As longer inter-city routes
developed, the early railway companies set up refreshment rooms at half-way
stages, or roughly 50 miles apart. In 1838, the London and Birmingham Railway
provided their own restaurants from the start at London Euston and Curzon
Street in Birmingham, as well as the mid-point at Wolverton. Swindon on the
Great Western Railway between Paddington and Bristol, and Normanton on the
Midland Railway route to the north were chosen for similar reasons. Amongst
others, those at Callander, Todmorden, York, Hull, Preston, Scarborough,
Colchester, Ballater, Newton Abbot, Crianlarich, Carlisle,
Kingussie, Bonar Bridge, Colchester, Newcastle, Bodmin Road, Sheffield,
Dingwall, Lincoln Central, Leeds, Morfa Mawddach, Manchester
Victoria, Birmingham Moor Street, Leamington
Spa and Tintern followed.
Given that the railway companies
wanted to keep train standing time to a maximum of around ten minutes, and that
a multitude of folk must have wanted feeding simultaneously, it is easy to
imagine the scenes of intermittent mayhem that must sometimes have prevailed in
refreshment rooms. Some companies preferred to contract out catering arrangements
but they would still have to agree that trains stopped for sufficient time to make
the operation worth-while.
At Swindon, the GWR made their
defining outsourcing agreement with the brothers Rigby. The deal was that the
Rigbys would build the station and the workers’ houses in return for 100 years of
rents and the lease on the refreshment rooms. Most trains would have to stop
there and no competing caterers were allowed on site. It proved to be such a
bad idea, that in 1895, after only half of the agreed timescale had elapsed and
it had already changed hands a number of times, the GWR bought its way out of
the contract it had signed, at considerable expense.
By 1852, “travelling
conveniences” were on sale to alleviate personal toilet pressure between
station stops. They were rubber contraptions that you strapped to your leg. You
could also buy a chamber pot in a basket. In practice, this must surely have
been a source of some embarrassment, at the very least, as other related scenarios
come to mind. Travel times remained slower than they needed to be because of
the requirement for refreshment and toilet breaks.
Spiers and Pond were soon to become a
prominent name in the railway catering business. Starting with the contract at
the Metropolitan Railway’s London Farringdon Street station, they followed that
with the London Brighton and South Coast Railway’s terminus at London Victoria
and the Midland Railway at Leicester, Trent and Derby. One of their innovations
was the luncheon basket, obtainable from refreshment rooms or platform trolleys,
which travellers could take onto the train, devour the contents on the move and
drop the empties off at the next station stop. The baskets were labelled with
their home location so they could be returned on another service. The London
and North Western Railway’s version was introduced at Preston, Crewe, Rugby,
Stafford and Northampton. Orders could be telegraphed ahead so food was ready
to be picked up on arrival at the station. The Midland Railway added hot food
options to the baskets by 1884, but partly as a result of widespread
breakages and theft, and partly through the development of alternatives, the
system died out between the two world wars.
Back in the refreshment rooms, there
was no competition to the appointed provider, whether in-house or contracted
out, so there was no incentive for the food provided to be of good quality or
for it to be inexpensive. Neither were the staff necessarily polite and
accommodating, and the less than favourable reputation that had been gained as a result would certainly stick. At
Tonbridge on the South Eastern Railway, the story was that when the bell rang
to tell customers to get back on board the train, coffee that was too hot to
drink was abandoned and then poured back into the urn in time for the next
batch of travellers to arrive. The novelist, Anthony Trollope, declared in 1868
that the railway sandwich had become a national disgrace.
When
Charles Dickens was travelling to Liverpool in April 1866, a fire in one of the
carriages forced a stop at Rugby so that he could change trains. Visiting the
refreshment room, it seems that the lady in charge failed to recognise him, whilst
he was displeased with her manner when she served him. In a thinly disguised
reference to his perceived treatment, Dickens went on to make a scathing attack
on railway refreshment rooms and their serving staff in the short story, Mugby
Junction, published later in the same year.
Refreshment room notoriety was characterised by over-crowding and a lot of inevitable jostling, so counter sizes lengthened to cope with demand. Increasingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, they also gained a reputation as drinking dens. In response, the railways tried to tighten up by restricting access to travel ticket holders, though that was sometimes difficult to enforce. Some refreshment rooms had doors leading onto platforms as well as onto the street outside, as is still the case today at the Head of Steam at Huddersfield and at the Mallard pub in the main station building at Worksop. Lax licensing laws didn’t help, either, and larger stations may have had at least three buffets to cope with, for 1st, 2nd and 3rd class customers.
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