Railway 200: Telecoms

Telecoms has always been an important engineering discipline for railways. Both telecoms and railways evolved at the same time in the 1800s and railways pioneered telegraph communication.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened on the 15 September 1830. There was a steep incline outside the station and, because the gradient was too steep for the locomotives of the time, there was a rope-haulage engine at the top. A communication link was required from the station to the top of the incline and, in April 1837, William Fothergill Cooke proposed a simple electric telegraph system. However, the railway decided to use a pneumatic telegraph equipped with whistles, and the telegraph system was not used.

Cooke then went into partnership with Charles Wheatstone and they patented a five-wire system, and went on to demonstrate a four-wire telegraph system in July 1837 at Camden Town in North London for the London & Birmingham Railway. The system used a number of needles at the receiver, which could be moved by electromagnetic means to point to letters on a board. This made the system simple so users didn’t have to learn codes. However, the system could not transmit every letter.

The application was similar to the Liverpool project and to indicate to an engine house at Camden Town to start hauling carriages up the incline. Unfortunately, while there was initial enthusiasm by the railway for the system, the electric telegraph was eventually replaced by a pneumatic system with whistles.

Cooke and Wheatstone had their first commercial success in 1838 when a five-needle, six-wire, telegraph system was installed on the Great Western Railway over the 13 miles (21km) from Paddington station to West Drayton. Interestingly, like today, the wires were originally installed underground, but instead of an insulated cable the wires were installed in a steel conduit using wooden insulators. 

Cooke was an inventor and entrepreneur who wished to patent and commercially exploit his inventions, but Wheatstone was an academic with no interest in commercial ventures. They fell out and, at arbitration, Cooke was represented by no other than Isambard Brunel. Cooke eventually bought out Wheatstone’s interest in the telegraph system.

The line was extended to Slough in 1843, and a one-needle, two-wire system was installed. The buried steel conduit wooden insulated ‘cable’ was replaced with less expensive and easier to maintain suspending uninsulated wires on poles from ceramic insulators. Cooke patented this system, which went on to be the most common method of telegraph communication.

Commercial telecoms

Today many telecoms people new to the railways propose using the railway telecoms network for commercial purposes. This is not a new idea though. The telegraph extension to Slough in 1843 was completed at Cooke’s own expense, and the new agreement gave the railway free use of the system in exchange for Cooke establishing a public telegraph service. This was the very first public commercial telecoms system.

The use of the electric telegraph started to grow as new railways were constructed in the mid-1800s. Robert Stephenson was one railway engineer who strongly supported the electric telegraph.  In February 1845, an 88-mile line from Nine Elms to Gosport was completed along the London and South Western Railway, far longer than any other system. The Admiralty paid half the capital cost and leased a private, two-needle telegraph to connect it to its base in Portsmouth.

Murderer arrested

On 1 January 1845 murder suspect John Tawell was arrested following the use of a railway needle telegraph message from Slough to Paddington. This is thought to be the first use of telecoms to catch a murderer. The message read:

“A MURDER HAS GUST BEEN COMMITTED AT SALT HILL AND THE SUSPECTED MURDERER WAS SEEN TO TAKE A FIRST CLASS TICKET TO LONDON BY THE TRAIN WHICH LEFT SLOUGH AT 742 PM HE IS IN THE GARB OF A KWAKER WITH A GREAT COAT ON WHICH REACHES NEARLY DOWN TO HIS FEET HE IS IN THE LAST COMPARTMENT OF THE SECOND CLASS COMPARTMENT”.

The Cooke and Wheatstone system did not support punctuation, lower case, or the letters J, Q, and Z. Hence the misspellings of ‘just’ and ‘Quaker’. The operator at Paddington repeatedly requested a resend after receiving K-W-A which he assumed was a mistake. However, the message got through and, after arriving in London, Tawell was arrested by a detective.

Another notable event was the use of the railway telegraph to communicate the birth of Alfred Ernest Albert, second son of Queen Victoria. The news was published in The Times 40 minutes after the announcement. Newspaper coverage of these incidents gave a great deal of publicity to the railway electric telegraph and its benefits. This led to its widespread use outside of the railway.

In September 1845, financier John Lewis Ricardo and Cooke formed the Electric Telegraph Company to establish the telegraph business. In 1869 the company was nationalised and became part of the General Post Office (GPO) which eventually became the BT of today. The one-needle telegraph proved highly successful on British railways, and 15,000 systems were in use at the end of the 20th century, with some still in service in the 1930s.

The telegraph needle system was adopted by signalling engineers to control the safe movement of trains via the block system. Railway telegraph (telecoms) engineers have always adopted the latest telecoms technology to support the railway, and today the railway telecoms network is at the heart of the digital railway.

Image credit: Network Rail