Did Queen Victoria See Her First Steam Train at Hersham?

In February 1837, five years before she ever rode on a train herself, the seventeen-year-old Princess Victoria wrote in her diary that she had watched a steam locomotive pass near Hersham. It is a small detail in a very long diary, but it puts the future queen at the edge of the railway age more than a year before the line through this part of Surrey opened to the public.

What the diary says

Victoria was staying at Claremont, the house near Esher lent to her by her uncle Leopold, King of the Belgians, when she saw the train. Her diary describes a “steam carriage” passing “with surprising quickness, striking sparks as it flew along the railroad, enveloped in clouds of smoke and making a loud noise,” adding that “it was a curious thing indeed.” She was seventeen at the time and would not become queen for another four months.

Hersham or Claremont?

Claremont itself sits under a mile south of Esher, not in Hersham. The railway Victoria watched was the line then being built south-west from London towards Woking and, eventually, Southampton, and the stretch her diary places her watching is generally given as near Hersham rather than at Claremont itself. The most that can be said with confidence is that Victoria was staying at Claremont and travelled out, by carriage, to watch the new railway somewhere in the Hersham area. The exact spot she stood is not recorded.

Not her first train journey

Watching a train pass is not the same as riding on one, and the Hersham sighting is often confused with Victoria’s actual first railway journey, which came more than five years later. On 13 June 1842, Victoria and Prince Albert travelled by train from Slough to Paddington on the Great Western Railway, a twenty-five-minute journey with Daniel Gooch driving and Isambard Kingdom Brunel riding along. She wrote afterwards that it was “delightful and so quick,” though she asked that her own trains never travel faster than thirty miles an hour. The 1837 sighting was an observation from the roadside; 1842 was the first time she boarded a train herself.

A railway before it was finished

What makes the Hersham sighting genuinely interesting is its timing. The line Victoria watched, built by the London and Southampton Railway, did not open to fare-paying passengers between London and Woking until May 1838, more than a year after her diary entry. She saw a railway under construction, or running test workings, rather than a public service. Hersham would not get a station of its own until 28 September 1936, on what had by then become the London and South Western Railway’s route to Waterloo. In February 1837, the village her diary names had no station at all, only the line itself cutting through the fields nearby.

The wider village history, including Hersham’s other brush with royalty, a visit from George III to see the first drill plough, is covered on the history of Hersham page. The green at the heart of the modern village is barely a mile from where Victoria’s railway once ran.