had its windows closed and was full of gun smoke. Inside were the bodies of Robert Wanless, a 31-year-old colliery overseer, and his estranged wife, Anne. She had been shot several times by her husband, who had then turned the pistol on himself.
Britain’s first murder of a passenger on a moving train occurred seven years before, on a London suburban train. The victim was a wealthy banker, the killer a young tailor desperate for money.
Suddenly, the humdrum railway compartment presented itself to the public mind as a space of potentially fatal encounters.
The murderer’s subsequent escape to the New World, followed by his capture, trial and public execution, all contributed to make the story one of the sensations of the day.
The Wanless case, the second recorded instance of murder on a British train, created only a modest stir by comparison. The inquest heard that the male subject was a heavy drinker with a jealous nature and a record of threatening violence.
With no suspect on the loose and no mystery about the course of events, the press could find little with which to amplify the marital tragedy.
The trashy Illustrated Police News did its best, placing on its front page an imagined view (pictured above) from within the fatal compartment at the moment the door was opened. Anne Wanless is falsely depicted with her face exposed rather than concealed by the veil of her bonnet, as witnesses described.
One of the passengers was asked at the inquest whether he had tried to communicate with the guard after hearing the suspected gunshots. He replied that he had no means of doing so.
When the jury’s verdict came, it included the recommendation that ‘there ought to be a means of communication between passengers and guards in all trains.’
The issue of internal communication when a train was on the move was a well-worn one by 1871. With braking under the control of driver and guard, the solution required every compartment to be equipped with some apparatus for raising the alarm, so that the train might be stopped for investigation.
Several different systems had been tried by that time, one of which was recommended by the Board of Trade in 1868.
The main problem – an all too familiar one with the various systems – was that its combination of a tuggable rope linked to a bell (for the guard) and gong (for the driver) didn’t work very well. In 1873, the Board quietly dropped its endorsement.
Other systems involved push-buttons linked to an electric bell, and a cord below the carriage floor, reached through a hole between the seats. There was even a proposal for an iron speaking-tube running the length of the train, with flexible rubber links between the carriages.
Resolution finally came after the Armagh disaster. It prompted the authorities to demand that continuous automatic brakes be provided on all passenger trains across Britain and Ireland.
Rather than communicating an alarm signal to the driver or guard, the cord could now be made to activate the braking system directly instead. Yet the phrase ‘communication cord’ still lingered in use, an echo of the unsatisfactory systems developed in the 1860s and 1870s.
