The age of the railway

What the first commercial line actually changed, and what it accidentally invented

A Few technologies have been credited with transforming a society as completely as this one, and few are as regularly misdescribed in the telling. The economic transformation attributed to the railway is often described as though the technology arrived complete. It did not. Rails, wheeled wagons and even steam engines had coexisted for decades in the coalfields of northern England, where wagons ran on wooden and later iron rails and stationary engines hauled them by rope. What was missing was a locomotive reliable enough to justify replacing the horse, and the demonstration that it existed came in 1829, when a competition held on a completed but unopened line was won by a machine that averaged a speed no horse could sustain and, more importantly, did so repeatedly without breaking down.

B The line that opened the following year between Liverpool and Manchester is the one that matters, and it matters because of what it was for. Earlier railways carried minerals over short distances for a single industry. This one connected a port to a manufacturing city, carried goods and passengers, was built by a company that had raised its capital publicly, and was profitable almost immediately. Within five years the proposition it demonstrated — that a railway could be a commercial undertaking rather than a colliery's private tramway — had been understood by every investor in the country. The line also demonstrated something its promoters had not anticipated. They had built it to shift raw cotton and finished cloth, and expected passengers to be an incidental supplement; passengers turned out to be the larger business almost at once, and remained so for a century.

C What followed was among the more instructive financial episodes of the century. Parliament authorised hundreds of schemes; share prices in railway companies rose steeply on the expectation of profits that had been earned by a small number of early lines and assumed for the rest; small investors entered a market they did not understand at the moment when experienced ones were leaving it; and the collapse, when it came in the late 1840s, ruined a great many households. The curiosity is that the mania nevertheless built a network. Much of the capital was destroyed, but the earthworks, tunnels and bridges it paid for are still carrying trains. A speculative bubble in a physical asset leaves the asset behind when the money disappears, which is a distinction between this episode and several more recent ones that are habitually compared with it.

D Standardisation arrived slowly and by conflict. Different companies built to different widths of track, and the resulting inability to run a wagon from one system onto another was resolved only after years of parliamentary inquiry, in favour of the narrower gauge that most lines had already adopted rather than the wider one that engineers generally agreed rode better. The episode is a favourite of economists as an early demonstration that a standard, once widely established, defeats a superior alternative simply by being widely established. Converting the wider lines took decades and was completed only at the end of the century, at a cost that would have paid for a great deal of new construction.

E A less visible standardisation had a greater effect on ordinary life. Before the railway, each town kept its own time, set by the sun, so that clocks in the west of England ran some minutes behind those in London. A timetable spanning several towns is impossible under such an arrangement, and the railway companies therefore imposed a single time across their networks, which the country adopted first informally and then by statute. The idea that the hour is the same everywhere — the foundation of every timetable, broadcast and appointment since — was created by the practical requirements of a transport company. Local resistance was real but brief: a few towns kept two minute hands on the town clock for a period, one showing the old time and one the new, and then quietly abandoned the older of them.

F The effects on where people lived were equally profound and less often noticed. A city had previously been limited in extent by the distance a person could walk to work. Suburban railways removed that limit, and the residential districts that spread outwards along the lines were built in the confident expectation of the service that would sustain them, in some cases by the railway companies themselves, who had grasped that selling houses along a line and selling season tickets to their occupants were the same business. The shape of every large nineteenth-century city still records the routes chosen by these companies, and so, in many cases, does the social geography: the districts that grew along the more expensive lines and those that grew along the cheaper ones diverged early and have often stayed apart.

G The reversal, when it came, was as rapid as the expansion. Road transport took first the freight and then the passengers; networks that had been built for a country of short journeys and heavy goods carried neither; and in Britain a review in the 1960s recommended closing a third of the route mileage and more than half the stations, most of which duly closed. The verdict has been argued about ever since, with reasonable people maintaining both that the closures were an obvious response to empty trains and that they destroyed connections which a later generation, facing congestion and emissions, would have paid a great deal to still possess.