The Railroad Revolution: How the Steam Train Changed the World
The railroad was the most visible product of the new industrial technology. The development of the steam locomotive and the railroad revolution transformed transportation, created new markets, and made possible the integration of the national and global economies.
Railroads did more than move goods and people faster. They redrew the map of settlement, created the first big industrial corporations, and forced societies to agree on things like standard time. The pages below cover the most important of these effects, with links to detailed articles on the topics.
The Development of the Steam Locomotive
The steam locomotive was the key technology of the railroad revolution. The development of the locomotive from the first experimental engines of Richard Trevithick to the famous Rocket of the Stephensons was one of the great stories of the Industrial Revolution, and it established the basic form of the steam locomotive for the next century. The article on the steam locomotive describes this development in more detail.
The development of the steam locomotive was a key chapter in the broader history of the steam engine, and the high-pressure engine developed by Trevithick and his successors was the basis of most subsequent locomotive and traction engine designs. The article on James Watt’s improvements describes the development of the steam engine more broadly.
The Coming of the Railway
The first public railways in the world to use steam traction were the Stockton and Darlington Railway, opened in 1825, and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened in 1830. The success of these early railways triggered a wave of railway-building that transformed Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, and that soon spread to continental Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world. The article on the railroad history describes the development of the British railway system in more detail.
The development of the railway in the United States was particularly dramatic. The first American railroads were built in the 1820s and 1830s, and the network grew rapidly in the following decades. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 was a watershed moment, tying the country together from coast to coast and creating a national market for goods. The article on the American Industrial Revolution describes the development of the American railroad in more detail.
The Impact of the Railroad
The railroad had a transformative effect on the modern world. By making it possible to move goods, people, and information quickly and cheaply over long distances, the railroad helped to create a single integrated economy in many countries, and it tied the world’s economies together in a global trading system. The article on the impact of the railroad describes this transformation in more detail.
The railroad also had important social and cultural effects. The railroad journey itself was a new experience for most people, and the new railway companies 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 railroad also had important effects on the geography of industry. The availability of cheap transport made it possible to specialize in the production of particular goods in particular regions, and the resulting regional specialization helped to increase the productivity of industry as a whole. The article on the railroad history describes the broader effects of the railway in more detail.
The Railroad and the Environment
The railroad had important effects on the environment. The construction of the railway network required large quantities of iron for rails, bridges, and locomotives, and large quantities of coal to power the locomotives. The result was a major increase in the demand for iron and coal, and a major expansion of the mining and metallurgical industries.
The burning of coal by the locomotives also contributed to the air pollution that was already a major problem in the industrial cities, and the locomotives themselves were major sources of pollution, particularly when they were operated in tunnels or in built-up areas. The article on the causes of the Industrial Revolution describes the role of coal in the Industrial Revolution.
The Long-Term Legacy of the Railroad
The long-term legacy of the railroad is still being felt today. The railroad was the first major technology to be developed by the new industrial economy, and it was the first to be applied on a global scale. The development of the railroad was a key chapter in the history of the Industrial Revolution, and it laid the foundation for the modern transportation system.
The railroad also established a model of large-scale, capital-intensive infrastructure that has been imitated in many other fields, including the telegraph, the electrical grid, the highway system, and the internet. The principles developed in the railroad era, including the use of standardized equipment, the integration of operations, and the development of complex systems of management, are still central to the modern industrial economy.
The Trevithick-Stephenson “Race” and the Origins of Locomotive Design
The development of the steam locomotive was the work of many engineers, not the heroic individual achievement of the standard narrative. The high-pressure steam engine that made the locomotive possible was developed by Richard Trevithick of Cornwall, whose 1803 Penydarren locomotive ran on the Merthyr Tydfil tramroad, and whose 1808 Catch Me Who Can was the first locomotive designed for passenger service. The early experiments of William Hedley at Wylam Colliery, who built the Puffing Billy and Wylam Dilly in 1813-1815, and of George Stephenson, whose 1814 Blucher was the first locomotive to use flanged wheels, established the basic form of the locomotive. The Rainhill Trials of October 6-14, 1829, organized by the directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, became the defining event of the period. The Rocket, built by Robert Stephenson and Company, achieved an average speed of 12 mph hauling a load of 13 tons, with a top speed of 30 mph, and won the £500 prize. The Rocket’s design, with a multi-tubular boiler (inspired by the French engineer Marc Seguin), a blast pipe, and inclined cylinders, set the pattern for the next century of locomotive design.
The Numbers of the Global Railway Boom
The railway boom of the mid-nineteenth century was the largest construction project in human history to that point. Britain, the pioneer, had 6,621 miles of line in 1840, 15,537 in 1852, and 24,929 by 1870, and a peak of 24,000 miles in service in the early 1900s. France built 1,850 miles of line in the 1840s, the period of the Chemins de fer du Nord and the Paris-Lyon-Marseille projects, and had 9,000 miles of line by 1852 and 17,000 by 1870. Germany had 6,000 miles by 1850 and 12,000 by 1870. The United States, the largest single market, had 23,000 miles of line in 1850, 35,000 in 1860, and 166,000 in 1890, and was the most active construction area in the world for most of the nineteenth century. Russia built the Trans-Siberian Railway, 5,753 miles from Moscow to Vladivostok, between 1891 and 1916. India had 28,000 miles by 1900, the product of state and private investment. By 1900, the world had roughly 500,000 miles of railway line, and the railway had become the largest single industry in the world.
The Cost of Railway Building
The cost of building the world’s railways in the nineteenth century was enormous. The total cost of the British railway system, by 1870, was about £720 million; the equivalent of perhaps 70 percent of one year’s national income at the time. The French railway system, built largely in the 1840s and 1850s, cost about 5 billion francs (£200 million). The American railway system, by 1890, had cost perhaps $4 billion in private capital and another $1 billion in federal land grants, the largest single private investment in American history to that point. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway cost Russia about 1.5 billion rubles, roughly equal to one year’s state revenue. The financing of the railways was the most important stimulus to the development of the European capital market: the Crédit Mobilier of the Pereire brothers in France, the Sachsenbank in Saxony, and the joint-stock banks of London, all built up their deposit and investment business on the basis of railway securities. The railway was, in this sense, the first modern industry.
Time Zones, Telegraph, and the Standardization of the Modern World
The railway did not just transform the world; it standardized it. The adoption of standard time zones, beginning with Britain’s Railway Clearing House in 1847 and culminating in the International Meridian Conference of 1884, was a direct consequence of the need to coordinate railway timetables. The conference, attended by 25 countries, established the Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian of the world and recommended a system of 24 standard time zones. The standardization of railway gauge — the British 4 ft 8½ in standard, the Russian 5 ft gauge, the Indian “Indian broad gauge” of 5 ft 6 in — produced a system of measurement that survives in modified form in the modern world. The development of the railway telegraph, which used the track as a conductor, was a major step in the development of the electrical industry. The railway was, in short, the prototype of the modern industrial system: a large, capital-intensive, networked industry that required standardization, regulation, and a state-supplied infrastructure.
The Environmental Impact of the Railway
The railway had profound environmental consequences. The construction of the American transcontinental railroad was responsible, in part, for the destruction of the buffalo herd of the Great Plains, which fell from an estimated 30 million in 1860 to fewer than 1,000 by 1884. The locomotive’s coal consumption was a major source of air pollution: a single passenger train of the 1850s consumed perhaps 5-10 tons of coal per 100 miles, and a typical freight train of the 1880s consumed perhaps twice that. The railway was also responsible for major changes in the landscape, including the construction of embankments, cuttings, and tunnels that altered the natural drainage patterns of the British and European countryside. The environmental history of the railway is the subject of William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis (1991) for the American Midwest, and of Peter Perhac for the British railway. The long-term effect, in both Britain and the United States, was to fix the location of the coal, iron, and steel industries along the railway lines for a century to come.
The Decline of the Railway in the Twentieth Century
The railway was, by 1900, the largest single industry in the world, and it remained so until the Second World War. The decline began in the 1930s, when the automobile and the diesel truck began to take over passenger and freight traffic, and it accelerated after the Second World War. The British railway system, nationalized in 1948 under the British Transport Commission and reorganized in 1963 under the Beeching cuts, lost 70 percent of its freight traffic and 50 percent of its passenger traffic between 1950 and 1970. The American railway system, which had reached a peak of 254,000 miles in 1916, declined to 174,000 miles by 1970 and continued to shrink thereafter. The French, German, and Japanese railway systems survived the transition better, in part because of greater state investment, and the high-speed rail systems of the 1960s and 1970s — the Shinkansen (1964), the TGV (1981), the InterCityExpress (1991) — represented a new lease on life for the technology. The decline of the railway in the English-speaking world is the subject of Mark Casson’s The World’s First Railway System (2009) for Britain and of John F. Stover’s The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroad (1999) for the United States.
The Railway and the Standard of Living Debate
The railroad has been central to the cliometric debate about the British Industrial Revolution. Robert Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth (1964) introduced the concept of “social savings” — the difference between the actual cost of transporting goods in 1890 and the hypothetical cost if the railroad had not existed. Fogel estimated that the social savings of the American railroad in 1890 were about 4.7 percent of GNP, a figure much lower than the 25-30 percent that earlier historians had claimed. The work provoked a long debate with Albert Fishlow, who argued that Fogel had understated the indirect effects of the railroad, and with Paul David, who introduced the concept of “social overhead” capital. The more recent literature has emphasized the role of the railroad in creating the integrated national market — the unification of the grain market, the development of the Chicago commodity market, the rise of mail-order firms like Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward. The debate is the subject of Robert Fogel’s The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 (2004) and of Sharon Strom’s Beyond the Typewriter (1992), which places the railroad in the larger context of the transformation of the American workplace.
The most important open scholarly debate about the railroad is the social-savings question: was the railway a net contributor to 19th-century economic growth, or was it merely a faster substitute for the canal and the turnpike? The traditional answer, going back to T. S. Ashton and given its modern form in the standard accounts of British and American industrial history, 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 answer, made famous by Robert Fogel in Railroads and American Economic Growth (1964), 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 G. R. Hawke’s British figure for 1865 was around 7-10 percent. The debate is unresolved in the sense that the methodological choices (which costs to count, which year to use as the base) substantially affect the answer, and the historical work since Fogel (Albert Fishlow, Paul David, Jeffrey Williamson) has moved the answer back up toward 10-15 percent. The interesting current question, raised in the post-1990s climate history, is whether the railway matters more as an indicator of fossil-fuel availability, since the rail-and-steam-and-coal complex that emerged in 1830-1870 is the direct ancestor of the carbon-intensive growth model of the twentieth century. The question is, in other words, whether the railway’s social savings were economic (saved transport costs) or environmental (the price we are now paying for the fossil-fuel era that the railway ushered in).