Great West Way® Travel Magazine | Issue 01

RIDING THE RAILS
Travel the Great Western Railway line, designed and built by
engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel from 1836, to visit the
spectacular sights and landmarks along the Great West Way
Words: Jeremy Forsyth
ONE OF ENGLAND’S GREAT long-distance
railway lines, the Great Western Railway (or
GWR), is perhaps Brunel’s most enduring legacy
and many of the attractions described in this
magazine are easily accessed from its stations. The railway
west from the capital, sometimes nicknamed
“Brunel’s billiard table”, provides a leisurely opportunity
to enjoy the delightful sights along the route, via Taplow
and Maidenhead to Reading. The ‘northern’ track goes to
Bristol through bucolic Pangbourne and the railway town
of Swindon while that to the south takes in Newbury,
Bradford on Avon and Bath. Choose your destination
and take your pick! Incidentally, the Malmaison hotel in
Reading, also designed by Brunel,
was one of a chain, originally built
to accommodate the vast number
of passengers taking advantage of
the railway to explore places to the
west of London.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel has
often been described as “the little man in the big hat”.
However he was in fact a daring British engineer whose
work is commemorated to this day throughout the nation,
particularly on the Great Western Railway. In 1833, at the
age of 27, he was appointed chief engineer of the newly
formed GWR. Brunel personally surveyed the route from
London to Bristol, and further on to Exeter, and planned a
passenger-friendly line that involved few inclines and no
sharp curves. Bridges over rivers, viaducts over valleys, and
tunnels through hills were constructed.
His two mile GWR Box Tunnel, near Chippenham, was
the longest in the world when it was completed in 1841
and, when the two teams of tunnellers met in the middle,
they were only 1¼“ out of line. The elegant entrances to
the tunnel, built of Bath stone quarried at nearby Corsham,
have both been listed as national monuments. Railway
“Brunel’s engineering solutions
were often radical, and
frequently graceful”
enthusiasts, of all ages, will feel the lure of STEAM - Museum
of the Great Western Railway, in Swindon, housed in one of
the original engine ‘sheds’ telling the story of the men and
women who built, operated and travelled on the GWR. You
can see famous locomotives, drive a steam train simulator
and even work the signals in the restored signal box.
Brunel was a typically energetic Victorian, working up to
18 hours a day, often sleeping in his office. He believed that
there was no challenge he couldn’t meet. His engineering
solutions were often radical, and frequently graceful, even
if not all of them came to fruition.
His construction of the Great Western Railway, including
the bridge over the Thames at Maidenhead, Bristol docks,
and the three biggest steamships
in the world were part of an
integrated masterplan that would
take passengers from London to
Bristol by train and then straight
over to the United States in
transatlantic steamers. SS Great
Britain was the first steam powered screw propeller ship to
cross the Atlantic. Originally the largest passenger ship in
the world on her completion in 1845, Brunel’s masterpiece
is now restored and displayed in Bristol Docks.
Brunel’s other less well-known ships are the Great
Western and the Great Eastern. The former was the longest
ship in the world at the time and proved the viability of
commercial transoceanic steamship travel. The Great
Eastern became a pioneering oceanic telegraph
cable-laying ship.
The newly-opened ‘Being Brunel’ exhibition, at Brunel’s
SS Great Britain, explores the great engineer’s multifaceted
character and is full of facts about his extraordinary
life and legacy. Maybe he was compensating for only being
five feet tall but no one in Victorian Britain thought as big
as Isambard Kingdom Brunel. →
24 GreatWestWay.co.uk