Industrial Revolution · CHAPTER 4 ·
Early railways and Railway Mania
Chapter 4 of The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914: “The Railway Age”
Railways grew out of the coalfields: the Stockton & Darlington line opened in 1825 to carry coal. After the Stephensons’ Rocket won the Rainhill trials in October 1829, the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened in 1830 as the first line between two cities worked entirely by steam to a timetable.
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The map above is the world of The Industrial Revolution in Europe, 1850 — The first industrial nation.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The railway grew out of the coalfields, and it became the technology that bound Britain’s scattered industrial districts into one industrial economy. For two centuries horses had pulled coal wagons along wooden and then iron rails from pits to rivers, and steam locomotives, developed in the coal-mining districts after 1800, simply replaced the horses. The Stockton & Darlington line of 1825 was a coal railway that also carried passengers. The decisive step came in 1830 with the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, the first line between two great cities run entirely by steam locomotives to a timetable, after Rocket, a locomotive built by the engineer George Stephenson and his son Robert, won the trials held at Rainhill in 1829. It worked much like a modern intercity line, with stations, signals and tickets, and it carried far more passengers than its promoters had expected, which turned a coal technology into a way of moving people.
Private investors then built a national network in twenty years. Britain had about 100 miles of railway in 1830, about 1,500 in 1840 and about 6,000 in 1850, much of it promoted in the railway mania of 1845–47, a speculative frenzy much like the rush to buy internet shares in the late 1990s. On the map the white lines spread from Euston and London’s other main stations to Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Glasgow, and Britain turns charcoal as the first industrial economy. Railways cut the cost of moving coal and goods, created standard national time and railway towns such as Swindon, and pulled millions of people into a single national market, so that by 1850 Britain worked as one economy for the first time.
The full story
Railways began as an answer to the oldest problem of the coal industry, which was the cost of moving a heavy, cheap fuel. Wagonways with wooden rails had carried coal from Tyneside pits to the river since the seventeenth century, so iron rails and steam locomotives improved a familiar system. The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick ran a high-pressure locomotive at Penydarren in South Wales in 1804, and coal-mine engineers such as George Stephenson built locomotives at Killingworth near Newcastle in the 1810s. The Stockton & Darlington Railway opened on 27 September 1825 to carry coal from the Durham pits to the River Tees, using steam locomotives for freight and horses for most passengers. Its success showed that a public railway, open to anyone who paid, could earn money, and merchants in Liverpool and Manchester, frustrated by slow and costly canal carriage, set out to build a better one.
The Liverpool & Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830, turned the coal railway into modern transport. Its directors held trials at Rainhill in October 1829 to choose a locomotive, and Rocket, a locomotive built by George Stephenson and his son Robert, reached about 30 miles an hour because its boiler, heated by many tubes carrying hot gas from the fire, raised steam quickly. The line was double-tracked, worked entirely by steam and run to a timetable, and passengers flocked to it, so railways became a passenger business as well as a freight one. The opening day also brought the first famous railway death, when the politician William Huskisson was struck by Rocket. Within a decade trunk lines, meaning the main routes between major cities, joined London to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool; the London & Birmingham, running from Euston station in London, opened throughout in 1838, and the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Great Western Railway reached Bristol in 1841. In a single decade the railway had grown from a local experiment into a national system.
The national network was built in a burst of private speculation, and its effects reached far beyond transport. During the mania, a speculative boom in railway shares, investors poured in their savings; in 1846 alone Parliament passed about 270 railway acts authorising some 4,500 miles of line, and the York businessman George Hudson, nicknamed the Railway King, controlled over a thousand miles before his frauds were exposed. Many schemes collapsed, yet by 1850 Britain had about 6,000 miles of track, built at the 1847 peak by some 250,000 navvies, the labourers who dug the cuttings and raised the embankments by hand. On the map the white lines now join every coalfield and port. Railways cut the cost of carrying coal and goods, let fresh food and newspapers reach every town, and put the country on one clock, as railway time, set by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, replaced local times. By 1850 the railway had joined coal, iron and machines into a single system that kept itself growing, which made Britain the world’s first industrial economy.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
How much did railways matter? The social-savings debate
Railways are the classic test of how much a single technology matters, and the economic historian Robert Fogel’s Railroads and American Economic Growth (1964) posed it as a deliberately provocative question: how much poorer would the United States have been in 1890 without railways, moving its freight by canal and road instead? His answer, the social saving of the railways, was only about 2.7 per cent of national income, which suggested that the economy could have grown almost as fast without them. The economic historian G. R. Hawke applied the method to England and Wales in 1865 and found a larger figure, perhaps 7 to 11 per cent of national income once passengers were counted, because Britain’s railways carried people as much as goods; the economic historian Tim Leunig later valued the time passengers saved and found the gains larger still, around 14 per cent of national income by 1912. Critics stress the limits of the method. It measures cheaper transport at a single date and ignores what railways made possible over time: national markets, larger firms, cheap coal for every town, new engineering industries and the stock markets built to finance them. Most historians now see railways in Britain as an accelerator of an industrial economy already in being, and in vast countries with few navigable rivers, such as Russia and India, as something closer to a precondition.
The railway mania as a financial bubble
The mania of 1845–47 was the largest investment boom Britain had yet seen, and it built a network no government had planned. Every line needed its own Act of Parliament, passed as a private bill, a law serving one company’s project, so promoters competed for routes, duplicated lines and fought over standards. The state kept a light touch: William Gladstone, then the minister for trade, passed a Railway Regulation Act in 1844 that required every company to run a cheap daily train at a penny a mile. The engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the Great Western to a broad gauge, meaning the distance between the rails, of seven feet, while most lines used the railway pioneer George Stephenson’s 4 feet 8½ inches, so trains could not pass from one network to the other, much as a plug will not fit a foreign socket. The Gauge Act of 1846 required new lines to use the narrower standard, though broad-gauge track survived until 1892. Shares were often sold partly paid, so buyers faced later demands for the rest; when interest rates rose in 1847, many were ruined, and in 1849 the financier George Hudson, the ‘Railway King’, was exposed for paying shareholders their dividends, or profit payments, out of new investors’ money, the trick behind a modern pyramid scheme. Britain’s market-built network arrived faster than any plan could have delivered it, and it paid for that speed with duplicated routes, clashing gauges and ruined investors.
Time, space and the railway town
The railway changed how people experienced space and time, which is why the cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch called it an annihilation of both. Journeys that had taken days by stagecoach took hours, and railway companies needed a single time to run their timetables, so the Great Western Railway adopted London time in 1840 and the Railway Clearing House, which settled accounts between the railways, recommended Greenwich time to all companies in 1847. The future travel agent Thomas Cook ran his first railway excursion, from Leicester to Loughborough, in 1841, and cheap excursion trains brought many of the roughly six million visits to the Great Exhibition of 1851, a giant show of industry in London. The railways also built towns of their own. Swindon, Crewe and Wolverton grew around locomotive works and became communities of skilled engineers, with company housing, schools and institutes. The navvies, the labourers who dug the lines by hand, lived differently: tens of thousands of English, Irish and Scottish labourers moved from contract to contract in temporary camps, and dangerous work killed many of them, among them some thirty men, by estimates that range from 22 to 32, who died building the first Woodhead tunnel through the Pennine hills between 1838 and 1845. The railway that shrank time for its passengers was built at a heavy cost in the lives of the men who dug it.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Coal needed cheaper carriage. Coal was bulky and cheap, so the cost of moving it often exceeded the cost of mining it. Collieries, as coal mines were called, had used horse-drawn wagons on rails for two centuries, and the steam engines that already pumped their pits offered a way to haul the wagons as well. The Stockton & Darlington Railway, opened in 1825 to carry Durham coal to the sea, was promoted by local Quakers, members of a small Christian movement, led by the Darlington wool merchant Edward Pease. Its purpose shows that the first railways were the coal industry’s answer to the cost of carriage.
High-pressure steam made engines mobile. The engineer James Watt’s low-pressure engines were too large and heavy to move themselves. The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick’s high-pressure engines of around 1800 delivered more power from a smaller boiler, and later refinements, such as the many fire-tubes that carried hot gas through the boiler and the blast pipe that fanned the fire with spent steam, both used in the locomotive Rocket, raised steam fast enough to haul trains at speed. Robert Stephenson & Co., founded in Newcastle in 1823, was the first works built to make locomotives, turning these improvements into a reliable product.
Merchants frustrated by the canals. Canal carriers had grown complacent without competition, and by the 1820s the waterways between Liverpool and Manchester were busy, slow and, in the merchants’ view, overpriced. Cotton merchants and manufacturers, who needed raw cotton and finished cloth to move quickly between port and mill, backed the Liverpool & Manchester Railway as a rival. The scale of the cotton trade meant that any saving in carriage was multiplied many times over. The first great railway began as a merchants’ revolt against a transport monopoly.
Savings looking for a home. Britain’s middle classes had built up savings, and in 1825 Parliament repealed the Bubble Act, a law of 1720 that had restricted share-selling firms, so joint-stock companies, which sold shares to the public, became easier to form. Government bonds, which are loans to the state, paid modest interest, so railway shares promising high returns drew in clergymen, widows, merchants and manufacturers alike. Cheap credit in the mid-1840s turned that interest into a mania, a frenzy of share-buying, which financed a network far faster than any government plan could have done.
THE TURNING POINT
Rainhill, October 1829. The Rainhill trials, a contest to find the best locomotive for the new Liverpool & Manchester Railway, are the hinge because they settled what kind of railway Britain would build. The Liverpool & Manchester’s directors had seriously considered hauling trains with fixed engines and cables, and the performance of Rocket, the locomotive built by George Stephenson and his son Robert, reaching about 30 miles an hour and running reliably, persuaded them to rely on locomotives. When the line opened in 1830 it proved that steam railways could carry passengers as well as freight, at speed and to a timetable, between two great cities. Every main line built afterwards, in Britain and abroad, followed the pattern set by the engine that won at Rainhill.
What it changed
A national market and national time. Railways carried coal, cloth, fish, milk and newspapers across the country overnight, so prices converged and local monopolies collapsed. Railway companies adopted Greenwich time, set by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, from the 1840s and towns followed, giving Britain a single clock decades before the law confirmed it in 1880. Cheap transport let the industrial cities keep growing after 1850, because railways could bring in food and fuel from far beyond the reach of canals and carts.
The continent builds its own lines. Railways became the leading industry of continental industrialisation, because they created demand for coal, iron and machines all at once. Belgium opened the continent’s first state-built steam railway in 1835, and the German states and France followed within a few years, often with British locomotives and engineers. Because continental governments often planned the routes themselves, their networks served national strategy as well as private profit.
Railways across the world. British capital and engineers built railways from India to Argentina, and the transcontinental lines of the United States, Canada and Russia opened continents to settlement and trade. Chapters 9 and 11 follow the lines that carried grain, cotton and migrants into a single world economy, and the costs they brought to the people who lived in their path. Wherever they went, railways turned distant land into suppliers for industrial markets.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did railways create Britain’s industrial economy, or did an industrial economy create the railways?
The chronology of events favours the second view. Railways appeared after cotton, coal, iron and steam were already transforming Britain, they grew out of the coal industry’s needs, and they were paid for with savings that an industrial and commercial economy had produced. Measured by social savings, the extra cost of moving the same traffic without them, as the economic historian G. R. Hawke did, they made Britain richer by several per cent of national income, a large gain but one the economy could partly have made up with canals and roads. Yet the railway also changed the industrial economy’s character. It created a mass market for coal and iron, made engineering a leading industry, built towns, standardised time and drew ordinary investors into a national market for shares, so the system that emerged after 1850 differed in kind from the one before it. The best judgement is that an industrial economy created the railways, and the railways then created a fully industrial society. For any innovation it helps to separate the change that starts a process from the change that completes it.
An interesting fact
Before the railways, every British town kept its own time by the sun, so the clocks of Bristol, about 170 kilometres west of London, ran roughly ten minutes behind the capital’s. When the Great Western Railway began running its trains on London time in 1840, Bristol’s citizens found themselves living by two clocks. The compromise is still visible: the clock on the Corn Exchange, Bristol’s eighteenth-century trading hall, in Corn Street has two minute hands, one showing London time and one showing Bristol time, ten minutes apart. Greenwich Mean Time, the time kept by the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, became the legal time of Great Britain only in 1880, long after the railway timetable had made it the clock most Britons actually lived by.
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