The 19th century entrepreneur and real-life Phileas Fogg who ran for US President.
London’s first tram services were set up in 1861 by an American with the wonderfully appropriate name of George Francis Train.
Described as "excitable and visionary to the point of insanity", he was a transport entrepreneur, property developer, round-the-world traveller and would-be politician.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks, please click here.
Before his London venture, Train had established a double-decker tram service in Birkenhead, near Liverpool, in 1860. However, he was keen to bring his horse-drawn ‘street railway’ to other, larger cities in England.
After an unsuccessful attempt in Birmingham, he turned to London, the biggest of them all.
He invited influential people to Sunday morning breakfasts at his rented house in Covent Garden to persuade them of the merits of his plans. It worked. His Bayswater line, from Marble Arch to Notting Hill, opened on 25 March 1861.
A Victoria Street line, from Westminster Abbey to Pimlico, opened on 15 May 1861. His third service, the Surrey Side Tramway, from Westminster Bridge to Kennington Gate, opened on 15 August 1861.
However, Train’s trams were troubled and short-lived.
A boy was killed by one of the trams and Train was arrested, although later acquitted.
His tramcars were drawn by horses on rails that stood on top of the road surface, making it very difficult for other traffic to cross them.
Carriage owners were not shy in voicing their objections. In Birkenhead a similar track was replaced with more practical rails sunk into the road, but not in London.
Train was arrested and tried for breaking and injuring the Uxbridge Road and charged by the Surrey Assizes with obstructing the street (he was arrested a total of 15 times in his life).
The court ruled that only an Act of Parliament could authorise the laying of rails in the street. He was fined, ordered to remove the track and imprisoned when he refused.
After failing to win Parliamentary approval, his three London lines were all removed by June 1862. He opened lines in the Potteries in Staffordshire and in Darlington, but soon lost interest in trams and in England.
The London writer Harold P Clunn, in his 1932 book The Face of London, summarised Train’s disillusionment:
“Naturally he was very angry at thus getting badly treated, to the great detriment of his banking account, and accordingly conceived an animus against England which nothing could assuage.”
George Francis Train was born on 24 March 1829 in Boston, Massachusetts. After losing his parents and three sisters to yellow fever at the age of four, he was brought up by his Methodist grandparents, who hoped he would become a minister. This was not to be, although Train abstained from alcohol and tobacco throughout his life.
While still a boy, a school friend who had moved to the US from England mentioned to the young Train the challenges of travelling around his hometown, Birkenhead. When, as an adult, Train had moved to Liverpool to join a cousin’s shipping office, this childhood conversation motivated him to set up his first tramway there.
In 1850, while travelling in the US on holiday from England, a young woman caught the eye of the 21 year old Train. He changed his plans to be on her train. 48 hours later, Wilhelmina Wilkinson Davis accepted his proposal and the couple married in 1851. They had four children, one of whom pre-deceased him, but they lived apart from 1872.
Train’s career also included Melbourne, Australia, at the time of the gold rush. There, he was a shipping agent for the White Diamond Line, worked in insurance, helped to build port facilities and was involved in the import of a wide range of goods.
He claimed to have been offered the presidency of Australia by republicans seeking independence from the UK.
In the US he enlisted the Queen of Spain to finance the Atlantic and Great Western Railway. He was also involved in setting up the Union Pacific Railroad and made a lot of money buying undeveloped land on the railway’s route, developing it and selling it.
Train was an enthusiastic supporter of Irish independence from the UK. In 1868 he was arrested in Ireland for possessing copies of speeches he had given in the US in favour of the Fenians, an organisation advocating independence through armed revolution.
During the American Civil War, styling himself ‘Citizen Train’, he gave speeches expressing his strong backing of the Union and criticising the Confederacy. However, he later opposed Black enfranchisement, believing in educated suffrage (but conceded “I am willing that intelligence should be the test”).
Train did support votes for women and was closely associated with the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, campaigning energetically for it. He also helped to finance The Revolution, a newspaper focusing on women’s rights.
According to a Kansas suffragist, Train “in appearance, manners and conversation was a perfect, though somewhat unique specimen of a courtly, elderly gentleman”. In addition, he attracted “immense and enthusiastic audiences everywhere, and was a special favourite with the labouring classes”.
However, another (male) supporter of the Woman's Rights movement referred to him as “that crack-brained harlequin and semi-lunatic”.
He defended an article by suffragist Victoria Woodhull, who advocated of abortion, divorce, free love, legalised prostitution and votes for women. Her article had referred to an alleged adulterous affair involving Congregationalist clergyman and anti-slavery campaigner Henry Ward Beecher and suffragist Elizabeth Richards Tilton.
The contents of Woodhull's article were considered improper, so, as a comparison, Train published certain explicit extracts from the Bible.
As a result his sanity was called into question. He was officially declared sane, but a monomaniac (someone with an exaggerated or obsessive enthusiasm or preoccupation for one thing), and arrested and imprisoned on obscenity charges.
Train stood for President of the United States as an independent candidate in 1864 and again in 1872, when he became the first male presidential candidate to argue in favour of women’s right to vote. Victoria Woodhull also ran for President in 1872, becoming the first woman to do so.
In spite of Train’s confidence and his skills as an orator, Abraham Lincoln was elected in 1864 and the incumbent, Ulysses S Grant, was re-elected in 1872.
Train completed three round-the-world trips.
The first, in 1870, was achieved in 80 days of travel, although the total time elapsed was extended by a two week spell in jail in Paris for supporting the revolutionary Paris Commune.
He claimed that his journey was the inspiration for Jules Verne’s 1872 novel Around the World in Eighty Days, the fictional story of Phileas Fogg’s circumnavigational adventure.
"He stole my thunder," complained Train. "I'm Phileas Fogg."
Illustration of Phileas Fogg by Alphonse de Neuville and/or Léon Benett, sourced from Wikipedia, Public Domain. Photo of GF Train by Mathew Benjamin Brady - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons, Public Domain
Train achieved a second round-the-world trip in a record time of 67 days in 1890 and broke the record again on a third trip of 60 days in 1892 (then aged 63).
In his later years, Train’s life was less hectic, but he became more and more eccentric. He wouldn't shake hands with others, as he thought it would drain his energy, but shook hands with himself.
He lived in the Mills Hotel in New York and liked to sit in Madison Square Park, giving coins to passers-by and speaking only to children and animals.
He wrote a memoir in 1902, containing a number of somewhat incredulous claims about his life. He died of heart failure, aged 74, in 1904 with his daughter by his side.
A man with a multitude of different facets to his interests and personality, George Francis Train was something of an enigma.
In a 2001 biography, Allen Foster summed up George Francis Train as a “capitalist, communist, royalist, revolutionary, genius, lunatic, visionary prophet, fool, pacifist, warmonger...”.
Walks available for booking
For a schedule of forthcoming London On The Ground guided walks, please click here.
What a fascinating life! Someone should make a film about him!