John Herepath, his Railway Magazine and the Greenwich Railway

Last week when I was still doing the research on Percival Parsons I came across two things - one was from NeiI Rhind’s ‘ book on Blackheath. In it he says that one of Parsons nearby neighbours in the 1880s was an Edwin John Herapath. The other thing was a little note on a report from the 1870s which said that the publisher of Herepath’s Journal  was the same - Edwin John Herapath with an address in Kidbrooke.  The actual founder of Herapath’s  Magazine  in the 1830s was John Herapath and I eventually established that Edwin John was his son to whom he left his Railway Magazine.

It’s good to know of a local connection to John Herapath –which leads us on to his role in our own London and Greenwich Railway.  I am very aware when writing about old railways that there are lots of well informed enthusiasts out there –and what I write is probably full of (innocent) misapprehensions. So--  I expect to be corrected with some of the following.

In the 1980s I did a lot of research on the London and Greenwich Railway and, of course, the best source is Herapath’s  Magazine. - THE great source of information about the construction  and early days of our local railway.  John Herapath is described by Wikipedia as being a physicist from a family of distinguished scientists who gave ‘a partial account of the kinetic theory of gases in 1820; though it was neglected by the scientific community at the time’.  He seems to have had personal disputes with some of the scientific community of the day – I am wondering whether to read into it that he was a bit of chancer.

I’m also assuming here that readers are aware that by ‘London and Greenwich Railway’ I mean the railway between London Bridge and Greenwich which so many of us use every day. It was the earliest railway - using locomotives - in London; and the first suburban railway in the world.  It was opened as far as Deptford in 1836, getting to Greenwich in 1838 following hold ups in building  a crossing over the Ravensbourne.  It runs all the way on its now listed brick viaduct,  which is one of the longest in Britain.   It ran was what essentially a commuter service from the start and the earliest complaints about it are strongly similar to complaints you can hear now any day of the week at London Bridge from long suffering commuters.

Most of my own research on the Greenwich Railway has been about its engineer – ex-Lt.Col George Landmann.   Needless to say my possible biography of him is still sitting unpublished on my hard disc after over 30 years – I began it when I wrote a leaflet on him for an amazing festival which was held to commemorate 150 years of the Greenwich Railway-in 1986 and which was held on Cannon Street station platforms.  The sad thing is that we can’t imagine such an event happening today.

George Landmann was a Royal Engineer – and there is a very interesting relationship between early railways and the Royal Engineers  - I need to find what, if anything has been written on that.  I have always thought that the brick arches on the Greenwich Railway Viaduct owed much to designs of George Landmann’s father who taught ‘fortification’ at the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich and who had studied military engineering  and the legacy of Vauban in France. .George Landmann, was briefly Battlefield Engineer under Wellington in the Peninsulas War. He was therefore trained to do  and think fast when work was needed on the site of a battle and to have a skill set to take almost anything on.

One reason I have never finished research on Landmann is because of a very vague era in his life during the Peninsula wars in Spain where it is almost impossible to find out what he was doing.  I am very grateful to the Royal Engineers Historical Society who always send me  notices of their meetings and are very friendly and helpful.  I understand from one of their historians that they also are unable to explain either what he was doing in Spain during the Peninsula Wars --- commenting that he seemed to be able to act above his rank and effectively do what he liked. We have to draw our conclusions from that.

When Landmann  built the Greenwich Railway he had been retired from  the Royal Engineers for over 10 years (he had resigned following a liaison with a young lady followed by notice of a posting to Ceylon). By then he was involved with John Harapeth in far more ways than the Railway Magazine suggests..  In the 1830s there were endless plans for railway companies - most of which were never set up but which advertised themselves enthusiastically.

In a long article Herapath, ever the master of a mixed metaphor, described these projected railways as “many tributary streams”.  The Greenwich line was “like the trunk of a  tree, must gather strength and bulk from every branch  it sends forth”. He  suggested that all of these new  lines to  coastal  towns would have to come up into London somehow and why not on the Greenwich Line rail. To do this they would have to pay a charge-and thus enrich  Greenwich Railway shareholders. But -– there was a snag.

Advertisements for some these proposed railways  assign various roles to Herapath. We have the  London.   Salisbury, Exeter. Plymouth, Falmouth Railway Company and we also have the Salisbury, Romsey, and Southampton Railway, (By way of Redbridge). For both it is Engineer George Landmann, Esq,  Superintendent  John Herapath, Esq.  Nearer home we have the London, Shoreham, and Brighton Railway - Engineer George Landmann, Esq.  Assistant Engineer John Herapath, Esq.  and  also  the  London and Dover Railway  Engineer George Landmann, Esq.,  Superintendant of Works John Herapath, Esq.

There were of course numerous other railways being promoted to these places  by people totally unconnected with Landmann and Herapath. This meant there was a scramble to get support from the citizens of the places their projected railway would pass through and another scramble to get it through Parliament.  No railway could go ahead without its own enabling Act of Parliament.

So, the various towns on the routes were visited  to reassure and hopefully recruit the  citizens to support their rail scheme.  At Maidstone  Mr.Herapath  “ apologised for the absence of Colonel Landmann, the engineer to the Company, and for the late hour at which he had arrived - a circumstance, by the way, which, owing as it was to the difficulty of persuading the horses to travel faster, furnished one argument more in support of the cause which they had come to advocate”.

At Rochester  “Mr. Herapath, who was engaged with Col. Landmann as engineer in projecting the railway, was in attendance to give every information which the meeting might  require.”  In support of his arguments he read out paragraphs  from a congratulatory press report on the scheme.  “Good, well-constructed railroads will be the soul of our national prosperity”.  He seems to have omitted to mention that he had written these extracts from the ‘Railway Magazine”  himself.   And as for rival schemes “He did not consider that a railway should be laid down merely because it was the cheapest, but regard should be had to the benefit that it was likely to ring to  the country and the shareholders”.

Now,  as I said there was a snag. Clearly today the Greenwich line does not carry the major traffic down to the coast  and elsewhere in the way it was suggested in 1836 .In fact the Greenwich line stopped at Greenwich and it was not until 1873 that it was opened between Maze Hill and Charlton.   Trains to the coast went from London Bridge to Blackheath and then – as they still do - went from Blackheath to Charlton through a tunnel. Trains to places like Falmouth come nowhere near London Bridge at all.

The snag  is mentioned in the very first paragraph of Herapath’s article on the Greenwich Railway “to avoid the inconvenient circuitous route, it shall be carried by means of a handsome viaduct, straight across Greenwich Park.  There is some opposition ... of the viaduct’s being likely to mar the beauty of the park ... but It will obviously increase rather than detract from the picturesqueness of the scenery”. Of course, there is nothing like a railway line running through a park to make the scenery better. While some rail enthusiasts might agree , it seems many others did not.

Of course today the railway runs under the lawns in front of the Maritime Museum but the saga of how eventually that link was achieved is a  long and tortured one – including for instance a scheme to put statues of naval heroes and past Admirals is the gaps  under the viaduct’s arches.  To read this in detail  I would very much recommend Ron Thomas’s  book on the Greenwich Railway –London’s First Railway - which will explain it all. Ron summed it up “opposition to the railway did not come from the Observatory ...but from the Admiralty and  the vicar and churchwardens of Greenwich”.

This has just been a quick look at some the role of John Herapath in the promotion of the London and Greenwich Railway.  Readers of Ron Thomas’ book will discover that this was a very minor part of what was going on compared with the activities of some of the other directors of the proposed line.