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Lawrence Waters entertained us with a very informative and interesting talk, well illustrated by slides, on the G.W.R. and it's development in the Thames Valley and Oxford.
He began by reminding us of the problems of travel prior to the advent of the railways: poor roads, often little more than cart tracks with turnpikes limited; canals which were often frozen in winter and short of water in the summer; river travel with similar problems and also flooding;high costs and pilfering of goods.
These conditions led to a consortium of business men from Bristol and London deciding to build a railway between the two cities.
An Act of Parliament was obtained in 1835 and the GWR was founded. A young engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was engaged and he set about the task of building by walking the route. As the Act did not specify a gauge for the track Brunel felt free to apply engineering principles to this aspect of the construction and he decided that a width of seven feet would provide an efficient system, providing both a smooth and a swift ride for passengers and goods. This went against the practice already in operation in the north where railway builders were extending existing systems which had been laid down for horse drawn trucks and which used a gauge of for feet eight and a half inches.
The line was built in sections with the first part running from London to Taplow being completed by 1838. The section from Taplow to Reading was delayed by the need to cross the Thames. This created a gap for a time. When the bridge was built to Brunel's design using brick a shuttering is wood was used because of safety concerns. The same bridge still carries the fast trains across while a later one carries the stopping traffic alongside.
The money needed had to be raised piecemeal, some £3,000,000 and savings were made by building stations only of wood and sometime, as in the case of Slough, only on one side of the line. A novel method of providing facilities at little or no cost was used at Swindon where the refreshment rooms were built privately with a condition that all trains would stop for long enough to allow passengers to alight and buy food and drink.
Initially there were no proper timetables, Trains were scheduled to start at hourly intervals and arrived when they did not at any set time. In these early days the engines were bought from northern companies and were very unreliable many broke down leaving trains stranded until a spare engine was sent out to rescue them. With no communication system there were long delays. Eventually the company began to build their own locomotives designed by their own engineer who had been responsible for maintenance, Daniel Gooch.
The line was completed to Bristol in 1841 but the spur to Oxford took another three years. The original station at Oxford was at Granpont at what is now Western Street, the estate of houses in that area having built on what was once GWR land. The track went down to the riverside. A new station eventually replaced that one as the line was extended north to Banbury and Birmingham and a branch went to serve Littlemore, Cowley, and beyond. A local commuter service say halts along this stretch until the demand fell away. The station was rebuilt in part during the 1970's until the money became available in recent years for a complete rebuild more recently.
Of course the old Broad Gauge track created problems. Although the wider gauge was better the narrower width favoured elsewhere became more common creating a major problem when people and goods needed to use other lines. Eventually narrower gauge was designated as Standard by Parliament and the GWR began to add an extra rail so that both types of rolling stock and engines could use their track and, May 20th 1892, the broad gauge was finally taken out of service and all the track was converted.
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