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On the 9th April 1657 an advertisement appeared in Mercurius Politicus, a London Newspaper. A public coach service was about to start running between London and Chester. The 190 miles would take four days, and a passage cost 35 shillings. (£388 in 2019). There are other claims to be the first scheduled coach service but they were all around this time. The Chester coach, if not the very first, was certainly one of the earliest.
Prior to this, the few people who needed to make long journeys would either walk, go on horseback, or ride in a stage waggon. A very few, exceedingly rich people, might own a own private carriage, together with the many servants necessary to support a journey.
Most of the passengers on this new coach would have been travelling between London and Dublin. Chester had become important as the main port for travel between England and Ireland. Henry Cromwell was trying to improve relations between the two countries, so more people were travelling between them. So Chester was a logical choice to be the terminus for this new form of public transport.
The timetable for this first coach was a little optimistic. Advertisements two years later show that it was then taking five days for the journey - a day longer! Amazingly, the coach service was a success and other routes started operating, linking London with other major towns across the country.
These were the earliest public coach services. They were successful financially but journeys were slow. Two factors kept journey times long: the roads were poor, and the same horses usually had to pull the coach over the whole of its route.
The coaches used on these services were fairly crude and little better than covered wagons. They were generally drawn by four horses which had to make the entire journey. They had no suspension, so the ride was very bumpy. They could only average about 3mph on the rutted tracks and unmade roads of the time, which were wide and heavily rutted in summer, and muddy or flooded in winter. In autumn, coaches would often become stuck in mud up to the axles and they usually stopped running altogether during the winter.
Incredibly, despite these problems, early coach services were commercially successful. By the end of the reign of Charles II in 1685, several key routes had been established from London to major towns across the country.
Section 4:
The Coaches
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Anecdotes written by people who actually travelled on the coaches
The coachmen, the inns, the coach proprietors - they’re all here. Come in and meet them
Britain’s roads were pretty impassable for most of our history. Coach travel was very difficult until they improved
Wheeled transport evolved over many years. Find out how coaches developed
Sources and information about how I came to create this website
Home Page of the Coaching Website