Yorkshire Philosophical Society

Event Information

The Railway Station: Two Centuries of Transformation

Dr Bill Fawcett, author of “Railway Architecture” etc

Memorial Lecture for Darrell Buttery

When the Stockton & Darlington opened in 1825 it had no conception of the potential of passenger traffic, so this, along with general goods traffic, was let out to private carriers, with the railway only operating the coal and mineral trains. So their (surviving) depot at Stockton was equipped only with a weigh/toll office, based on turnpike road practice. Within 2 years they found it desirable to provide hotels (for waiting and refreshment) at 3 locations, but the first serious approach to station design is found in the termini of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (1830).

Things then blossomed rapidly, and sometimes extravagantly, and the talk will trace this path as far as two recent stations: Liege and the Berlin Central Station, which have seen a rebirth of confidence in the great glazed train sheds which became the hallmark of major 19th century stations.

2025 celebrates the 200th anniversary of the modern railway. Events list at:

 https://railway200.co.uk/

2.30pm in the Tempest Anderson Lecture Theatre in the Yorkshire Museum

YPS Members free, non members £5.

Image: Liege Station

Member’s report

This lecture was delivered as a YPS contribution to the national programme of events marking the 200th anniversary of the modern railway.

The first public railways aimed to move goods, not humans – so were caught off guard by the latent demand for travel they unleashed. Facilities resembled toll houses, but the Stockton and Darlington Railway built lineside inns at key locations; first at Heighington north of Newton Aycliffe in 1827. The building still exists. More significant facilities were built at the termini of the earliest passenger lines, most notably Liverpool Road in Manchester (1830), preserved today as part of the city’s Museum of Science and Industry.

Distinctive architecture emerged with the opening of the Newcastle and Carlisle Railway. Hexham’s attractive building, opened in 1836, is believed to be the world’s oldest station still used for its original purpose. By contrast, Selby’s surviving 1834 Leeds and Selby Railway goods and passenger terminus displays no architectural pretensions.

Dr Fawcett’s impressive sequence of images demonstrated how, with the rapid expansion of railways and their growing wealth, architectural ambition increased. We were taken to stations large and small around Britain and observed the technical solutions to spanning ever larger numbers of tracks. By 1840 major terminals provided not only train sheds but offices, booking halls and catering – mostly class-segregated. These might be accompanied by hotels. George Gilbert Scott’s majestically gothic St Pancras Hotel (1878) adjoined the world’s widest single-span trainshed. Later major terminals, typified by Glasgow Central in the 1890s, used ridge and furrow glazed roofs to make better use of expensive city centre sites.

In the twentieth century the age of innovative station building in Britain was largely over, except, perhaps, for the highlights provided by Charles Holden for the expansion of London’s underground system to new suburbs. The latter part of Dr Fawcett’s lecture explored Europe, with differing technical and aesthetic approaches to serving trains and their passengers.  Via Antwerp, Dresden, Milan and Zurich our eyes were opened to the way in which railways went beyond workaday facilities to become city hubs. The presentation finished with the remarkable recent example of Liege, unrecognisable as a conventional ‘train-shed’.

Andrew Scott