Air travel

Today I salute the town of Croydon, Surrey, for its pioneering role in transport. For it was on this day in 1803 that the Surrey Iron Railway opened, linking it up with Mitcham and Wandsworth. It has been called the first public railway. It was public in the sense that it was open to anybody, as long as they had a train to put on it; and, this being a few years before the age of steam, a horse to pull it. Bits of it survive today as part of Croydon's latest groundbreaking transport initiative, the much loved Croydon Tramlink which brought trams to the London area for the first time in 50 years.

A more ambitious though ultimately unsuccessful rail project connected Croydon with London Bridge in the 1840s. This "atmospheric railway" used pneumatic propulsion. A piston would be propelled along a cast iron vacuum pipe (pictured) running between the rails. The pipe had a leather valve so that a connecting rod could fix the piston to the train.  It would have had the advantage of keeping the engines, and all their smoke, well away from the train in separate "pumping stations". It only lasted a few months, due partly to problems with the leather valves, especially at points.

The town's next transport innovation was to host the first airport in the world to have air traffic control, introduced in 1921 when Croydon was London's main airport, and it was the height of fashion for silent film stars and glamourous flappers to be photographed cavorting down Purley Way.


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