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Organization

Reorganized

The British railway companies

Britain · Since 1840s

The old companies were nationalized in 1948, privatized in the 1990s, and the infrastructure later returned to public ownership. The original firms are gone.

By the 1870s the British railway was no longer a single adventurous company. It was a set of consolidated lines, the London and North Western the largest among them, each with a head office, a rule book, and more clerks than many government departments.

This page is about that group, not about one firm. They competed, shared wagons, and together employed the biggest clerical workforce the country had yet seen. A boy could enter as a junior clerk and expect, if he was careful, to retire from the same company.

The clerical profession

Goods clerks rated consignments. Booking clerks sold tickets and balanced a daily cash sheet. The clearing house in London allocated revenue between companies when a passenger changed trains. The work was literate, poorly paid next to a profession, and respectable next to a factory. It is the direct ancestor of the office the typewriter later sped up. The railways did not invent paperwork. They made a career of it.

Nationalized, privatized, renamed

The Railways Act 1921 grouped the companies into four. The Transport Act 1947 took those four into public ownership. British Rail was broken up in the 1990s into operating companies and a track authority. The track later returned to public ownership. None of the Victorian companies survived as employers. The jobs, in thinner form, did. A guard today does not work for the London and North Western. The occupation is the part the companies left behind.

The work it organized

  • Goods clerk
  • Booking clerk
  • Clearing-house clerk
  • Stationmaster

On the timeline

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