Did railways create Britain’s industrial economy?

The short answer

• 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 Britain’s middle classes had built up savings, and in 1825 Parliament repealed the Bubble Act, a law of 1720 that had restricted share-selling firms, so joint-stock companies, which sold shares to the public, became easier to form.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.

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.