Written with great confidence and considerable aplomb, The Coming of the Railway is a must for the train enthusiast. David Gwyn, a major figure in the important Welsh railway-heritage movement, offers a crisp and comprehensive account that focuses on Britain but also ranges more widely, including to America, where in 1833 President Andrew Jackson traveled on the Baltimore & Ohio line. As far as is known, Jackson purchased his ticket like the other passengers and shared a carriage with them.
By then passengers were traveling more frequently, although there were restrictions, for example on Sunday services. Sometimes, there was an interesting fluidity to social mores as they responded to rail travel, with women gaining new freedoms and new dangers. Frederick Law Olmsted was surprised on the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad by seeing “a white girl . . . and a bright and very pretty mulatto girl” talking and sharing sweets from the same bag. Many suggested that ethnic mixing was less common in the North, with free African Americans relegated to the baggage car with, sometimes, smoking whites.
A new Iron Age was in progress.
In Britain, meanwhile, the St James’s Chronicle of March 30, 1847, was far from alone in considering the impact of rail travel on the human body. Social geography changed thanks to rail. Alongside long-distance routes, commuting into London rapidly developed, as an extensive network of lines spread over nearby areas. This brought suburbanization linked to major long-distance routes, but also lines that were more specifically intra-suburban and regional. Floated in 1831, spurred by an Act of Parliament that was obtained in 1833, and completed in 1838, the London and Greenwich Railway was the first steam train in London and the first entirely elevated railway; the key element was a viaduct of 878 brick arches. This railway rapidly became very busy, although the high costs of building the line ensured that the company was not profitable. Other commuter lines followed including to Croydon in 1839 and to Margate in 1846
The pace of development saw fifty-four Railway Acts passed by Parliament between 1825 and 1835 and another thirty-nine in 1836–37 alone. Speculation, both sensible and less so, was attracting liquidity to the railways, which became the prime form of domestic and international investment, although the Bristol and Exeter Railway found it difficult in 1836–37 to get subscribers to pay for the shares they had committed to purchase when the company was floated in 1835. By 1841, 1,696 miles of track were complete in Britain and the authorized capital of rail companies was £78 million, but, by 1846, the figures were 3,036 and £296 million, and the more capitalized nature of the industry was linked to the amalgamation and expansion of the system, so that in 1845–46, in the time of “Railway Mania,” the building of another seven thousand miles of track was authorized by Parliament.
A new Iron Age was in progress. Completed in 1823, the fifty-foot-long Gaunless Bridge on the Stockton and Darlington Railway was one of the first railway bridges to be constructed of iron and the first to use an iron lenticular truss. Aside from the building of new bridges, wooden bridges were replaced by iron.
Gwyn is very good on early passenger travel, but, as he makes clear, freight, notably coal, was the key purpose for many lines and services. Coal provided bulk, volume, regularity, motive power, and a reason for financing. It is unlikely that rail would have developed as it did had wood remained the major fuel. This also helped explain the early development of rail in Britain, as the transfer from wood to coal for industry and residential heating was furthest advanced there.
Rail also provided a key competition to canals and maritime transport. Rail and these alternatives could be aligned, each offering distributive possibilities for the other, but there was also competition on key routes such as the one taking coal from Northeast England to London. Moreover, far from water transport automatically declining with rail’s rise, the application of steam there also led to new profitability and investment.
Investment is, of course, a key element for any railway history. Not only was return on capital significant, but also general liquidity in the local, national, and international economies and the availability of alternative investment possibilities all mattered. Thus, in Britain, the absence of an engrossing of liquidity by the state comparable to that during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars led to a search for funding opportunities. This was accentuated from the 1840s on by the increase in liquidity arising from successive gold rushes. The availability of fresh investment capital interacted with the determination by entrepreneurs to seek and apply technological advantages. The strength of the British economy and pound sterling and its ready convertibility to gold ensured ready funds at a time when British train technology was at the cutting edge, while much of the world was partly within the sway of the British formal or informal empires. Indeed, the spread of British rail technology within the imperial context possibly deserves more attention than it tends to receive. Yet, for the period of this book, the emphasis on the British Isles, parts of Europe, and the United States is appropriate.
Other European states encountered financial difficulties that emphasized the importance of liquidity. In France, a financial crisis in 1839 led to bankruptcies that ended the railway boom and encouraged government contributions. Funding the Prussian system caused serious difficulties in 1847.
Colonial development was a frequent theme in prospectuses, such as one from 1845 for the City of Toronto and Lake Huron Railway, which declared that it would eliminate the need to face the dangers of traversing Lake Erie by ship, stating:
The most certain and effective means of establishing an enlarged system of colonisation consist in the judicious investment of capital within our colonies, for the purpose of extending trade and facilitating the communication of the colonist with rich and abundant markets.
Gwyn’s thoughtful and attractively produced book deserves widespread attention.
