1833–1835: Beginnings of the Great Western Railway , still a mainline station, was the London
terminus of the GWR.In Autumn 1832, the first plan for a line between London and Bristol was conceived by four men in the latter city. The idea followed from the success of the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway and the planned
London and Birmingham Railway (L&BR), and the railway picked up the support of local groups such as the
Society of Merchant Venturers. While the Clifton Suspension Bridge remained incomplete for Brunel's life, it had given him the opportunity to become known by the people of Bristol. When, therefore, a company was formed to build a railway to London, Brunel was floated as a possible engineer. After it was suggested that the role of Engineer would go to the person who designed the line of lowest cost, Brunel wrote to say "You are simply giving a premium to the man who makes the most flattering promises. The route I will survey will not be the cheapest – but it will be the best". of the GWR, based on its connection between London (left) and Bristol (right) The company committee did appoint Brunel, but only alongside the local engineer William Townsend, with whom Brunel had no interest in working and who had only worked on local tramways in the Bristol area. Brunel and Townsend were given ten weeks to travel the entire route on horseback, take the necessary measurements to work out the route, and convince the landowners to sell the land needed to build the railway, many of whom were starkly opposed to a railway cutting through their property or area. The project was publicised on 30 July 1833, the longest ever proposed at . Brunel felt the directors were not enthusiastic enough, bar one, Charles Saunders, with whom he became friends. The directors agreed that Brunel would be the line's engineer and confirmed the name—the
Great Western Railway (GWR). He hired a team of assistants and made a mobile office out of a
Britzka which contained a bed, and his equipment needed to survey the line, which became known colloquially as the "Flying Hearse". On 7 September 1833, the company commissioned Brunel to complete a second, more detailed survey, and finalise the purchase of necessary land. The cost of Brunel's route was £3,000,000 (), of which half had to be raised to successfully propose the bill in Parliament. When it became clear this was impossible within the parliament, the GWR decided to only get permission for and , postponing the rest of the line for the next parliament. The bill was submitted to Parliament in November 1833, and Brunel was called as a witness for eleven days; according to his biographer Anabel Gillings, "he flourished under [the pressure]" and "made it a show, [of which] he was the star", the extent of opposition. Nevertheless, the extent of opposition from landowners, the settlements along the route, and rival railway companies, left the bill unviable and the House of Lords voted to oppose it on 25 July 1834. track, with three rails to allow trains to use either gauge. The main change made by Brunel to the bill was the terminus, from
Vauxhall to meeting the L&BR at
Queen's Park and using their terminus at
Euston. It was while revising the bill that Brunel realised he could fix the swaying carriages on the
Stockton and Darlington Railway by using a wider gauge of at least , and had this changed on the bill without telling the directors. Brunel's decision to use a wider gauge was controversial; his chosen
broad gauge was , which he believed would offer superior running at high speeds, and indeed he proved this through calculations and trials. He found that the broader gauge was better for speed and comfort, but was less economical than
narrow- or
standard-gauge railways. Almost all other British railways to date had used
standard gauge, yet Brunel said that this was nothing more than a carry-over from the mine railways that
George Stephenson had worked on prior to his construction of the world's first passenger railway. Brunel quickly expanded the line west to
Didcot, but he was constantly battling the GWR board who thought his plans were overambitious and unnecessarily costly, such as his design for
Reading railway station, approval for which was withdrawn by the board after they saw the scale of Brunel's design. was given free reign by Brunel to work on improving the GWR's locomotives, and came up with the idea of works at Swindon In this time, Brunel let his assistant
Daniel Gooch work independently of him and the board on increasing the capability of the locomotives from their original designs; in 1840, a driver was fined by the company for racing locomotives and while Brunel at first said the practice "must be put to a stop immediately", he soon changed his mind and refunded the driver. On 13 September 1840, Gooch wrote to Brunel suggesting they build a locomotive works at
Swindon as they were running out of space at Paddington station. Rather than just building a works, Brunel built an entire
new town for its workers named "
New Swindon", which opened with
the works on 2 January 1843. While the quality of his locomotives and the railway had increased, Brunel was nonetheless severely over his budget and delayed on building the rest of the line. Two deadlines of August 1840 and February 1841 had gone by, by which point there were still significant gaps in the line, in particular the
Box Tunnel. Brunel had drawn on his experiences with the Thames Tunnel in major technical advancements on the line—viaducts such as the
Hanwell Viaduct and
Ivybridge Viaduct, specially designed stations, and tunnels including the Box Tunnel, which was the longest railway tunnel in the world at that time. With the opening of the Box Tunnel, the line from London to Bristol was complete and ready for trains on 30 June 1841; the first journeys took hours compared to road journeys of 15–20 hours, but the final cost was £5,887,000, .
1842–1846: Railway Mania and the Gauge War '' in 1846, showing people trying to change between gauges at
Gloucester. By the 1840s, the United Kingdom was in
Railway Mania—Parliament passed 650 railway acts between 1845 and 1848, and engineers and railway companies were desperate to find alternatives to steam engines. One consequence of this was that railways were beginning to branch out, with Britain covered in small lines. As these lines began to link up, a problem arose for the GWR whose broad gauge was incompatible with most other railways' narrower gauge. On the one hand, Brunel's broad gauge railway was simply faster—the first London to Exeter train covered in hours, making the GWR's services the fastest in the world at the time, but they were simply outnumbered by the rest of the country. Brunel's general engineering influence allowed him to spread the broad gauge in the West and Wales, such with as the
South Wales Railway, of which he became Chief Engineer in 1844. As these railways then spread north and east it created huge issues: locations such as
Gloucester and Swindon were served by railways with different, incompatible gauges. Goods trains wishing to use more than one system waited for hours as their cargo was taken off one train and onto another. In July 1945 a
royal commission was created to research the optimum gauge for the country, by which time it had picked up the name of the "
Gauge War". The commission began their hearing on 6 August 1845 and Brunel was called to give evidence from 25 October. Brunel's argument was twofold: firstly, no single gauge was needed because such a war created beneficial competition between companies; and secondly, that the broad gauge was, as Brunel had always claimed, a better choice of engineering because it allowed for faster and more comfortable services. Brunel naively suggested a race between locomotives of each type, even though the newest broad gauge locomotive was three years of age compared to many newly-built narrower gauge locomotives.
Engine A, representing the narrower of the gauges, ran the Darlington–York section of line, whereas
Ixion, a Firefly class representing the broader of the gauges, ran the Paddington–Didcot section of line. Despite its older age,
Ixion kept an average speed of ; when
Engine A reached this speed on its run, it
derailed. In spite of the evidence Brunel sought to demonstrate, their report, published in 1846, was in favour of the narrower gauge to become the new 'standard gauge'. The commission argued the most important factor was having only one gauge in the country, and the hassle of converting the narrower gauge to the broader gauge was significant compared to the opposite. Brunel refused defeat and lobbied Parliament with his own fifty-page report on why the commission was wrong to choose against him, and while the decision was not reversed, Parliament permitted Brunel and the GWR to continue building in his gauge. His adamance that his gauge was better from an engineering perspective eventually became irrelevant in the face of its financial inferiority; the GWR would eventually convert their broad gauge track to the new standard gauge, starting in the 1860s after Brunel's death and finishing in May 1892. In the modern day, some high-speed railways have reverted to broader gauges, such as the Japanese
Shinkansen. in 1845, designed by Brunel It was during this period that Brunel designed the first
Hungerford Bridge, which opened on 1 May 1845, and at the time was a
suspension bridge and only for use as a
footbridge. An Act of Parliament had been approved in 1836, and the land bought in 1840. The purpose of the bridge was originally to serve
Hungerford Market, which had just been renovated. Brunel designed the bridge with two piers in the river, built from brick and in an Italian style, and using chain suspension. In 1859, the replacement of the bridge with a railway bridge to serve the new
Charing Cross railway station was approved, and the dismantling of the old bridge began in 1860. The chains and ironwork were used in the eventual construction of the Clifton Suspension Bridge after Brunel's death.
1847–1848: The atmospheric railway It was in the context of the Railway Mania that Brunel chose to build the Atmospheric Railway. In 1844, Brunel had travelled with Gooch to
Dún Laoghaire to visit their so-called '
atmospheric railway'. Invented by
Samuel Clegg as an adaption of a similar system for moving post, each trains had no engine and was instead connected to a pipe. Air was pushed through the pipe by huge pumps at each end of lines, which contained the steam engines. One direction of line was uphill, using the pump system; the other was downhill and gravity based. By this time, Brunel was not just working on the GWR but also many other lines in the South West, such as the
Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway, and the
South Devon Railway (SDR), for which was building a line between
Exeter and
Penzance; the section of line was, while under a different company name, effectively a southern extension of the GWR. Brunel realised that he could use this atmospheric system on the SDR, and planned to build a test section as far as
Teignmouth. , using a segment of the original piping at
Didcot Railway Centre|leftThe atmospheric railway had many flaws—the driver had little control of the train, which could lead to deadly accidents, and keeping the pipes airtight over long distances was difficult. Both Brunel and
William Cubitt believed in applying the concept to the British railways;
George and
Robert Stephenson thought it too impractical, as did Gooch. The piping was so expensive that Brunel had to reduce the line to a
single-track, and it opened to Teignmouth after delays on 13 September 1847. The line was built with pumping stations at intervals, designed with distinctive square chimneys; engine houses were also built further towards Plymouth and on the Torquay branch (now the
Riviera line). There were eight pumping houses in total on the route. pipes were used on the level portions, and pipes were intended for the steeper gradients. The line had reached
Newton Abbot by 10 January 1848, with trains able to run at approximately . Nevertheless, Brunel was proven wrong—the valve connecting the train to the pipe leaked constantly, and the pipe both froze solid in winter and was eaten by rats. Yet it was the deterioration of the valve—due to the reaction of
tannin with
iron oxide—that was the last straw that failed the project, as the continuous valve began to tear from its rivets over most of its length, and the estimated replacement cost of £25,000 () was considered prohibitive. The railway closed for conversion back to a normal railway on 10 September 1848, having operated for less than a year, and Cubitt's line in London had closed the previous year equally as unsuccessful. Totnes engine house The accounts of the SDR for 1848 suggest that atmospheric traction had cost 3 1 per mile (p/mi) per mile compared to 1 4 per mile (p/mi) for conventional steam power; this does not account for the many issues after construction, some of which were never solved. Humiliated, Brunel paid off the £434,000 of costs himself and did not help the company again; however, the idea proved that the higher speeds achieved on atmospheric railways could be reached by conventional trains as well. Three of the eight
engine houses still stand, at Totness, Starcross, and Torquay. The Totness engine house was made a
Grade II listed structure on 7 March 2008. Inventor Max Schlienger unveiled a working model of an updated atmospheric railroad at his vineyard in the Northern California town of
Ukiah in 2017.
1849–1859: Later projects The SDR extended from Devon into Cornwall, which involved crossing the
River Tamar.
William Moorsom was originally contracted to engineer the line, and suggested a
train ferry over the
Hamoaze; he was replaced by Brunel when Parliament rejected this idea. Brunel chose to cross the river at
Saltash as the river there is only wide, and proposed the railway cross on what would one day become the
Royal Albert Bridge. Brunel wanted to build a timber-span bridge with six piers at a height of , but this was rejected by the Admiralty who needed to use the river for ships, and so he redesigned the bridge as having one pier in the centre of the river and one span either side to the riverbank, at a height of . The greatest challenge was surveying the riverbed as the river was in depth and too murky for divers to see anything; Brunel used a
caisson to drain sections of water in 35 different places and map the rock formations. He then used the
Chepstow Railway Bridge as a test as it had a similar design; safety was a major issue as the construction work was in the aftermath of the
Dee Bridge disaster. Brunel's design for the bridge, taking into account the shortfalls of the Dee Bridge, was based on placing wrought iron trusses above the railway which, when compressed together, would naturally hold the railway in place below. In what his biographer Annabel Gillings calls an "incredibly ingenious design", Brunel made the bridge self-supporting rather than relying on its weight being held by structures on either end. At the end of November 1847, the Railway Mania abruptly ended when the
stock market collapsed in response to companies going bankrupt from the intensity of the Gauge War. Thousands of individuals, including many from the GWR, were left unemployed and the work on the Royal Albert Bridge was stopped. In an act of sympathy, Brunel and his associates gave 3.5% of their annual salary to a charity fund for those made redundant, but it was this experience that made Brunel realise that the railway industry could no longer be so unrestrained and ambitious. By that point, he had been ridiculed by the Gauge War and the Atmospheric Railway, and the financial support had evaporated. The industry had not recovered even by April 1852, when Brunel reduced the bridge to a single-track design in order to allow construction to begin. Not willing to risk failure once again, Brunel built a substantial caisson rather than the normal
cofferdam in the river to build the pier, ensuring that the underwater work was successful. Brunel designed a pressurised caisson to withstand the water from outside, one of its first uses in Great Britain. The bridge was also mostly
prefabricated—the caisson and trusses were all built on land and then lowered and lifted into place respectively. The construction of the bridge attracted great local attention, as high as 300,000 people at once. On 2 May 1859, Prince Albert opened the bridge, but Brunel was not present as he was too ill; services finally commenced on 4 May 1859. After Brunel's poor outlook in 1847, four of his five major projects having failed or halted, the Royal Albert Bridge served as one of his most famous successes. Brunel's other notable railway infrastructure includes the
Windsor Railway Bridge, the
seawall of the
Exeter–Plymouth line, and the original
Chepstow Railway Bridge.
The Engineer wrote that the bridges were the most imposing part of Brunel's railways, and that his methods, though often criticised, were cutting-edge in their advancement of bridge-building techniques. Throughout his railway building career, but particularly on the
South Devon and
Cornwall Railways where economy was needed and there were many valleys to cross, Brunel made extensive use of wood for the construction of substantial viaducts; these have had to be replaced over the years as their primary material,
Kyanised Baltic Pine, became uneconomical to obtain. Brunel also built the
Brunel Swivel Bridge at the entrance to Bristol's Floating Harbour, which were the design of
William Jessop. It was originally built to carry a road across his new Entrance Lock to the City Docks. It was built in 1849 in the same dockyard as the SS Great Britain and by the same firm. It still survives today, next to the 1872 Entrance Lock where it provided an essential crossing, until the opening of the Plimsoll Swing Bridge on a different road and commissioned in 1968, at which point the Swivel Bridge was decommissioned. The deck is long, weighs about 70 tonnes, and, although derelict, can still rotate. The bridge is a
Grade II* listed national heritage asset and on Historic England's
Heritage at Risk Register, where its condition is described as ‘very bad’. It is now the subject of a major restoration project. , Cornwall as built When the
Cornwall Railway company constructed a railway line between
Plymouth and
Truro, opening in 1859, and extended it to
Falmouth in 1863, on the advice of Brunel, they constructed
the river crossings in the form of wooden viaducts, 42 in total, consisting of timber deck spans supported by fans of timber bracing built on
masonry piers. This unusual method of construction substantially reduced the first cost of construction compared to an all-masonry structure, but at the cost of more expensive maintenance. In 1934 the last of Brunel's timber viaducts was dismantled and replaced by a masonry structure. The present
London Paddington station was designed by Brunel and opened in 1854. Examples of his designs for smaller stations on the Great Western and associated lines which survive in good condition include
Mortimer,
Charlbury and
Bridgend (all
Italianate) and
Culham (
Tudorbethan). Surviving examples of wooden
train sheds in his style are at
Frome and
Kingswear. Brunel's last major undertaking was the unique
Three Bridges, London. Work began in 1856, and was completed in 1859. The three bridges in question are arranged to allow the routes of the
Grand Junction Canal,
Great Western and Brentford Railway, and Windmill Lane to cross each other. ==Shipping career==