Contents
Introduction
THE FIRST TRACKS
From Wagonways to Railroads
Father of the Railroads
Powering the Engine
The First American Railroads
The Early Years of American Steam
Europe Takes to the Rails
Map: Western European Railroads
Railroad Mania
Wheels and Trucks
The American Civil War
Signals in the Steam Age
Heroic Failures
India: Dalhousie’s Colonial Imperative
Map: Early Indian Railroads
The Navvies: Digging, Drinking, and Fighting
The Track Structure
Cuban Sugar Railroads
THE SPREAD OF THE RAILROADS
Crossing the Alps
Climbing Mountains
The Panama Railroad: A Deadly Rush for Gold
Crossing America
Map: North American Transcontinentals
Going Underground
Death on the Rails
Stopping the Train
The Railroad Experience
Turnouts and Sidings
Temples of Steam
Railroad Signal Telegraphy
Monopolies and Railroad Barons
Building Bridges
The Pullman Phenomenon
RAILROADS COME OF AGE
The Trans-Siberian Railway
Map: The Trans-Siberian Railway
The Orient Express
The Most Spectacular Railroads in the World
Going Uphill
Henry Flagler and the Overseas Railroad
Hauling Freight
Cape to Cairo: the Railroad that Never Was
Map: Cape to Cairo
Electricity Lightens the Load
Going Electric
The People Who Ran the Railroads
The Wrong Side of the Tracks
Indian Hill Railroads: Climbing Out of the Heat
WAR AND UNCERTAINTY
The Golden Age of the Railroads
The Field Railroads of World War I
American Luxury
Wartime Railroad Disasters
The Hejaz Railway
Streamliners
Australia’s Gauge Bungle
High-speed Steam Trains
Going Diesel: from the Fliegende Hamburger to the Future
Diesel Power Meets Electricity
World War II: Atrocities on the Line
THE IRON ROAD TODAY
Brezhnev’s Folly
Railroads Lost and Found
Vive le Channel Tunnel
Building Tunnels
Switzerland: the Best of the Best
Going Faster: Bullet Trains and High-speed Lines
China, the New Pioneer
The Railroad Renaissance
Maglev Trains
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PUBLISHING INFORMATION
O
Introduction
f all the great inventions of the Industrial Revolution, the railroads had the most impact. In a
world before rail, travel over any distance was a major undertaking. Regions of even small
countries, such as France or England, could be up to seven days’ journey from the capital, while large
countries like the United States, China, or Russia could take months to cross. Until the early 19th
century, most people lived their whole lives within the confines of the town or rural area in which they
were born, and no one had ever gone faster than a horse could gallop. Travel was simply too difficult
and too expensive for the vast majority of people, which in turn limited the spread of ideas and
technology.
Lack of mobility was a major barrier to economic and social development. In the absence of rapid
transportation, people could starve within only a few hundred miles of plentiful food supplies. The
slow transit of goods by horse and cart, or along rivers and canals, meant that perishables had to be
consumed very rapidly. Sending a letter across the country took days, and newspapers were a
misnomer, since they were effectively full of old information. It took months for people to learn the
fate of loved ones at war, and news of major events, from even just a short distance away, filtered
through slowly.
Limitations on travel also translated into social restriction—people had little choice of spouse,
since opportunities to meet potential marriage partners from even neighboring towns were rare.
Concepts of time, too, were different before the railroads. Daily life was regulated by the sun, and
towns just a few miles east or west of each other could operate on different schedules.
Then the railroads arrived and changed everything. One of their first major impacts was to force
countries to standardize their measurements of time, both nationally and internationally, since railroad
timetables would otherwise be too confusing. Greenwich Mean Time, the standard by which the world
sets its clocks, was created partly as a result of the railroads, and the US was divided into four time
zones for the same reason. The Trans-Siberian, the longest railroad in the world, still operates
according to Moscow time, even though the line crosses seven time zones on its way to Vladivostok.
Punctuality and time-keeping thus became vital, not just with regard to the railroads, but in all spheres
of life. The railroads created the structured day, which, prior to their arrival, had been ten hours long,
rather than today’s norm of eight. In other words, they created the “nine-to-five” routine.
The railroads overthrew all established concepts of distance and time, and social upheaval followed.
The last vestiges of feudalism were swept away, since people were no longer tied to the land—indeed,
they could now work far from home. People worked standard hours and expected to do so for a wage.
Thus, the growth of capitalism went hand in hand with the expansion of the iron road. As people no
longer had to find employment near their homes, towns and cities could become far larger than would
previously have been possible. Suburban sprawl, often thought of as a product of the automobile age,
is, in fact, the result of the development of commuter lines.
Access to long-distance travel, in relative comfort at fairly low cost, changed people’s horizons and
opened up their imaginations. What had previously been impossible became routine—such as going to
the seaside or visiting an exhibition. On a social level, the scope for potential marriage partners
suddenly broadened, being no longer confined to the immediate vicinity. The exchange of ideas took
off as national conferences could now be convened, and the inventions of the Industrial Revolution
spread—first across Britain, then across the world. Professional sports became feasible as teams and
their supporters could travel long distances to play other teams, and league size was limited only by
how far a team could travel in a day.
Warfare, too, was revolutionized by the railroads. Armies had traditionally sustained themselves by
foraging and pillaging—an unreliable practice that made it impossible to keep troops in the same
place for long, since supplies, especially for the animals, inevitably ran out. These logistical
restrictions meant that battles took place over days rather than weeks or months. With the rise of
railroads, armies no longer needed to be constantly on the move, since they could be supplied with
food and munitions from the nearest railhead. They were also invaluable in transporting troops
quickly to quell domestic riots or launch wars against neighbors.
Nation states became more cohesive as country-wide railroad systems developed. The railroads,
often state-owned, were the glue that bound a country together, linking disparate regions and enabling
governments to expand their influence in remote, previously lawless areas. The railroads also
stimulated large movements of people: Siberia and the American West were both populated after
major lines were built. Settlements everywhere congregated around the tracks; indeed, in the US,
several towns that were bypassed by the iron road simply moved to be closer to it. Stations became
hubs, attracting development and commerce.
As the railroads expanded they brought change in their wake. Railroad companies were often the
largest organizations in their respective countries and, due to their size, required new types of business
management and even accounting methods. The very engines of capitalism—bank loans, stock
markets, information on investment—suddenly became possible. Railroad companies needed banks to
fund their expansion and, in turn, banks found railroad companies to be their best clients, since they
were the biggest and most ambitious. It was no coincidence that banks and railroad companies were
the driving force of mid- and late-19th century capitalism.
T
oday’s railroads are a combination of inventions that were made over millennia, starting with the
wheel around 8000 BCE and culminating in the steam engine in the late 18th century. By the early
1800s, steam engines—which began as huge, cumbersome machines—were small enough to be put on
wheels, and so the self-propelling “steam locomotive” was born. The next stage was simply to hitch
the locomotive to a train—consisting either of cars carrying freight, or of coaches bearing passengers.
There were many who argued that train travel would never be popular, or that horses should provide
the power, but once the world’s first major railroad, the Liverpool and Manchester line, opened in
England in 1830, there was no stopping the spread of the iron road. The United States quickly
followed, and the invention spread throughout Europe—tentatively at first, but then quite rapidly.
Lines were opened to enormous fanfare, and people flocked to the new stations—many to begin
routines of journeying to work by rail, many just to enjoy the new technology.
There were some initial setbacks, however. Every aspect of the railroads, from laying tracks and
signaling to training staff and building stations, had to be learned from scratch. This was the birth of a
completely new industry and teething problems were inevitable. There were accidents and fires, and
investors fell prey to fraudsters and confidence tricksters. Indeed, locomotives were prone to blow up
or break down, and a prominent politician, William Huskisson, was killed at the opening of the first
railroad when he failed to respond quickly enough to warnings of a passing train. Nevertheless, all
these difficulties were overcome, and within a couple of decades trains were traveling at twice the
speed of a galloping horse and covering huge distances. The railroad age had begun.
second engine that was sent to the railroad at Scott’s Pit at Llansamlet, near Swansea, in 1819. These
failures demonstrated the great difficulty in developing engines that were light enough not to break
the primitive tracks, but powerful enough to haul a reasonable load. Showing his versatility as an
engineer, Stephenson initially solved this problem by using steam pressure to create a “steam spring”
to cushion the weight of the load. He then simply increased the number of wheels to distribute the
weight. In 1820, Stephenson was hired to build an 8-mile (13-km) railroad at Hetton colliery. The
result was a train that relied on gravity on the downward slopes and steam locomotion on the level or
uphill sections. It was the first railroad that used no animal power whatsoever.
However, Stephenson’s engines continued to have difficulties, and he did not have the resources to
solve them. In the early 1820s, he became quite despondent, but then developments in the coal town of
Darlington lifted his spirits. A group of prosperous Quaker colliery owners, led by Edward Pease and
his son Joseph, wanted to create a railroad that would connect Darlington to Stockton at the mouth of
the River Tees, where coastal shipping from London docked. They wanted to reduce the price of coal
by making it cheaper to transport, and to counter an alternative plan that was being discussed to build
a canal. Stephenson was the obvious man to prepare such a route and build the Stockton and
Darlington Railway, and was summoned to the Peases’ home to discuss their plan. He was duly
appointed surveyor and engineer on the project, and, since he had formed a company in 1823 with his
son, Robert, to build locomotives at a works in Newcastle, he could use his own engines on the
railroad. Nevertheless, when Stephenson surveyed the area to be crossed, he encountered considerable
opposition from local landowners and had to map out a route that would avoid their fox-hunting
grounds.
The plan was far more ambitious than any of the former wagonways. Nearly 37 miles (60km) of
track had to be laid, and there were major physical obstacles too, notably the Myers Flat swamp and
the Skerne River at Darlington. Stephenson eventually created a firm base in the swamp by filling it
with tons of hand-hewn rock, and called on a local architect to help him design a stone bridge to cross
the river. Despite its length and logistical difficulties, the line took only three years to construct, but
even as it opened debate raged over what form of traction to use. Stephenson and his son produced the
steam engine Locomotion No. 1, which, on the opening day of June 27, 1825, pulled a train of 34 cars
carrying 600 passengers and a variety of goods through the countryside. However, this was not enough
to convince the Peases. The truth was that Stephenson’s locomotives were unreliable—they often ran
out of steam and frequently needed repairs—so most of those early trains were hauled by horses; at
one point, the Peases even considered turning the whole line over to horse-driven trains. Eventually,
however, a much better engine designed by an engineer at Stephenson’s works, Timothy Hackworth,
saved the day, and it was the horses that were phased out.
The completed Stockton and Darlington Railway was recognized as a major technical advance over its
predecessors, but, given the use of horses, it was still effectively a superior type of wagonway. It was
also flawed. It had few sidings—which allow trains traveling in opposite directions to pass each other
—so arguments and even fights between drivers were common. The owners also made the mistake of
allowing anyone who was prepared to pay a fee to use their vehicles on the line, which meant that all
kinds of conveyances, rickety and unstable, were used, resulting in frequent breakdowns.
Nevertheless, the railroad attracted a lot of traffic, and, although it took time to become profitable, it
established an important precedent—Stephenson had decided on a gauge of 4ft 8½in (1,435mm),
which became standard across much of the world’s railroad network.