The new railways, whose earliest stations had been very modest indeed, were as interested as insurance companies and banks in the representational dignity of Classical frontispieces. At Euston Grove in London, before what was intended to be a double station planned by the engineer Robert Stephenson (1803-59)[5^a] in 1835 to serve the London & Birmingham and the Great Western Railways, there rose from the designs of Philip Hardwick (1792-1870) the Euston ‘Arch’, a giant Greek Doric propylaeon; for the Birmingham terminal of the railway at Curzon Street Hardwick provided a second gateway that is more in the form of a Roman triumphal arch. This theme John Foster (1786-1846) expanded into a continuous Roman screen in front of Lime Street Station at Liverpool in 1836. At Huddersfield James P. Pritchett (1789-1868) and his son Charles fronted the main station block in 1845-9 with a Roman temple portico and flanked it with minor colonnaded features. The Monkwearmouth station by John Dobson (1787-1865) of 1848 is similar, but Grecian in its detailing. More appropriate to modern eyes was the endless red-brick façade designed by Francis Thompson for Robert Stephenson’s Trijunct Station in Derby of 1839-41. This was astylar but had various subtle projections and recessions of the wall plane and a comparable variety of levels in the very long skyline. Thompson also, in the stone towers he designed for Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge of 1845-50, handled his material with a superbly rational directness (Plate 61). The technical significance of such structures as examples of the new uses of iron which the railways encouraged, must be considered later (see Chapter 7). Of comparable quality to Thompson’s work is the enormous Royal Navy Victualling Yard at Stonehouse of 1826-35 by the engineer Sir John Rennie (1794-1874)—able son, like Robert Stephenson, of a more famous engineer father and also a brother-in-law of C. R. Cockerell. Despite the severity characteristic of the period, this has an almost Baroque plasticity and vigour of silhouette rarely achieved by contemporary architects before the mid-century. Except for certain large provincial and suburban Nonconformist churches, the heyday of the temple portico came to an end about 1840. The last prominent example in London is the Royal Exchange, built by Sir William Tite (1798-1873) in 1841-4, but there is nothing Classical about other aspects of this prominent structure. The side, rear, and court façades are in a sort of Neo-Baroque that prefigures the bombast of the third quarter of the century (see Chapter 9).