The British railway network

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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.