It also meant that its trains from London Bridge passed over the lines of three other companies: the L&GR to Corbett's Lane Junction, the L&CR as far as 'Jolly Sailor', and the L&BR to Merstham.

[13] The company had complete control of Folkestone whereas at Dover it had to negotiate with both the Admiralty and the local town council, and the rail route from Boulogne to Paris was better developed than that from Calais.

[19] Thereafter further developments were at London Bridge, and following a shunting accident during August 1850 which caused the collapse of a large part of the station roof,[20] the SER closed Bricklayers Arms terminus to passenger traffic in 1852 converting it into a goods facility.

In September 1845 the SER appointed James Macgregor (sometimes spelled McGregor or M'Gregor) to a new post combining the roles of Chairman and Managing Director.

Likewise the acquisition of a line so remote from its main area of operation, and of doubtful profitability, caused heated discussion and the resignation of several directors, who felt that the company should rather secure its territory and develop services in Kent, as the LB&SCR was doing in Sussex.

Relations between the two companies were bad from the outset, especially at those sites where they shared facilities, such as the approaches to London Bridge, East Croydon, and Redhill.

The matter was resolved in court in favour of the LB&SCR, but victory was short-lived as the following year the SER opened its lines from Tunbridge Wells, reducing the distance by rail to Hastings from London.

[41] One group of SER directors were anxious to 'close the capital account' and build no more lines,[42] even though this might leave the field open to rival projects, as would later prove to be the case.

As a result of the railway's unwillingness to act, plans for an independent line from the SER station at Strood to Faversham and Canterbury were made following a public meeting at Rochester in 1850.

[43] Following Macgregor's resignation in 1854, there followed a decade of factionalism among the directors and equally poor management, described by Samuel Smiles the company Secretary as 'not so much business as speech-making, that seemed to be the work of the Board.

'[44] It was during this period that there was a continuing failure to deal with underlying problems in the company, and its relationships with its neighbours together with further strategic errors which weakened what might otherwise have been a profitable enterprise.

[50] This enabled the LCDR, which had only reached Dover in 1861, to secure the contract and the following year would give it leverage when it came to negotiating the Continental Traffic Agreement.

[51] The SER responded by gaining parliamentary approval to build its own line from New Beckenham to a new station at Croydon (Addiscombe Road), which opened 1 April 1864.

[63] In 1868 a Bill was presented to Parliament to allow for co-operative working of railways of southern England (the SER, the LCDR, the LB&SCR and the L&SWR).

Watkin had long-term ambitions for the SER to become one link in a chain of 'Watkin' railways from the industrial north of England to the Continent via a proposed Channel Tunnel.

His plans for a Channel Tunnel were ultimately blocked by the War Office, and suspicion fell on James Staats Forbes, chairman of the LCDR for having urged the decision.

The LB&SCR had supported a plan to build the Surrey and Sussex Junction Railway along this route in 1865, but its involvement had been opposed by the SER as being contrary to their agreement, and the scheme was abandoned during the 1867 financial crisis.

[68] Ernest Foxwell, also writing in 1883, stated 'The great blots on the South Eastern are its unpunctuality, its fares, its third class carriages, and the way in which local interests are sacrificed to Continental traffic.

A scathing article in The Investors Review for June 1894 demonstrated how poorly Watkin's railways had performed financially compared to others, and referred to the SER's 'bitter hatred towards all but first-class travellers, [and] their determined cultivation of the art of running empty coaches'.

Some of the complaints of unpunctuality of the SER may have been exaggerated, or were at least soon remedied after Watkin's departure, since a statistical survey of the company's services conducted in 1895 by William Acworth found that, with the exception of the heavily congested and difficult to operate lines between London Bridge and Cannon Street and Charing Cross, the company did not perform significantly worse than others in London in terms of timekeeping.

[74] Probably the most wasteful competitive venture by the SER was a second bridge over the river Medway between Strood leading to a branch to Rochester (opened July 1891) and to Chatham.

[75] Unlike the neighbouring LB&SCR, the SER failed to capitalise on the rapidly growing population of the South London suburbs during the 1870s and 1880s, and to develop effective suburban services.

During the early 1890s the SER was actively considering extending the Bricklayers Arms branch into Charing Cross and Cannon Street as a means of relieving this congestion, but deferred making any decision to do so and ultimately the idea was dropped following the operating agreement with the LCDR in 1899, which provided the new 'joint railway' with two further pathways into London.

As mentioned above, the SER was accused during the 1880s of concentrating on its Boat trains and Continental passenger traffic at the expense of its local services in Kent and the London suburbs.

One area where the SER did fail compared with the LB&SCR and the L&SWR was in developing effective services to the rapidly growing suburbs of south east London.

The SER did however have the advantage of taking commuters far closer to the centres of business and commerce at Charing Cross and Cannon Street, whereas the LB&SCR and LS&WR deposited them south of the river Thames at London Bridge and Waterloo respectively.

During the 1860s the railway was an important factor in the development of holiday destinations such as Margate and Ramsgate in Kent and St Leonards-on-Sea and Hastings in East Sussex.

[80] By the 1870s, the South Eastern Railway was running Hop Pickers' Specials to transport large numbers of working-class Londoners to towns and villages in Kent and East Sussex for the season.

He was travelling with Nelly Ternan and her mother at the front of the train in a first-class carriage, which escaped complete derailment when the locomotive and tender left the track as a result of repairs to the line.

[98] Under Cudworth the railway was the largest British user of the experimental and ultimately unsuccessful Crampton locomotive type with twenty examples built between 1847 and 1851.