Railway towns: how a station made a village grow

Most towns grew where something already attracted people: a harbour, a ford, a market, a mine. A few of Britain's largest railway towns did the opposite. The railway company arrived first, picked a spot for its own reasons, and the town followed. Three cases are well documented: Crewe, Swindon and Wolverton.

Three places the railway chose

• Wolverton, Buckinghamshire. The London & Birmingham Railway opened in stages and was complete in 1838. Its engineers needed a place to change locomotives and carry out repairs about halfway along the line, and a small village on the route suited them. A works followed, and with it houses for the men who worked there.
• Crewe, Cheshire. The Grand Junction Railway ran from the Birmingham area towards Warrington and opened in 1837, and a station was placed at a spot where other lines were planned to meet it. The company moved its locomotive works there in 1843. The town that grew up around it was, in the words of a gazetteer of the early 1870s, entirely a new place.
• Swindon, Wiltshire. Old Swindon was a market town on a hill. The Great Western Railway built its locomotive works in 1843 on open ground below, beside the line, and put up a "railway village" of company housing for the workforce. That cluster became New Swindon, which in time outgrew the old town and absorbed it.

In all three the order was the same: line first, then station or junction, then works, then houses, then shops and schools. The station alone brought passengers. The works brought wages that stayed in the place.

Crewe in numbers

Crewe has the clearest record, because there was no older town to blur it. John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales (1870–72) gives the town 8,159 people at the 1861 census and “upwards of 12,000” by 1865. The locomotive works had opened in 1843, so the first figure is what eighteen years of railway work built on open ground.

Two sums are worth doing. From 8,159 to 12,000 is a rise of at least 47% in four years, since 12,000 ÷ 8,159 ≈ 1.47. Spread evenly, that is about 10% a year, because 1.10⁴ ≈ 1.47. For comparison, a place growing steadily at 2% a year adds only about 8% in the same four years (1.02⁴ ≈ 1.08). And the 8,159 itself had appeared in less than twenty years on a site the gazetteer could call entirely new.

That is not how a farming parish grows. It is how a place grows when a single employer keeps adding jobs and every new job brings a household.

Why a station could do this

Early railways had practical reasons to concentrate work in a few places. They are the reasons behind the three towns above.

1. Junctions. Where lines met, trains had to be split, joined, turned round and passed between companies. That needed shunting crews, signalmen, porters and clerks living within walking distance. Crewe grew as lines from several directions were brought together there.
2. Engine changes and repair. Steam locomotives needed coal and water, and they wore out. A depot at a fixed spot along a long route kept engines and crews fresh. Wolverton, roughly halfway between London and Birmingham, is the textbook example.
3. Works on cheap land. A company building workshops wanted flat, inexpensive ground beside its own line. A greenfield site at a station gave that, which is how New Swindon appeared below the old town rather than inside it.
4. Company housing. Workers could not live in a village with a few dozen cottages. The company built streets, and sometimes a school, a church and a reading room. Housing was part of the cost of getting the work done.

Compare this with a river town, where trade arrives because the geography allows it. For the reasoning behind why the lines run where they do, see why railways follow rivers. A railway town is the reverse: the company decides first, and the geography is merely convenient.

What it did not do

A station did not guarantee growth. Many small stations gave a village a better road to market and little more, and some towns that refused or were bypassed by the line lost trade to those that took it. The pattern also has an end. When railway workshops later shrank or closed, the towns that depended on them had to find other employers. Crewe and Swindon both did, though not painlessly.

The checkable point is the scale. Growth of around 10% a year, sustained, needs thousands of new jobs, and in these towns a single company supplied them. When you read of a "railway town", ask what the railway actually did there: a junction, a depot, a works, or only a platform.

Where this shows up in the game

In Valley Rail: Train Tycoon you start with a handful of small towns and no trains, build a station beside each town and send trains between them. Its Play listing says towns grow from small villages into large cities as your trains serve them. The history above is real; how fast the game's towns grow is not something these figures describe. If the freight side interests you, how freight chains work covers the mines and mills that supplied railway towns with their traffic, and how railway signals keep trains apart explains what kept a busy junction from jamming.