The railway, an icon of the Industrial Revolution that came to symbolise Britain’s place on the world stage, was perhaps one of the most important innovations of the modern era. It united the nation like never before, lessening the gulf between north and south, village and city, cutting journey times from days to hours. But its earliest roots were surprising and its growth was much more of an evolution than a masterplan for a radical transformation of the country.

As MW Kirby writes: It is salutary to remember that the development of the steam railway was inextricably bound up with the transport needs of the expanding coal industry of the early nineteenth century.

Early engineers linked to the mining industry such as Richard Trevithick and the industrialist George Stephenson perfected the idea of the railway at the start of the 19th century. Stephenson’s most famous locomotive, ‘The Rocket’, was a major turning point in the rolling out of the railways across the country.

Intercity railways
Within ten years railways, not just for coal miners, but for passengers were being built. One of the first to be built was an intercity line between London and Greenwich. Just four miles long, it was designed to simplify an awkward commute. On foot, four miles can take an hour and half, while travelling by horse and cart meant navigating London’s many winding and long streets, being careful to avoid any passers by wandering the streets. Long before the idea of the underground was conceived, the Greenwich to London railway provided a line above the ground that could connect Victorian Londoners directly to their destination.

It was propped up by a series of iconic arches, 800 in total, which made it look like there was a giant viaduct running through the city. Those who couldn’t afford to pay for the railway could walk the length of the arches instead. The line was a huge success and by 1844 was carrying two million passengers. The station at Spa Road, complete with the iconic arches, although no longer a railway station, can still be seen today.

Lots of these intercity lines sprung up around the country – some are today run as novelty lines for members of the public wishing to get a taste of a quaint by-gone era. But soon the architects of the railway began to think big and the idea that a railway line could link up the big cities began to take shape. The most well known of these early railways are the Liverpool to Manchester line and the London to Birmingham line.

The Liverpool to Manchester line, overseen by George Stephenson and opened to great fanfare, was a remarkable piece of engineering for its day. It took four years to build, spanned 35 miles and included 64 bridges and viaducts. It also made use of The Rocket, which rose to speeds of 29mph. The Rocket could, according to Dan Snow, go faster than anything else built by humans in the world.

London to Birmingham
The Act granting permission for the London and Birmingham Railway to go ahead was given royal assent in May 1833. Millions of pounds was raised to build the railway through stocks and shares. Even by today’s standards this is a vast amount of money but in 1830 these sums equated to hundreds of millions of pounds, still a fortune, though relatively cheap when we consider the new high-speed rail line HS2, due to open in 2026, has a budget of £55 billion. Robert Stephenson, George’s son, was the principal engineer.

By 1837 the first part of the line to Boxmoor was opened, with the entire length being fully complete by 1839. It was a remarkable piece of engineering, connecting two of the most important cities in the country together for the first time with a journey time of just five hours, 30 minutes (today a fast train journey with few stops can take just one hour and 30 minutes). A ticket for the entire distance would set you back 32 shillings and 6 pence.

The building of this line also gave us two of Britain’s finest railway stations, the original buildings sadly no longer with us: Euston Station, London and Curzon Street, Birmingham. Euston, with it’s iconic great hall and tall and imposing famous archway to rival Marble Arch, was, according to John Christopher, “a statement in stone that the railways had arrived and that they were here to stay”. Curzon Street, which opened a year later in 1838, was just as iconic.

The ‘gold rush’
With the success of the London to Birmingham line there began a revolution. Entrepreneurs, spotting an opportunity to make it big, formed companies and raised capital from investors who bought shares in these new companies, getting government approval to build lucrative new lines across the country. In the year 1846 alone, the government passed 272 Acts of Parliament relating to new railways.

This had a profound effect on business in Britain, an effect known as Railway Mania or, as Liz McIvor describes it, a ‘gold rush’. The railways made some investors rich very quickly, with share prices going through the roof for profitable lines, while others lost everything investing in companies that failed to get their projects off the ground.

What made so many people invest in railway shares was how cheap they were in comparison, for example, to shares in the canals. Railway shares were often just a few pounds which, although meant they were far off reach to the average worker, they were easily accessible for the burgeoning entrepreneur. Success stories and advertisements were also heavily publicised in local and national newspapers, which themselves were in the midst of their own revolution. There were even periodicals dedicated to railway speculation.

But because these new companies and the railways they built were expanding so fast and wealth was being generated so quickly – GDP rose to one of its highest ever levels during this time – the government did not want to ‘get in the way’ with regulation. As a result, businessmen like George Hudson, who owned the Midland railway, began to get greedy. It also didn’t help that he was a Conservative MP with a hand both in enacting the legislation for the railway projects – orchestrating plans for 32 parliamentary bills – and in the construction of over a third of all the railways in Britain today. His unethical practise of paying dividends out of company capital led to the collapse of the railway bubble, leaving many investors severely out of pocket, even bankrupt. Shares became more and more expensive until they just collapsed, leading people to panic and sell en masse, a bit like a run on the bank.

It was in the aftermath of this collapse that railways, and the companies which had built and owned them, started to become more accountable, employing accountants such as William Deloitte to audit them for the first time to ensure that nothing like Hudson’s precarious scheme could ever happen again. These new firms flourished and created what Liz McIvor argues was an “entirely new class of middle managers who were needed to run these complex organisations”. In many respects it was the railways which created this new middle class, allowing ordinary people numerous and varied opportunities to earn a modest living.

The working class and the railways
But there was also a much darker side to the rapid expansion of the railways over the course of the 19th century and not everybody stood to gain.

St Pancras station and the adjoining former Midland Grand Hotel, an architectural icon that embodies the City of London as much as St Paul’s Cathedral was completed in 1876 after a decade of construction. While it is undoubtedly a dazzling display of craftsmanship and Victorian modernity, the sacrifices made by the working class to make it happen are all too easily forgotten.

The government’s laissez-faire attitude to regulation, although it had improved since the 1840s, was still very much driving the expansion of the railways. The Midland Company was given the green light to demolish the entirety of Agar Town, one of the poorest working class suburbs in London, to make way for the new St Pancras station. Renowned for disease and illness which festered in its streets and its lack of street lights or sewage facilities, Agar Town was seen by many as a slum. Indeed the vicar of St Pancras wrote that it was “more fitted for the occupation of wild beasts than for human beings”. When it was wiped off the map two months after the Ecclesiastical Commissioners sold off the land, many Londoners were grateful to see the back of the town. But the tenants themselves were given no compensation, they were simply expected to vacate and find new houses elsewhere in the city. Although the official figure is 1180 people who were affected, research by Stephen P Swenson suggests a more realistic figure is 4000 homes being destroyed in total, with around 32,000 people losing their homes.

One of the main points of contention about the demolition of that area of London was it meant that there were now three stations within a mile of each other: Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross. Each was built by a different railway company unwilling to countenance sharing one station that could house all of their lines; to many people it was the very essence of greedy and out of control capitalism that needed restraining.

The railways also brought a huge array of new jobs such as conductors, signalmen, porters and engine drivers. But often these new jobs could be dangerous and workers were easily exploited. In 1861, 21 people were killed and 176 seriously injured in the Clayton Tunnel Disaster. The primary cause was a signalling failure due to the fact one of the signalmen, named Killick, had worked a 24-hour shift. The incident and Charles Dickens’ own experience in a railway accident at Staplehurst in 1865 are said to have inspired his short story ‘The Signalman’.

Overworked and often underpaid, over the course of the later half of the 19th century railway workers formed trade unions and called strikes which gripped the rail network in support of their cries for better working conditions and safety measures. The so-called Taff Vale Railway Incident strike, called in support of Signalman John Ewington who had been penalised for involving himself in the trade union movement, was perhaps the most notable.

Nevertheless, despite the obvious pitfalls with the new technology and the need to curtail the excesses of the exploitative culture which came hand-in-hand with early Victorian industrialism, the railways left a remarkable and lasting legacy on Britain.