The British railway network

Assembled from 20 blocks · 2 evidence · 15 related

1. Story
2. Rails came long before locomotives: wooden wagonways carried coal from pit to river in the north-east from the seventeenth century, and the rail is simply a way of lowering rolling resistance. What changed between 1825 and 1850 was the combination of iron rail, steam locomotive and joint-stock company, and the result was not a faster canal but a different kind of thing. Railways carried passengers profitably, which canals never did; they ran to a published timetable, which forced Britain onto a single clock time in place of local solar time; and they were built by capital raised from the public through Acts of Parliament, in two speculative manias that made and destroyed fortunes. The network went from the Stockton and Darlington in 1825 and the Liverpool and Manchester in 1830 to several thousand route miles by the early 1850s. Its effect on the canals was quick and complete: bulk traffic could go by rail at a speed no boat could offer, and many canal companies were bought by railway companies precisely in order to be run down.
3. Knowledge
4. The British canal network
5. The British railway network
6. Connections
7. Puddling and rolling
8. The British canal network
9. Liverpool and Manchester Railway
10. The Stockton and Darlington Railway opens
11. The Rainhill trials settle the question of traction
12. The Great Exhibition
13. Coal
14. The Bridgewater Canal
15. The British railway network
16. The Bridgewater Canal opens from Worsley into Manchester
17. The Liverpool and Manchester Railway opens
18. Evidence
19. Supports the identity, builder and date of the locomotive that won the Rainhill trials, and by extension the decision of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway to adopt locomotive rather than cable haulage. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted; the collection record was not opened in this session and the surviving object's current display location is not asserted here.
20. Named as the canonical source for the output and trade series referred to qualitatively in this pack. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted. No numeric series from Mitchell is quoted here for that reason; every output statement in this pack is deliberately an order of magnitude rather than a figure, and a curator with access should replace those statements with dated numbers.