Chapter 7 - Railways and Coastal Shipping in Britain in the Later Nineteenth Century: Cooperation and Competition

Summary

Among Philip Bagwell's many publications, one of the earliest was on the Railway Clearing House (RCH). This was the first definitive history of the establishment, functions and mechanisms of the RCH. One of the functions which Philip highlighted was its role as an impartial administrator of the various pooling agreements, conferences and grouping arrangements that the independent railway companies concluded to ensure through working and to reduce inter-company competition, especially on long-distance hauls. This work predated Philip's interest in coastal shipping and, as befits a book on a railway institution, there is relatively little about competing modes of transport. Yet the railway companies did not confine their attempts to regulate long-distance traffic to their own transport mode. For long hauls their chief rival was the coastal steamboat, which remained surprisingly competitive until the Great War. Hence, many railway conferences were only too keen to bring their seaborne rivals into an agreement in order to restrict competition, raise freight rates and allocate traffic on a “reasonable” basis. Bagwell noted that the Dundee, Perth and London Shipping Company was brought into the English and Scotch Traffic Agreement in 1856, as did Channon in his thesis, and that in 1867 “a similar kind of agreement” was concluded on the Clyde-Mersey route by railways and steamboat firms, but neither he nor Channon pursued the analysis to show what these agreements implied about coaster-railway competition.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate that there was a range of methods of restricting inter-modal competition which have previously been ignored. The use of pools and conferences by the railway companies is now well known, as is the adoption in the later nineteenth century of conferences among shipping companies in some foreign liner trades. Recently it has been shown that agreements, analogous to conferences in all but name, existed from a much earlier date among firms plying the coastal trade using steam liners and that these were widespread geographically and continued in existence at least until the First World War. In other words, the coastal liner companies endeavoured to minimize competition and regulate trade among themselves just as the railways did. This essay will show that there was also inter-modal collaboration over freight rates and levels of service, both formally through written agreements between railway conferences and coastal liner companies and by more informal understandings.