Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World by Christian Wolmar

Author:Christian Wolmar [Wolmar, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: World History, Retail, Technology, Social History
ISBN: 1586488341
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2010-03-01T15:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

THE INVASION OF

THE RAILWAY

By the final quarter of the nineteenth century, railways were well established throughout the world, and the sight of a steam locomotive puffing across the countryside had become commonplace, not only in towns and on the major routes between them, but also in remote regions penetrated by the burgeoning number of branch lines. In 1880 there were 280,000 miles 1 of railway and that would rise to nearly 500,000 by the end of the century. Across the world railways were growing at the rate of 10,000 miles per year and would continue to do so until the outbreak of the First World War. This was the period when the railways were in their pomp, spreading everywhere with the misguided confidence that the railway age would define the twentieth century as it had the nineteenth.

The first underground railway was completed in London in 1863, and there was no shortage of other astonishing engineering feats, but the last quarter of the century would see railways go beyond what had been achieved before to conquer the most inhospitable parts of the world. There were no boundaries, physical, social or topographical, which could prevent their progress or delay their dominance. The transcontinental railways may have been the headline stealers in terms of their ambition but they were by no means the only ones to overcome remarkable obstacles. Mountains, rivers, deserts and jungles, as well as sheer distance, were all comfortably ignored as the railway reached places that seemed inaccessible for such a cumbersome and complex invention. Since these regions were often little inhabited, these new railways were, as with the transcontinental schemes, frequently politically rather than economically driven. Even so, many were used for a precise economic purpose only, serving a particular mine or facilitating the export of a single agricultural product like sugar or wheat.

The global expansion of railways was at its peak in the final twenty-five years of the nineteenth century when industrial development in many countries was stimulating unprecedented rates of economic growth and the railway was unchallenged as the principal means of transport for both passengers and freight, since the development of motor cars and lorries was still embryonic. But it worked the other way, too. For some countries the opening of their first railway was the stimulus for a period of sustained economic growth and industrialization based on the development and spread of the railway network. Every European country, 2 except for Albania,3 had a railway by 1869 when both Romania and Greece opened their first lines. By the early 1880s most Asian countries had joined the age of the iron road at the behest of their colonial powers, and in Central and South America virtually every state boasted at least a few miles of track. The hectic pace of railway construction only came to a halt with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 which coincided, too, with the growth of road transport that was beginning to shift investment away from the iron to the tarmac road.

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