Page 65 - BBC History The Story of Science & Technology - 2017 UK

Why did the railway provided by this new form of
revolution come transport. The appetite for iron
to Britain first? increased enormously too because
Coal was a massive reason for this. you needed it to make trains
Because of the nascent industrial and tracks.
revolution in the 18th century There was also a huge, unex-
and because there were no big pected desire to ride on these
indigenous forests left in the trains. It was thought that early
country, Britain, and London railways would be largely for coal
in particular, needed energy and goods, but instead they proved
from coal. overwhelmingly popular with
London had a voracious appetite, people, passengers. This meant
so the coal trade was absolutely they were fantastically successful and
booming in a way that it wasn’t An 1822 lithograph of Hetton colliery, which they made money.
elsewhere in the world. That coal was was home to an early private railway. It was Some later railways ended up losing a vast
arriving from Newcastle by ship, down the here that pioneering engineer George amount of money, but early on there was
Stephenson cut his teeth
east coast. In order to take the coal to simply a massive market for them. By 1840
Newcastle there was a huge network of there were 2,000 miles of tracks, but by 1900
trackways right across north-east England. By 1840 there were there were over 23,000 miles. It was extraor-
Trackways – used initially by horses and dinary and it shows that there was a lot of
carts – created much less friction than 2,000 miles of money in Britain at the time. There was
travelling over the rough ground. track, but by 1900 (without wishing to sound like a Marxist)
It was only a matter of time before people a kind of under-taxed elite looking for
started experimenting with steam engines there were over opportunities to invest the surplus value
on these trackways. Britain had already done that they’d earned from textile mills,
a lot of the early running in the development 23,000 miles. It was coalmines, iron foundries and things like
of steam power, using it to pump out deep that. This money was being ploughed into
mineshafts in particular. By the late 18th extraordinary railways, which were very attractive invest-
century, people started thinking about using ment opportunities.
steam engines to pull these carts up and Britain was a country where this
down the tracks. added his little touch of genius as well, but it was all doable. You could join up
didn’t burst fully formed out of Zeus’s head Birmingham and London or Liverpool and
So the industrial revolution created like Athena. He was building on what had Manchester. These industrial hubs were
the railways, not vice versa? gone before. being gradually connected and it created
Yes, absolutely. Particularly, as I say, this need its own momentum.
to move large volumes of heavy coal. The How much impact did the
engineer George Stephenson began working British landscape have on the Did the growth of the railways
in the collieries and the British standard rail development of railways? attract any opposition?
gauge began as the gauge of a trackway in the Britain was the right country for railways There was hostility from romantic poets and
north-east of England. Of course the railways to come to first. They were manageable lovers of the countryside – although frankly
did themselves give an enormous boost to propositions because all you had to do was that was brushed aside. There was more
the industrial revolution. transport things to the nearest water and, as problematic opposition from a class of
an island nation, we’re never very far from landed aristocrat who did not want railways
Was the development of the railways that. It was different when they brought to infringe their property rights. The original
a collective process or more the result railways into Canada, for example, where plan for the Liverpool and Manchester
of geniuses such as the Stephensons? they had to build over vast distances with railway was actually defeated at the commit-
It was a collective process. If you look at titanic sums of venture capital being required. tee stage in the House of Commons because
George Stephenson, he spent his early The Stockton and Darlington railway was MPs thought it was a harebrained scheme
engineering career working in the coalmines about 26 miles long and the subsequent and landowners didn’t want members of the
of County Durham, where people were Liverpool and Manchester line wasn’t a huge public crossing their land.
experimenting enormously with transport. amount further. There weren’t bewilderingly In addition, there was the extreme
He was right in the middle of that and was large distances involved. Also, the landscape, hardship suffered by many of the navvies,
then able to enlarge on what he’d seen to while being challenging, wasn’t catastrophi- who could be paid well but also had high
build the Stockton and Darlington railway. cally difficult, which would be the case in mortality rates and extremely tough lives.
This was the first serious railway in history. other parts of the world. These people were virtually enslaved to the
It was built primarily to transport coal to building of the railways because their salary
Stockton-on-Tees, doing exactly what Nineteenth-century Britain witnessed was often used up buying food and alcohol
trackways had been doing for years, but a railway fever. How was such rapid and they ended up permanently indebted to
finally with a moving steam engine. pace of growth achieved? the companies they were working for.
There was a massive hub of exciting It was partly because an incredible virtuous Then of course there were the slums that
developments going on in north-east circle was created. In the first 20 years of the were cleared. People in north London were
GETTY England at the time. George Stephenson railways’ existence, iron and coal produc- turfed out of their houses as the line from
Birmingham came into the city, with
tion tripled thanks to the added efficiencies
learned from them, perfected them, and
The Story of Science & Technology 65