Volk's Electric Railway: page 1

 

 

Magnus Volk was born at 40, Western Road, Brighton, on October 19, 1851, and as a result of his early interest in electricity and his family connections with Germany, which was shortly to become the pioneer of electric traction, Volk has linked Sussex and his home town of Brighton indissolubly with the birth of the electrical age. He lived to a ripe old age well over 82 years, and more over was still attending to daily affairs in the town in his early eighties.

 

He reached his business office soon after 9 o'clock, and also attended to public duties as a life governor and vice-president of the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Sick Children, and as a Freemason and a Rotarian. This remarkable genius reached the most interesting stage of his career at the early age of thirty, when he obtained public recognition for a street fire alarm system, similar to that now used in all big towns. He was awarded a gold medal for this in December, 1881.

 

In 1882 he was engineer to the Telephone Company, Ltd., and then introduced the telephone to Brighton. Besides an exchange in Brighton, he inaugurated private lines at Eastbourne, Bexhill, and Hastings, and these formed the nucleus of the telephone exchanges at these towns. Brighton Corporation early recognised his vocation, and appointed him borough electrical engineer. In this capacity he accomplished the largest electric light installation in the country to that time, lighting the whole Brighton Pavilion in April, 1883, preparatory to the summer season. About this time, he was engaged on the preliminary work of his electric railway.

 

It should be understood that electric traction was then in its very infancy. A number of experiments had been made with battery-driven vehicles on railways between 1835 and 1842, those on the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway even giving rise to sanguine suggestions at that early date of the supercession of the steam locomotive, but the current available was only from primary batteries and the electric motor was in a most primitive state.

 

The development of the dynamo and of the third rail system for conveying electric power to trains made further progress possible. and Dr Werner von Siemens, of the famous German firm of Siemens & Halske, had advanced sufficiently far to lay down a small narrow gauge railway at the Berlin Trades Exhibition of 1879, when 900 yards of line were opened on May 31. Eighty thousand passengers were carried in four months, and a public line from Anhalt to the Cadet School at Lichterfelde, near Berlin, 1.5 miles long, was opened on May 12, 1881.

 

Mr Magnus Volk obtained permission from the Brighton Corporation early in 1883 to lay a line from a point on the beach opposite the entrance to the old Aquarium to the Chain Pier, about a quarter of a mile long, and this was opened by the Mayor on August 3, 1883, and was thus the first electric railway in Great Britain. The rails were laid to a gauge of 2 ft. 8.5 in, and were flat-bottomed of the shape known as vignoles. being spiked direct to tar-covered sleepers, which

 

were laid on the shingle on a course parallel to the promenade A low voltage was used, and the wooden sleepers were sufficient to insulate the current, which flowed in the running rails. A curious open coach was employed. Over 30,000 passengers were carried before January, 1884, when the line was closed to enable an extension to be made. In April, I884, the re-opened line started work, passengers being carried from the same point close to the Aquarium, but continuing under the Chain Pier and nearly a mile beyond to Paston Place, where the terminus was at the Banjo Groyne, then colloquially known as the " Free Pier."

 

Opening of the Volk Electric Railway in 1883

 

Nearly a decade passed, in which this line proved a huge success, with more passengers presenting themselves than could be carried at holiday periods, when Mr Volk conceived a further brilliant scheme. He promoted a bill in the Parliament of 1893 which received the Royal Assent on July 27, for a line to run through the sea from Banjo Groyne to Rottingdean, a distance of about three miles.

 

The Act (56 Vic.. cap 157) was necessary because the new project ran far beyond the then Brighton boundaries. The official title of the company was the Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Tramroad Company, but such a lengthy title could never become popular, and the usual reference to the scheme was the apt one of "Daddy Longlegs" from the shape of the car used.

 

This ran on an effective gauge of no less than 18 feet, being supported on a line of huge concrete blocks embedded in the rocks and chalk along the shore, and still visible at low tide. Each of the two rows of blocks carried a track of 2 ft. 8.5 in gauge, the 18 ft. measurement being the extreme overall one. The car was supported on four legs, two standing on each track, and each carried by four wheels.

 

It was 50 feet long 22 feet wide, and weighed 40 tons. One hundred and fifty passengers were acornmodated on a platform not unlike the deck of a moderate-sized pleasure steamer, at a height of 24 feet above rail level. A trolley wire ran along side the track throughout, hanging from standards tramway-fashion, and a trolley picked up the current, which was conveyed to four 25 horse-power motors on the deck. Current was returned through the undersea rails. The motors drove through shafts arranged inside the steel legs to each of the sixteen 2 ft. 6 in. diameter wheels. The Board of Trade insisted upon a lifeboat being carried, and this swung from davits, completing the amphibean picture.

 

Bad fortune dogged the project from the start. The opening ceremony was at low tide on Saturday, November 29, 1896, when a. large crowd assembled to see the Mayor of Brighton, Alderman J. G. Blaker, turn the switch that set the car in motion on its 35 minute journey to Rottingdean. Alderman Abbey, Brigden and Cox, whose united ages totalled over 250 years, were among the distinguished company of passengers on the inaugural journey.

 

Lunch was served at Madeira Road shelter hall on the return of the party. Before a week was out the landing stage at Paston Place and the car itself had been seriously damaged by the sea in the great gale which struck Brighton on the night of December 4. This storm swept away the Chain Pier, then 73 years old, and the wreckage of this was swept round the Banjo Groyne to batter against the unfortunate Daddy Longlegs.

 

Thousands of pounds worth of damage was done, and the best part of the summer traffic in 1897 was lost, as operation was only resumed late in August of that year, eight months after the disaster.

 

The office, workshop and sub-station in the side of the cliff at Paston Place.
Once presided over by Magnus Volk himself. Most of the cars used on the line
were built in the "cave", the entrance can just be seen on the right.

 

During this period, of course, the landing stage at Ovingdean Gap and the 300 feet long pier built at Rottingdean, together with all the £30,000 sunk in the railway, were useless. When working resumed, the railway fell short of the promoters expectations.

 

Technical progress had not advanced so far as the magnificence of their conception, and there was not power enough available to make rapid journeys at periods of high tide. Through journeys to Rottingdean were thus rare, and the car simply took passengers for a short and slow ride over the sea.

 

 

 

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