Blood, Iron, and Gold

The event's significance had not been missed. The Liverpool & Manchester was far more advanced than any of its predecessors or any other line being considered elsewhere in the world. It was double tracked, powered entirely by steam, and connected two of the world's most important cities of the day. It was not, of course, the world's first railway, but while its predecessors had been created principally for the transport of coal or other minerals from a mine to navigable water, the Liverpool & Manchester carried traffic, including passengers, in both directions. Thanks to Britain's place as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, not only was British technology the most advanced in the world, but its application was far more widespread and developed than elsewhere. Consequently, many foreign dignitaries and, more important, engineers eager to reproduce the technology back home were among the thousands of people who lined the tracks watching the proceedings.

There was, for example, William Archibald Bake,¹ a Dutch artillery officer, who would return home to press for a railway to link Amsterdam with a proposed network of Prussian railways in the Rhineland. Rumors spread through the city that several Americans and Russians were at the opening on fact-finding missions, and xenophobia bubbled under the surface, with dark talk of spies and agents from potentially hostile countries intent on stealing the technology. Indeed, a pair of Americans, Horatio Allen, chief engineer of the Delaware & Hudson Canal Company, and his companion, E. L. Miller, had already dropped in to witness the Rainhill Trials, a competition for locomotives, the previous year. All these people and many more were ready to become proselytizers for railways, taking the message back home that the Iron Horse had arrived and was here to stay.

Without the cheap new method of transportation the railways provided, the economic development stimulated by the Industrial Revolution would have stalled or remained localized for far longer than it did. The railways were the catalyst for the spread of technology and would initiate the process of globalization that culminated with the development of the Internet and the World Wide Web. From its isolation in small communities, the human race was brought together by the railway, for better or worse. Within a decade of the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester, trains pulled by steam locomotives had spread across Europe and started running in North America. Within a quarter of a century, railways had sprung up in the most unlikely places, ranging from Cuba and Peru to Egypt and India. While these new opportunities to travel had huge beneficial effects, they also facilitated the fighting of wars and hastened the decline of many industries.

Britain's role in this process was seminal. Although jingoistic British writers sometimes exaggerate the country's importance in world history, with regard to the history of the railways it is almost impossible to do so. British technology formed the basis of so many different railways that the British tradition was dominant for decades, and its capital helped to fund projects not only in the United Kingdom but also in the rest of Europe and in Latin America. The locomotives of George Stephenson, who was largely responsible for the engineering of the Liverpool & Manchester, for example, would provide the basic design for many railways. A prominent part of the British legacy is the gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches—the distance between the rails that Stephenson chose for the Liverpool & Manchester—which would rightly become known as "standard" because it is the most widely used gauge around the world.

Arguments about gauge cannot, unfortunately, be dismissed as a mere technical matter that is outside the scope of this book. Quite the opposite. Gauge plays an all-too-important role in this story because disputes over that crucial distance between the rails encompass a diverse range of other issues, such as cost and speed, and making the wrong choice has often resulted not only in massive sums of money being wasted but also in jeopardizing the profitability of whole railway networks. Gauge was a compromise between cost and practicality, and Stephenson got it about right, which explains the popularity of his choice. Wider railways obviously cost far more to build and take up much more land, but could offer greater standards of comfort. Narrower railways were cheaper to construct, but they were slower and could not accommodate as many people. The width between the rails is not, however, the only aspect of gauge. There is the "loading gauge"—the size of the "envelope" required to accommodate trains, which determines the size of tunnels, the location of platforms, and the placement of lineside equipment—and this is normally larger on standard-gauge lines on the Continent than in Britain. Stephenson did not always succeed in persuading the various foreign railways he advised to adopt his gauge, and the legacy of that failure still proves costly today. In Spain, for example, which the aging Stephenson visited in the 1840s, the nascent Reo Nacional de los Ferrocariles Españoles (RENFE)² rejected his pleas to adopt the standard gauge and instead chose 5 feet, 6 inches,³ which was later used in several other countries, notably India and parts of Latin America.

The debate over gauge occurred in every country with a railway, even in Britain, where the standard gauge was adopted relatively early following a Royal Commission on this vexed issue in 1845. That was already too late for the Great Western Railway, ultimately linking London to western England and Wales, which by then had more than 200 miles of line using the 7-foot, 0.25-inch gauge favored by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the line's engineer. The Great Western would not fully convert until the end of the century, causing great inconvenience, not least to Queen Victoria, who was forced to change trains on her journeys from Windsor to Scotland, and enormous expense. This brief reference to gauge, a subject that comes up all too often, demonstrates why it is necessary to start this brief international history with an account of the prehistory and early history of the railways in Britain. Though that story has been widely covered elsewhere,⁴ a short recap is essential for an understanding of the full account of the global spread of the railways.

The railways were made possible by a series of technical inventions over the space of a couple of centuries involving the development of steam engines, locomotives, and rails. Railways were the answer to the long-established problem of how to transport heavy loads of coal and other minerals to rivers or the sea, and later to canals, where they could be transported for far greater distances. There is some evidence that putting goods in wagons to be hauled by people or animals along tracks predates Jesus Christ, and the earliest surviving representation of such a scene, dating from 1350, can be found in the cathedral at Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany. There were enough such lines to be discussed in a book published in 1556, and certainly by the sixteenth century in Britain there were numerous wagonways⁵ using crude wooden rails to help haul heavy wagons out of mines. Horses had begun to replace manpower to boost efficiency, and combining the two ideas, horses and rails, which allowed for far greater loads to be pulled, was the obvious next step. By the early eighteenth century in the principal German coal-producing area of the Ruhr, rather more sophisticated wooden wagonways were developed that used a type of flange—an extra lip on the wheels to keep them on the track—to guide the trucks and prevent them from becoming derailed. These precursors of the railway had an important economic impact in the early days of the Industrial Revolution as coal consumption in Britain increased (there was a tenfold increase between 1700 and the early 1800s⁶), serving both industrial and domestic needs.

The network of wagonways that emerged in the northeast of Great Britain was so extensive that they became known as "Newcastle Roads." By 1660, in the Tyneside region of northeastern England,⁷ there were nine such wagonways. The rails became increasingly necessary as the more accessible coal near the surface was extracted and the pits extended deeper. In 1726, a group of coal owners, the Grand Allies, developed the idea further by agreeing to use a shared wagonway to link up their mines, which allowed them to rationalize coal movements. They even created a "main line," a joint route, much of it double tracked, from several mines to the water. This line included the Causey Arch, a bridge with a 100-foot span that lays claim to being the world's first railway bridge and survives today. These railways made extensive use of gravity, since most of them led down to a waterway, and therefore the horses had the relatively easy task of hauling the empty wagons back up the hills. As the putative railways increased in sophistication and length, wagons were coupled together to improve efficiency, and by the 1750s, iron rails were introduced that proved far more durable than the wooden ones.

The other major technical development required for the establishment of the railways was, of course, the steam engine and, later, the development of self-propelled locomotives, a far more complex and difficult process. Again, the idea of steam power dated to classical times, but the first working steam engines were probably those of Thomas Newcomen, an ironmaster from Devon who built them in the early years of the eighteenth century. Applying principles that had been observed by a French scientist, Denis Papin, who had noticed that a piston contained within a cylinder was a potential way of exploiting the power of steam, Newcomen produced engines to pump water from the mines. He created something of a cottage industry, making sixty engines himself, and after his patents ran out another three hundred were built by other engineers over the next half-century, many for export to countries such as the United States, the German states, and the Austrian Empire, where one was even used to drive the fountains for Prinz von Schwarzenberg's palace in Vienna.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century, it was James Watt who made steam power commercially viable. He did this by improving the efficiency of steam engines and adapting them for a wide variety of purposes. The engines manufactured by the company he formed with Matthew Boulton were used to provide power for everything from ships and looms to the sugar mills of the West Indies and the cotton mills of the United States, but they were not used for steam locomotives. Other inventors, however, did try to put steam engines on wheels. The first to do so was the Frenchman Nicholas Cugnot, whose fardier was intended to be used as an artillery tractor. On a test run in Paris, it reached a speed of 2.5 miles per hour but hit a wall, overturned, and was declared a public danger by the city authorities. It would never have run far anyway, since there was no way of replenishing the steam once it ran out. Various other inventors in England, Scotland, and the United States built similar steam road locomotives, but a historian of the railways dismissed these early efforts, writing that "none of these pioneers made any contribution to the design or development of the steam locomotive." ⁸ Their problem, which explains why railways were developed more than fifty years before road vehicles, was that the roads, poorly built and little-maintained, were simply too bad to support their weight.