On 27 September 1825, George Stephenson's locomotive Locomotion No. 1 hauled a train of 36 wagons carrying coal and flour — and 450 passengers in an open coal wagon — along the 26 miles of the Stockton and Darlington Railway at speeds of up to 24 miles per hour. The watching crowds, some of whom had come to see the engine explode as they fully expected it would, instead witnessed the beginning of the railway age — an age that would transform not just how people travelled but how they thought about space, time and the nature of the world.
Five years later, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened — the first railway designed from the outset to carry both passengers and goods by steam power over a significant commercial route. Its inaugural journey in September 1830 was also its first disaster: William Huskisson MP, a supporter of the railway who had alighted from his carriage to speak to the Duke of Wellington, was struck by Stephenson's Rocket travelling on the adjacent track and became the railway age's first fatality. The tragedy did not stop the railways. Nothing could stop the railways.
The great railway boom of the 1840s — Railway Mania, as contemporaries called it — saw Parliament authorise thousands of miles of new lines in a speculative frenzy that ruined many investors when the bubble burst but left Britain with a railway network that, by 1850, connected virtually every major city and penetrated deep into the countryside. The network's expansion was driven by competitive private enterprise with minimal government coordination, which produced a system of extraordinary dynamism but also of duplication, inconsistent gauges and the absence of any rational national planning.
The social consequences were revolutionary. Journey times that had been measured in days by coach were compressed into hours by train. A businessman in Manchester could conduct affairs in London and return in a single day. Fresh food — fish from Scottish ports, milk from country dairies, vegetables from market gardens — reached urban consumers in usable condition for the first time. Holiday excursions to the seaside, previously accessible only to those wealthy enough to afford a coach, became available to working people as excursion trains brought Blackpool, Brighton and Scarborough within reach.
The railways also created standard time. Before the railways, each town in Britain kept its own local time, set according to the sun's position, which meant that Bristol was ten minutes behind London and Edinburgh twenty minutes behind that. When railway timetables required trains to run to a consistent schedule across hundreds of miles, the diversity of local times became impossible to manage. Railway companies imposed Greenwich Mean Time on their operations from the 1840s, and by 1880 Parliament had legislated that GMT was the legal time for the whole of Britain. The railways had synchronised the clocks of the nation — a transformation in how people understood time itself that was as profound, if less visible, as the transformation in how they understood distance.
