South Eastern Railway

The South Eastern Railway was incorporated in 1836 and opened its main line from London to Dover via Redhill and Tonbridge in 1844, establishing itself as the primary carrier for Kent's Continental traffic and the crowds of Victorian tourists heading for the Channel ports, the Kent coast, and the steamer connections to France and Belgium. For half a century the SER's monopoly on the Folkestone and Dover boat-train traffic gave it a profitable if complacent commercial position, its reputation with passengers for overcrowding, unpunctuality, and poor service becoming notorious enough to earn it the satirical nickname 'Slow, Easy and Comfortable'.

The arrival of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway as a competitor through Kent from 1860 challenged the SER's monopoly and provoked a destructive competitive response — both companies building largely parallel routes through the same territory in a financial war that benefited neither. The SER's locomotive engineering at Ashford Works under James Cudworth and James Stirling produced competent if unglamorous types suited to the mixed requirements of the Kent network, including Cudworth's firebox innovation of 1856 that enabled the burning of cheap Welsh small coal. The competitive struggle with the LCDR ended finally with the 1899 working union that created the South Eastern and Chatham Railway.