(^86) an environmenTal hisTory of Wildlife in england
c.1850, were particularly dramatic due to the poor tractive power of the early
engines. By that date around 7,000 miles of track had been laid in Britain as a
whole, a figure rising to 23,000 by 1914 (Figure 17).^57 Railways could, of course,
constitute a threat to wildlife. Although the number of animals killed by trains
was relatively low before the introduction of electrified rails, badgers and otters
appear to have been particularly vulnerable. But more important were other
key characteristics. Like canals, railways provided a network of corridors along
which wildlife could move without interruption, including alien introductions.
The most famous example of this is the spread of the Oxford ragwort (Senecio
squalidus), a plant from southern Europe which had been kept in the botanical
gardens at Oxford since the eighteenth century. By the start of the nineteenth
century, airborne seeds had spread the plant into the city itself, reaching the
railway station by the 1850s. From here the species moved rapidly along the
Great Western railway, and subsequently along other parts of the rail network.
The clinker and chips on which the rails rested provided a close parallel with
the Mediterranean mountains which were the plant’s original home but in
addition (it is alleged) its floating seeds were drawn along in the stripstream of
the passing trains, or even transported in the carriages themselves (the Victorian
botanist George Claridge Druce described how he was accompanied by one on
a train journey from Oxford to Tilehurst in Berkshire).^58 Although Oxford
ragwort is now found widely in urban areas, displacing the indigenous ragwort
(Senecio jacobæa), in rural areas it is still often closely associated with the
rail lines. In Herefordshire, for example, it has been observed that it is largely
restricted to waste ground lying within a quarter of a mile of the Hereford
to Abergaveny railway; beyond, the indigenous ragwort is normally found.
Other plants may have benefited in a similar manner, such as rosebay willow
herb (Chamaenerion augustifolium).^59 Now a familiar plant of waste ground
in both town and country, with its tall stems and vivid purple flowers, it was a
rare woodland species, scarcely to be seen in many districts, in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. It was described as ‘scarce’ in Northumberland
in 1769, as ‘rare’ in Herefordshire in the 1840s, and as ‘not often met with
in a wild state, but common in gardens’ in Hampshire in 1853.^60 But in the
second half of the nineteenth century it spread rapidly. Again, it has been
suggested that the plant’s airborne seeds were sucked along the rail network
in the slipstream of trains. In reality, as with other radical changes in species
distributions, this one was probably the consequence of a number of factors,
including the increase in the area of disturbed waste ground, and of thin soils
over gravel and scree, that accompanied industrialization and urbanization.
In 1867, the Worcestershire botanist Edwin Lees described how the plant was
spreading through the Vale of Severn, ‘incited to take possession of new-made
roads and embankments. I have observed it by the side of a diverted road near
Shatterford, and in the cutting of the Birmingham and Gloucester Railway,
near Croome Perry Wood’.^61
Other species may have been spread through the country in part as a conse-
quence of the new rail network, including yellow toadflax (Linaria vulgaris)
elle
(Elle)
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