Rail fares in 1858

[Hellfire]

West Briton Newspaper 11 June 1858

SOUTH DEVON RAILWAY
AN EXCURSION TRAIN to LONDON on TUESDAY, 6th July, giving Passengers an opportunity of seeing the "Leviathan," which is now advertised as being open for inspection.

The Train will leave Plymouth at 6:20 a.m. (London time) taking on Passengers from Kingsbridge Road at 6:50 a.m.; Totnes, 7:10; Torquay, 7:15; Newton, 7:35; Teignmouth, 7:54; Dawlish, 8:5; Starcross, 8:15; and joining a Bristol and Exeter Company's Train at Exeter, which will leave that place at 9:15 a.m.
The Train will return from Paddington Station (London) at 8:0 a.m. on Monday, 12th July.

FARES: From Plymouth or Kingsbridge Road to Paddington and Back, 1st class, 30s; 2nd class, 20s; Totnes, Torquay, or Newton, 1st class 27s; 2nd class 18s.; Teignmouth, Dawlish, or Starcross, 1st class, 25s.; 2nd class, 17s.

I was interested to see this in a copy of the West Briton in 1858. The National Archives historical currency convector suggests that 30s in 1860 would be worth £64 today. I appreciate these sorts of calculations are not an exact science but it would suggest the cost of rail travel was pretty reasonable back then even allowing for the fact this was a special.

 

[Panceltic]

suggests that 30s in 1860 would be worth £64 today

This site http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcom...&amount=1.5&year_source=1858&year_result=2014 suggests that £1 10s 0d from 1858 would be worth at least £131.70 in 2013.

In 2013, the relative value of £1 10s 0d from 1858 ranges from £131.70 to £3,159.00.

 

[DynamicSpirit]

I was interested to see this in a copy of the West Briton in 1858. The National Archives historical currency convector suggests that 30s in 1860 would be worth £64 today. I appreciate these sorts of calculations are not an exact science but it would suggest the cost of rail travel was pretty reasonable back then even allowing for the fact this was a special.

You're correct that those calculations are not an exact science. And to get something even remotely comparable you would need to take into account typical wages. A quick google threw up this page giving some details of salaries in the 1860's. http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/wages2.html

•common laborers 3s. 9d.
•excavators wearing their own "long water boots" 4s. 6d.
•bricklayers, carpenters, masons, smiths 6s. 6d.
•engineers 7/6 (= £110 pounds/year)

That would put the cost of a first class ticket at about 7 days salary for a labourer, or 5 day's salary for a 2nd class ticket. Since these are prices for an excursion, we could presumably surmise that ordinary tickets would be more expensive.

That compares with a standard off-peak return Plymouth-London today is £92 - or about 2 day's salary if you're working full time and earning the minimum wage.

I'd say we get a better deal on rail fares today - especially as the trip today would be a lot faster and more comfortable.

 

[Andrewlong]

I am fascinated by the reference to London time. What was the difference in times between Plymouth and London back in 1858?

 

[fairysdad]

I am fascinated by the reference to London time. What was the difference in times between Plymouth and London back in 1858?

It's about 15 minutes I think; there's a clock on The Exchange in Bristol that has two minute hands to show Bristol time and Railway (London) time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exchange,_Bristol#Clock

 

[reb0118]

This may be of interest.

History of legal time in Britain
Introduction

Before the railways, local mean time was the time kept by clocks and used for general purposes in the UK, insofar as people kept time by clocks rather than by the sun. (Mean time, as shown by sufficiently accurate clocks, had largely replaced apparent time, as shown by a sundial, from around the end of the eighteenth century.) With the coming of the railways, it became a significant problem for timetables that the time at one end of a railway line should differ significantly from that at the other. For this reason, in the 1840s the railway companies started to keep London time consistently at their stations and on their trains; on 22 September 1847 it was recommended by the Railway Clearing House that all the railway companies should adopt Greenwich time, and by January 1848 this had generally been done. Over the next few years the rest of the country followed the railways, but in the 1858 case of Curtis v. March it was ruled that the time for legal purposes must be considered to be local mean time. In 1880 the legal time for Great Britain was made Greenwich mean time by Act of Parliament; that for Ireland was made Dublin mean time. For a more detailed history of events up to this point, see Derek Howse, Greenwich Time and the Longitude (National Maritime Museum / Philip Wilson Publishers, 1997).

Having established a simple, uniform timescale of GMT (the time for Ireland was changed in 1916 to also be GMT), it might be expected that this would have sufficed to establish the legal definition of time until the development of atomic timescales in the 1950s. However, successive governments have proved incapable of avoiding tampering with the clocks, leading to the story described on this page, while the legal definition is still based on GMT, even though time signals have been giving more uniform timescales for decades—UTC, with leap seconds, since 1972.

 

[snowball]

I am fascinated by the reference to London time. What was the difference in times between Plymouth and London back in 1858?

Plymouth is about 4 degrees west so it should have been 16 minutes.

 

[Hellfire]

The GWR was one of the prime movers in getting a uniform time adopted in the UK. As the first really long distance railway to operate west to east rather than north to south, their timetables were affected more by local 'sun time'

Before the coming of the railways it wasn't an issue as it took days to get from London to Cornwall so 20 minutes here and there was not really a problem.