Railroad History: From the Stockton and Darlington to the National Network

The history of the British railway is one of the most remarkable stories of the Industrial Revolution. Within the space of a single generation, between 1825 and 1850, the railway went from being a small, experimental technology used on a few industrial lines to being the dominant form of long-distance transport in Britain, with thousands of miles of track and millions of passengers. The railway boom transformed the British economy and society, and it became the model for the railway systems of the world.

The First Railways

The first railways were built in the early seventeenth century to carry coal and other minerals from mines to navigable waterways. These early railways used wooden or iron rails and horse-drawn wagons, and they were a major improvement over the dirt roads of the time. By the late eighteenth century, there were thousands of miles of these early railways in the coal-producing regions of Britain, and they were a key part of the transport system of the new industrial economy.

The transition to steam-powered railways began in the early nineteenth century. The first steam locomotive to run on rails was built by Richard Trevithick in 1804, and a few experimental steam locomotives were built in the following years. The most important early development was the work of George Stephenson and his son Robert, who designed the locomotives for the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened in 1825, and later the famous Rocket, which won the Rainhill Trials in 1829.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830, was the first railway in the world to use steam traction exclusively, and it marked the beginning of the railway age proper. The railway was the brainchild of a group of Liverpool and Manchester merchants who wanted a fast, reliable connection between the port of Liverpool and the manufacturing center of Manchester. The railway was engineered by George Stephenson, and its locomotives, designed by Robert Stephenson, established the basic form of the steam locomotive for the next century.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was an immediate success. In its first year of operation, it carried more than 400,000 passengers and 70,000 tons of freight, and it quickly became one of the most profitable businesses in the country. The success of the railway inspired a wave of railway-building across Britain, and the 1830s and 1840s saw a railway boom that transformed the British landscape.

The Railway Mania

The “railway mania” of the 1840s was one of the most spectacular episodes of speculative investment in British history. Hundreds of railway companies were formed, often with the support of local landowners, merchants, and politicians who stood to benefit from the new lines. The capital for the railways came from a variety of sources, including wealthy individuals, joint-stock companies, and the London Stock Exchange, which became the leading market for railway securities.

The railway mania produced a great deal of fraud and speculation. Many of the new railway companies were poorly planned, and some of the lines that were built proved to be uneconomic. The collapse of the railway mania in the late 1840s led to a major financial crisis, and many investors lost their savings. Despite this, the railway network continued to grow, and by 1870 Britain had more than 20,000 miles of railway, more than any other country in the world.

The Consolidation of the Network

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the consolidation of the British railway network. The thousands of small companies that had been built during the railway mania were gradually merged into a smaller number of large companies, including the Great Western Railway, the London and North Western Railway, the Midland Railway, and the North Eastern Railway. These companies built impressive new stations, including the famous stations at London Paddington, King’s Cross, and St Pancras, and they developed a wide range of services for both passengers and freight.

The railway companies also became major customers of the iron and steel industries, since they required large quantities of rails, bridges, and locomotives. The article on the Bessemer process describes how the development of cheap steel made possible the great expansion of the railway in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Effects of the Railway

The railway had effects that went far beyond the simple provision of transport. The railway journey itself was a new experience for most people, and the railways created a mass market for travel that had not existed before. The railways also created new patterns of working life, since the railway timetable became the standard by which the country organized its time, and the railway station became a new social institution.

The railways had a major effect on the geography of Britain. Many towns that had been small market towns grew rapidly as railway junctions, while other towns that had been bypassed by the new lines declined. The railways also encouraged the growth of seaside resorts, since day trips and short holidays by rail became possible for the first time. Blackpool, Scarborough, Brighton, and many other seaside towns grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century thanks to the railway.

The railway was also a major force for the standardization of time. Before the railway, each town in Britain kept its own local time, based on the position of the sun. The railway companies, however, needed a single, uniform time across the country to coordinate their timetables, and in 1847 the Railway Clearing House adopted Greenwich Mean Time as the standard time for the railway. The standardization of time spread to the rest of British society over the following decades, and Greenwich Mean Time became the standard time for the whole country in 1880.

The Railway and the Global Economy

The British railway was the model for the railway systems of the world. The first railways in continental Europe, in the United States, in India, and in many other countries were built with British capital, British engineers, and British materials. The British railway also influenced the design of railway systems elsewhere, with the British standard gauge, British signaling systems, and British locomotive designs being widely adopted.

The global spread of the railway was one of the most important ways in which the Industrial Revolution transformed the world. The railways created a global market for goods, raw materials, and capital, and they helped to create the modern global economy. The article on the American Industrial Revolution describes how the railway was central to the industrialization of the United States.

The Railway in the Twentieth Century

The railway remained the dominant form of long-distance transport in Britain until the 1920s, when the growth of the automobile and the airplane began to erode its position. The railway network was largely nationalized in 1948, and the modern railway system in Britain is a much smaller version of the great network that was built in the nineteenth century.

Despite its decline, the railway remains an important part of the British transport system, and the great Victorian railway stations, with their Gothic Revival and Italianate architecture, are still among the most impressive buildings in British cities. The railway is also a powerful symbol of the Industrial Revolution, and the sight of a steam locomotive hauling a train through the countryside is still evocative of the great transformation of the nineteenth century.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about the railway is whether it created the modern British economy or merely carried it. The traditional case, articulated by T. S. Ashton and given economic substance by the 1960s transport historians, is that the railway was the necessary precondition for the second phase of the Industrial Revolution: the heavy industry of iron, steel, and coal, the development of the consumer economy of canned food and ready-made clothing, and the integration of the national market. The revisionist case, made famous by Robert Fogel in Railroads and American Economic Growth (1964) and applied to Britain by G. R. Hawke, is that the social-savings estimate — the proportion of national income that would have been lost in the absence of the railway — was small: Fogel’s US figure was 4.7 percent of GNP in 1890, and Hawke’s British figure for 1865 was around 7-10 percent. The second position does not deny that the railway mattered, but it pushes back on the idea that the railway was the cause, rather than the consequence, of the broader industrial transformation. The current interest in the question, in climate history as well as in economic history, is whether the railway matters as an indicator of fossil-fuel availability, since the rail-and-steam-and-coal complex that emerged in 1830-1870 is also the direct ancestor of the carbon-intensive growth model of the twentieth century.

Selected Sources

Jack Simmons, The Victorian Railway (1991).
Michael Robbins, The Railway Age in Britain (1962).
T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (1948).
Harold Perkin, The Age of the Railway (1970).