Introduction

The monumental towers of the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash spanning the River Tamar between Devon and Cornwall bear the name of their engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel and commemorate one of the last and perhaps most enduring achievements of his career. By the time the bridge was finally completed in 1859, Brunel, worn out and ill, was too unwell to attend its grand opening ceremony, but was able to see his final creation as he was hauled across it on a railway wagon a few weeks later.

Work on the bridge and Brunel’s third steamship, the SS Great Eastern, then anchored on the Thames after a difficult construction and launch, had dominated the last years of his life and marked the culmination of his career as a civil, mechanical and railway engineer. Much has been written about Brunel since his death and the charismatic and original engineer will always be remembered for his three steamships, the SS Great Western, Great Britain and Great Eastern, his early designs for the Clifton Suspension Bridge and his part in helping his father Marc build the Thames Tunnel, along with many other engineering projects. It was his role as a railway engineer, though, that cemented his reputation as one of the preeminent engineers of the nineteenth century, and his most significant legacy is his work on the railways. The soaring roof at Paddington station and the graceful arches of Maidenhead Bridge, his railway village and works at Swindon, the daring tunnel at Box and his pioneering terminus at Bristol Temple Meads along with many other bridges, stations and structures remain as a lasting testament to his talents as a railway engineer.

Brunel
A nineteenth-century illustration of railway surveyors at work. (Author’s collection, Iron, Stone and Steam, Amberley Publishing)

Brunel’s twenty-six-year career as a civil and railway engineer spanned an astonishing period of social, political and industrial change and his life straddled the old world of the Regency era and the brave new world of Victorian Britain; ‘Nobody…will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of the most wonderful transition,’ noted Prince Albert, for whom Brunel’s Saltash bridge had been named. It is clear that the engineer’s railway adventures coincided with dramatic changes in railway development as well as profound technological, political and social change that would characterise the period more generally. When Brunel was appointed as the engineer to the Great Western Railway in 1833, railways were still very much in their infancy and to most of the British population still a real novelty; the first inter-city line, Stephenson’s Liverpool & Manchester, had only been open for three years, and other major new railways were either still being planned or in the course of construction. Brunel arrived on the scene at a key moment when large-scale railway development was about to explode into existence, dramatically changing the landscape, economy and way of life for British people.

Although Brunel was an integral part of that railway revolution, as this book will show, his ideas and experiments would result in railways that did not exactly fit the accepted evolutionary pattern being developed and practised by Stephenson, Locke and others, and it could be argued that his idealistic concept for railways provided a new and alternative paradigm to the accepted way of doing things. Brunel described his Great Western Railway as ‘the finest work in England’ even before it had been built, and when it was finally completed, it incorporated many innovations which gave his conception a distinctly different look to any other railway then planned or built. There is no doubt that Brunel’s work as a railway engineer demonstrated not only an astonishing level of technical skill, but also a singular design vision, demonstrating a diverse range of influences, ideas and styles, melding art, science and engineering in his designs. Brunel’s rejection of established practice and custom and his propensity for doing the opposite of what might be expected did not always succeed, however, often making him unpopular with Directors, shareholders and the press.

Brunel
The Engine House at Swindon Works in 1846 as portrayed by J. C. Bourne in 1846. (SS Great Britain Trust) (Iron, Stone and Steam, Amberley Publishing)

As a result, the book will highlight not only some of Brunel’s career-defining railway achievements and successes but will also aim to balance these triumphs with some analysis of his failures. Brunel was, the Bristol chronicler John Latimer thought, ‘an inexperienced theorist, enamoured with novelty, prone to seek for difficulties rather than evade them, and utterly indifferent to the outlay which his recklessness entailed on his employers’. His ‘pet crotchet’ Latimer continued, was the broad gauge, the bold and ultimately doomed idea of introducing a track gauge of 7 ft ¼ in for his railways rather than the 4 ft 8½ in ‘standard gauge’ favoured by the ‘sober-minded, practical and economical engineers of the North’. Brunel’s unconventional baulk road track, and the initial batch of ‘freak’ locomotives built for the GWR to his eccentric specifications also provided his opponents with ample ammunition to criticise his work even before the completion of the original line from Bristol to London. Perhaps the most infamous chapter in his career was the unsuccessful atmospheric railway system installed on the South Devon Railway, which ultimately cost its shareholders more than £400,000 and dealt a serious but not a fatal blow to Brunel’s reputation. Despite this seemingly severe dent to his professional standing, Brunel – ‘the Napoleon of engineers, thinking more of glory than profits’ – ploughed on, taking this setback and others like it in his stride, simply moving on to the next challenge.

Iron, Stone and Steam by Tim Bryan is available for purchase now.