Queen Victoria is usually credited as the first royal to ride a train. She was not. Her aunt by marriage, the dowager Queen Adelaide, travelled by rail in 1840, two years before Victoria's famous half-hour run from Slough to Paddington, and the oldest royal carriage in the national collection at York was built for Adelaide, not for her niece.
What Victoria did was something more lasting. Over six decades of travel she turned the railway carriage into a private royal room, with its own rules, its own speed and its own etiquette, and in doing so she set the pattern for every luxury train that followed. The saloon she helped pay for in 1869 still survives, and it explains a great deal about why grand trains look the way they do.
Thirty minutes from Slough
On 13 June 1842 the young queen drove from Windsor Castle to Slough and boarded a Great Western Railway train for London. The locomotive was Phlegethon, driven by Daniel Gooch, the company's locomotive superintendent, with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the line's engineer, on the footplate beside him. In her journal Victoria recorded that the run took thirty minutes, that there was no dust or great heat, and that it was "delightful and so quick". Some later accounts give the time as twenty-five minutes; the queen's own figure is the one worth trusting.
The journey mattered less for its speed than for its endorsement. Railways were barely a decade old as a public institution, and plenty of influential people still regarded them as dangerous and vulgar. A monarch stepping into a carriage, and pronouncing it delightful, made rail travel respectable in a way no prospectus could.
The queen who came first
The popular claim that Victoria was the first royal passenger does not survive contact with the museum records. The Science Museum Group, which runs the National Railway Museum in York, notes that Queen Adelaide, widow of William IV, made a railway journey between Nottingham and Leeds in 1840. Two years later the London and Birmingham Railway built a carriage for her use, known as Queen Adelaide's Saloon, No. 2, with an underframe from the company's Euston works and a body by a London coachbuilder.
That carriage is the oldest royal vehicle in the York collection. Model makers and retailers often go further and call it the oldest surviving royal carriage anywhere; the museum's own wording is more careful, and so should be ours. What is clear is that the idea of a dedicated royal coach predates Victoria's own enthusiasm for the railway.
A railway run on the queen's terms
Victoria quickly became the railways' most demanding customer. The Friends of the National Railway Museum have reconstructed her 1851 journey north on the new Great Northern Railway, for which the company ran a trial train to Peterborough and back under its locomotive superintendent, Archibald Sturrock. The return leg averaged 45¾ mph, which was considered very good for the time and faster than the royal party actually wanted.
On the day itself the train left the temporary London terminus at Maiden Lane and stopped at Lincoln, where the city had decorated itself for a royal visit. The queen did not get off. It was widely suspected that she remembered the city's MP, Colonel Charles Sibthorp, who had once dismissed railways as a passing fancy, had questioned in Parliament the risk to her person when she first took the train, and had voted to cut Prince Albert's allowance. The party slept that night at the Angel Inn in Doncaster, which Victoria found "quiet and clean", before going on to Edinburgh and then Aberdeen, at that time the closest railhead to Balmoral.
Her preferences hardened into rules. A limit of 40 mph by day and 30 mph by night is repeated in almost every popular history of the royal train, though it is rarely traced to a primary document and should be treated as tradition rather than established fact. More securely, a contemporary report of an 1891 royal run to Carlisle gave its average as 35 mph, described as the speed at which the queen usually travelled. She also preferred to stop at stations for meals rather than eat on the move, which did nothing for the timetable.
The 1869 saloon at Wolverton
The vehicle most associated with her was commissioned in 1869 from the London and North Western Railway. It was built at the company's Wolverton Works to a design by Richard Bore, and was reputedly the queen's favourite railway vehicle. Accounts published when the museum restored it put its cost at £1,800, of which Victoria herself contributed £800.
It began life as two six-wheeled carriages joined by a flexible gangway, one of the first such connections fitted to coaches in Britain. Inside were day and night compartments, a lavatory, and accommodation for her ladies-in-waiting and a personal servant, finished in silks, satinwood and bird's-eye maple. The Science Museum Group still holds the loose fittings: blue silk chairs, green night-compartment curtains, blinds, shutters, a pelmet and a 1933 inventory of the furniture, as well as a scale model probably made at Wolverton around 1890.
The queen disliked walking between vehicles while the train was moving, so in 1895 the two halves were remounted as a single saloon on a new twelve-wheeled bogie underframe. Sources differ slightly on how long she used it: one account says until 1900, while the museum's records say it remained in service until after her death in January 1901.
Milestones in the making of a royal train
- 1840 – Queen Adelaide travels by rail between Nottingham and Leeds.
- 1842 – Adelaide's saloon is built by the London and Birmingham Railway; on 13 June Victoria makes her first journey, Slough to Paddington.
- 1851 – The Great Northern Railway carries the royal party north from Maiden Lane.
- 1866 – The line is extended 26 miles from Banchory to Ballater, the station nearest Balmoral; it served royal trains until it closed in 1966.
- 1869 – The LNWR builds Victoria's saloon at Wolverton.
- 1895 – Its two halves are combined on a twelve-wheeled underframe.
From royal room to luxury template
The significance of the saloon is that it treated a carriage as a room rather than a seat. Victoria travelled with a household, so the vehicle needed a sitting room, a bedroom, a dressing area and space for staff, all arranged so the principal passenger never had to share a corridor with strangers. Her successors kept the idea: the LNWR built new saloons for Edward VII and Queen Alexandra soon after her death, and those too are now at York.
Commercial operators borrowed the language almost at once. George Pullman's palace cars sold a version of private comfort to anyone with the fare, and continental monarchs pushed the royal saloon to extremes, most memorably in Ludwig II's Versailles on wheels. In India the princely states commissioned their own carriages, a lineage traced in our piece on the maharajas' carriages. Preserving such vehicles is skilled work in its own right; Victoria's saloon had its interior restored in 2003 and its exterior panelling later, a process described in our article on the workshops where heritage carriages are restored.
Where the tradition rides on
Victoria's saloon will not run again, but the idea it embodied is very much in service. The closest descendant in spirit is the British Pullman, whose restored 1920s and 1930s cars leave from London and preserve the same sense of a carriage as a furnished room. Her long journeys north to Scotland find an echo on the Belmond Royal Scotsman, which tours the Highlands from Edinburgh through country around Inverness that the queen knew well. For a wider view of the options, our guide to luxury trains in Britain and Scotland sets the British trains side by side, and the full range of journeys is listed under our trains.
