page_title: Birmingham and Gloucester Railway
section_title: First proposals
hierarchical_section_title: Birmingham and Gloucester Railway / First proposals
caption_attribution_description: English: System map of the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway, England, in 1845
context_page_description: The Birmingham and Gloucester Railway was the first name of the railway linking the cities in its name and of the company which pioneered and developed it; the line opened in stages in 1840, using a terminus at Camp Hill in Birmingham. It linked with the Bristol and Gloucester Railway in Gloucester, but at first that company's line was broad gauge, and Gloucester was a point of the necessary but inconvenient transhipment of goods and passengers onto 4 ft 8 ¹⁄₂ in gauge that became the national standard. Nearly all of the original main line remains active as a "trunk" route, also known as an arterial route or line.
  Its main line incorporated the Lickey Incline 2 miles of track climbing a 1-in-37 gradient, northbound. The climb was a challenge or impediment for many of the heaviest loads and weaker engines during the era of steam traction.
  Having attracted its own patronage, capital and accomplished fully functional transformation and employment of land, buildings, labour force and rolling stock in 1846, it was acquired by the Midland Railway.
context_section_description: The idea for a railway line between Bristol and Birmingham was put forward during the construction of the Stockton and Darlington Railway. 78,000 tons of goods were conveyed from Birmingham to Bristol annually, a journey that took nearly a week, and the cost of the journey was high. At a meeting in Bristol on 13 December 1824 subscriptions were taken for a proposed Bristol, Northern and Western Railway. Investors, among which wealthy venture capitalists, were enthusiasts of the scheme and before the fund promoters' prospectus meeting closed, all the 16,000 shares allocated to Bristol were taken up. A further 9,000 shares were created, the subscription fee and paying-up of which was allocated to other locations, and the total amounted to £1.25 million (equivalent to £110,809,000 in 2019), in an era when cheap and plentiful labourers' and professional work would have enabled the construction of thousands of houses or road modifications (e.g. regular bridges) for such a sum. The company surveyed the route in 1825 but there was a financial crisis in 1826 in which investors asked for the project to be suspended, which the company did.
  In 1832 the company advanced a new scheme; Isambard Kingdom Brunel was asked to survey a cheap route between Birmingham and Gloucester. He avoided the barrier of the Lickey Hills and his maximum gradient would have been 1 in 300. This scheme too failed to make progress due to lack of funds.
caption: The Birmingham and Gloucester Railway system in 1845
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