Railways: Construction

The railway in the modern sense was very much an innovation of the late 1820s. The industry was established in the next half-century in a series of promotion 'manias' in the late 1830s, mid-1840s and mid-1860s. By 1870 over 70 per cent of the final route mileage had been constructed. The three striking characteristics of the railway industry were:

1. Novelty. The Liverpool and Manchester railway, opened in September 1830, combined the essential features: specialised track, mechanical traction, and facilities for public traffic and provision for passengers.
2. Size. The scale of this new technology was soon apparent. The capital raised by the companies in the United Kingdom amounted to £630 million by 1875, dwarfing the fixed-capital formation of basic industries such as coal, iron, textiles and steel. Gross revenue, running at £19 million a year in the 1850s, rose to £52 million a year in 1870-75, equal to the output value of the woollen industry and double that of coal. Permanent employment reached 56,000 in 1850 and by 1873 the figure had risen to 275,000 or 3.3 per cent of the male labour force.
3. Concentration. This was also visible at an early stage. The great mania of 1845 -1847 left 61 per cent of the UK railway capital and 75 per cent of gross traffic revenue in the hands of 15 major companies. By 1870 the same number of companies controlled 80 per cent of the capital and 83 per cent of the revenue. The remaining 415 railway companies shared the rest.

Investment

In the period up to 1870 investment was very largely the story of three great 'manias', peaking in 1839-1840, 1847 and 1865-1866. In the late 1830s railway investment consumed nearly 2 per cent of national income but this rose to about 4.5 per cent of gross national product in 1845-9. We should not neglect the continuing importance of railway investment after 1850: over 60 per cent of the capital raised between 1825 and 1875 occurred after 1850. So what role did this play in the growth process?

• While railway promotion was an undoubted influence on general economic activity from the 1830s, its role was to support rather than lead. Decisions to invest in railways tended to concentrate in the upswing of the trade cycle but, because of the timescale involved in promotion and construction, lagged behind. So there is a clear lag between the peaks of economic activity in 1836 and 1845 and peaks of railway investment in 1839-40 and 1847.
• Technological change, commercial viability and parliamentary attitudes were all important in stimulating investment. Gladstone's Act of 1844, which referred to the possibility of a state purchase after 21 years of new companies earning 10 per cent or more, helped encourage over-optimism about the industry's future profitability during the second 'mania'.
• After 1860 investment fluctuations tended to coincide with those of the economy as a whole, with a peak in 1865-6, a trough in 1869 and a further peak in 1874-5.
• Railway investment encouraged radical changes in the structure of the British capital market. The volume of railway business from the mid 1830s was such that the London Stock Exchange not only expanded but shifted its emphasis towards company securities.  Railway investors were protected by limited liability from the start and it is logical to assume that the industry acted as a model for the companies that sprang up in the wake of the 1855-62 legislation.

Construction

Historians have distinguished between the railway as a producer of transportation services and as a construction enterprise. While it is not always easy to isolate the economic effects of railway enterprise, there is no doubt that the construction phase was a major activity in its own right. Before 1850 the employment generated by railway building dwarfed that created by railway operation. Between 1830 and 1870 about 30,000 miles of track were laid to form routes totalling 15.500 miles. The associated demands for men and materials -- unskilled labour and iron products in particular -- was large enough to merit a separate analysis. As far as labour was concerned

1. Between 1831 and 1870 an average of 60,000 men were engaged annually in building railways, or about 1 per cent of the occupied male labour force. This may not appear particularly dramatic but during the short 'mania' the numbers employed were considerable: 172,000 annually between 1845 and 1849 and 106,000 between 1862 and 1866.
2. The construction booms produced sudden surges in demand for labour and especially unskilled labour. The outcome, in the late 1840s, was a substantial boost to effective demand in the economy at a time of depression. Wages paid during this period amounted to £11 million or 2 per cent of GNP. In the mid 1860s constructional wage costs were high once again, averaging £7 million or so between 1862 and 1866.
3. Railway construction also brought demands for professional expertise based on specialist work. Engineering, law, accountancy and surveying all received an important stimulus. Civil engineers increased four fold between 1841 and 1851.
4. Both navvies and specialists were not immune from cutbacks once railway booms subsided. The number of parliamentary agents increased from 27 to 141 between 1841 and 1851 but fell back to 70 by 1861. The navvy workforce dwindled to under 36,000 by 1852 and after the 1860s boom it was probably no more than 33,000 in 1870. The long-term benefits of the attraction of labour to railway building were thus rather limited, especially after 1850. Of more lasting importance was the permanent employment offered by companies open for traffic, which exceeded 100,000 by 1856 and 200,000 by the late 1860s.

There is general agreement that the construction of Britain's railways had its greatest impact on the iron industry. Wrought iron rails were the major product purchased, but there was also a substantial demand for iron in other areas of railway enterprise. It is, however, important not to overestimate the long-term significance of this additional demand:

• Pig iron requirements were of major importance in the 1840s, particularly in terms of home demand, but the same cannot be said of the construction phase as a whole.
• Between 1844 and 1851 about 18 per cent of United Kingdom pig iron output went into railway enterprise. However, after 1852 as iron exports grew steadily, the railway's share of iron output fell back to under 10 per cent. Railways were not essential to the expansion of the iron industry; of more importance were the diffusion of Neilson's hot-blast technique in the 1830s and the surge of export demand [much of it was in fact for railway iron] after 1840.  Steel rails began to replace iron in the 1860s but the substantial shift did not occur until the 1870s.

Railway construction stimulated demand for other products, notably coal, engineering products, timber and building materials. The evidence for linkages is rather thin. In terms of total production, the direct impact of railway on the coal industry was small but as much as 10 per cent of output was used for making iron for railway uses. About 20 per cent of engineering's output went in the form of railway rolling stock in the late 1830s and 1840s. Brick production also received a direct stimulus: 25-30 per cent of the total production went into railways in the 1840s.

A horse-drawn society?

The popular image of Victorian England is of a society whose members travelled by train[1]. Certainly there is little doubting the impact that railways had on English society, its landscapes and its attitudes. However, for most people for most of the time the railways were not the main means of transport. F.M.L. Thompson first called Victorian England 'a horse drawn society' in an article published in 1970 and more recently[2]

'Railways paraded the power of the machine across the whole country, they eroded localism and removed barriers to mobility and they created new jobs and new towns. Their very modernity and success in generating new traffic, however, also generated expansion in older forms of transport, for all the feeder services bringing freight and passengers to the railway stations were horse-drawn. This, coupled with the needs of road transport within the larger towns, produced a three or fourfold increase in horse-drawn traffic on Victorian roads. The result, in employment terms, was that there were consistently more than twice as many road transport workers as there were railwaymen until after 1891 and that in the early twentieth century the road transport men, by now including some handling electric trams and soon to include others on motor vehicles, remained easily the largest group of transport workers.'

In early 1830 twenty-nine coaches operated between Liverpool and Manchester; by early 1831 there were four and two years later only one remained. One of the leading coach owners considered 'annihilation' as the most appropriate word to describe the effects of railways. But this experience was not typical of all parts of the country. Where the new railways ran roughly parallel to long-established trunk roads there was certainly little future for stage coaching. Where roads traversed or fed into the route of the railway a very different situation existed and horse-drawn vehicles still had a very important part to play for many decades to come in the overall provision of transport services.

Initially the effect of railways on towns that had previously been important staging posts was disastrous. In 1839 Doncaster found employment for seven four-horse coaches, 20 two-horse coaches, nine stage wagons and 100 post horses; the total horse population was 258. In 1845, after the town had had railway links for five years, only one four-horse coach, three stage wagons and 12 post horses were still in service and the number of horses had fallen to 60. Trade had suffered badly and the value of property had fallen between 25 and 30 per cent. Where coaches acted as 'feeders' there were still opportunities for them to stay on the road and, in some cases, increase their business. The completion of the early skeleton network by about 1840 provided many opportunities for opening up new combined coach and railway routes for passenger traffic. In April 1839 the well known coach magnate George Sherman expressed the opinion that after the railway had driven most of the coaches off the long distance routes 'there would be as much employ more horses as there ever was through the extra ordinary quantity of omnibuses and cabs that were appearing on the streets.'

The result was a significant increase in the cost of horses: in 1872 the London and South Western were paying £54 17s for the same type of animal that had only cost them £44 10s five years earlier. The increased demand for horses was certainly not confined to London; there is also significant evidence from the provinces. Thompson commented that 'Without carriages and carts the railways would have been like stranded whales, giants unable to use their strength, for these were the only means of getting people and goods right to the doors of houses, where they wanted to be.'  There was also an increase in privately owned heavy carriages: from 30,000 in 1840 the number grew to 120,000 by 1870. Over the same period the number of light two-wheeled carriages increased six times. By 1902 12 out of every 1,000 people in Great Britain owned some kind of private horse-drawn vehicles. This compared with 14 per 1000 in 1870 and 4 per 1000 in 1840, and it was not until 1926 that the number of car owners exceeded the number of persons who had owned horse-drawn carriages in 1870.

Road traffic

In 1838 there were 1,116 turnpike trusts, private, profit-making bodies, managing some 22,000 miles of road compared to the 104,770 managed by parish authorities. Neither was well equipped to meet the challenge of the railways. In the first place both operated on too small a scale to be run economically: the average turnpike road was under 20 miles long and parish roads even less. Secondly, they were in financial difficulties: turnpikes were in debt for over £7 million [four times their annual income] and parishes had considerable difficulty collecting the highway rates. Reform was necessary. It extended through the century and was a tediously slow process:

Some amalgamation or consolidation of turnpikes had already occurred by 1830. In 1826, for example, north London set up the Metropolitan Turnpike Trust uniting under one management the administration of 122 milers of roads formerly controlled by separate trusts. In 1844, following the Rebecca riots, the trusts in South Wales were brought under the control of county road boards. This process was not followed in other areas of the country where trusts suffered from increasing indebtedness and their roads lay unrepaired. Parliament was aware of the need for reform and Royal Commissions and select committees recommended consolidation and abolition. It was not until the Local Government Board took over responsibility for roads from the Home Office in 1872 that the dissolution of the trusts was hastened. In 1871 there were 851 trusts, by 1881 this had been reduced to 184 and by 1890 only two remained. the last trust -- on the Anglesey section of the Holyhead road -- ceased to function on 1 November 1895.

Reform of the parish roads occurred equally slowly. Parishes, even when it was obvious that they could not maintain their roads, were unwilling to surrender their authority. This did not help bring about uniformity of practice. The pattern became more orderly from 1872 but it was not until 1894 that the chaos that previously existed was finally sorted out. The Local Government Act 1894 merged the old highway districts and highway parishes into the rural sanitary authority. The recently created county councils [1888] assumed responsibility for the main through roads. The reform of road administration occurred at the same time as a reawakening of interest in long-distance road transport from the 1880s. The main reasons for this were:

1. A revival of horse-drawn coach transport for carriage of the new parcel post because of the terms offered by railway companies; success on the London-Brighton route in 1887-8 led to the scheme being extended to other routes.
2. A revival on four-in-hand coaching primarily as a leisure activity.
3. The development of the bicycle for the less well off. The British bicycle industry had its origins in the late 1860s in Coventry. It was the Rover safety bicycle with rear wheel chain drive, first produced in Coventry in 1885 that extended the craze. This was aided by the introduction of the pneumatic tyre by J.B.Dunlop in 1888 considerably increasing the comfort of cycling and helping to make the new means of recreation socially acceptable to women. By 1885 there were already 400,000 cyclists in Britain and the 1890s saw the bicycle reach the peak of its popularity: in 1896 for example they were issues to all police stations in the country. By 1900 the Raleigh Cycle Factory was producing 12,000 cycles a year.
4. The ending of the 12 mph speed limit [the 'Red Flag' legislation of 1865] in 1896. Though originally designed to limit the speed of 'steam-carriages', the decision liberated the newly developed motor vehicle for which good roads were essential.

As the proportion of people living in large towns and cities rose, the problems of urban transport assumed an ever-growing importance. Suburban railways met some of the demand but during the second and third quarters of the century an attempt was made to meet this by expanding the provision of horse-drawn short stage and omnibus services. The number of horses engaged in commercial passenger transport rose from 103,000 in 1851 to 464,000 by 1901. The carriage and the horse-drawn omnibus [each of which required 11 horses a day to keep running] were essentially middle class conveyances. The working class largely still went by foot. A survey of London in 1854 found that to teach their place of work 52,000 people used their own or hired carriages, 88,000 used horse-drawn omnibuses, 54,000 used suburban trains and 30,000 river steams but 400,000 people still walked to work. After 1875 there was a rapid expansion of the tramway network, especially the growth of the electric tram from the turn of the century, with fares sufficiently low to give general access to the working class. By 1900 1 million passengers were carried each year on electric trams rising to 3.3 million by 1913. This produced, for the first time, genuine mass transport. Traffic jams are not the product of the car: urban traffic congestion was a consequence of the nineteenth century horse.

The growth in passenger traffic on the roads was paralleled by a growth in good traffic, nearly all horse drawn. An estimated 161,000 horses were pulling freight vehicles in Britain in 1851. By 1891 the figure was 500,000, by 1901 702,000 and by 1911 832,000. Throughout the nineteenth century three things need to be noted about transport than have been all too long overlooked:

1. There was the central importance of walking, both as a mode of transport and as a way of carrying and delivering, from the porters, packmen, coster girls and street vendors of urban areas to the carriers, peddlers and postmen of the countryside.
2. There was the sheer diversity of experience of transport. Just as today, people did not restrict themselves to one mode of transport.
3. There was the gradual adoption of the bicycle which in its flexibility and ease of use and its speed -- it was four times faster than walking -- foreshadowed automobile travel.

British motor transport had a greater impact on social life than it did on the economy in the period up to 1914. The country's roads were in no fit state to accommodate the noisy new vehicles with their solid rubber or even metal tyres. They generated huge clouds of dust and this was a major cause of their unpopularity. Cottages and market gardens whose properties fronted by roads popular with motorists were angry than the quality of their crops and hence the saleability of their land had fallen sharply: on the London to Portsmouth road the fall was in the order of 25 to 35 per cent. Animosity also had a class dimension: cars were only for the wealthy who seemed to drive oblivious of their effects on others.

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[1] P.S. Bagwell The  Transport Revolution  since  1770, Batsford,  1974, H.J. Dyos  and D.H. Aldcroft British Transport: an economic survey from the seventeenth to the twentieth century,  Leicester, 1969,  Penguin, 1976 and H. Perkin The Age of the Railway, Routledge,  1970 are  the basic general surveys. The central role of the Stephensons can  be examined  in  L.T.C. Rolt George and Robert Stephenson: The  Railway Revolution, 1960  and R.H.G. Thomas The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Batsford, 1980.  See also Rolt's biography  of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 1957.  On  the construction of railways see T. Coleman The Railway Navvies, Penguin, 1968, an eminently readable book. On  the  impact of railways see T.R. Gourvish Railways and the  British Economy 1830-1914,  Macmillan, 1980, M.C. Reed (ed.) Railways in the Victorian Economy: Studies in Finance and Economic Growth, David & Charles, 1969, G.R. Hawke Railways and Economic Growth  in England and Wales 1840-1870, OUP, 1970 and J.R. Kellett Railways and Victorian Cities, Routledge, 1969. H. Parris Government and  the Railways in the Nineteenth Century, 1965 deals with state regulation.

[2] F.M.L.Thompson The Rise of Respectable Society, page 47.