What is a railway? According to Dr Michael J T Lewis, the eminent scholar of early railways,   it is ‘a prepared track which so guides the wheels of the vehicles running on it that they cannot leave the track’ (Lewis 1974). This definition has the merit of technical simplicity and thus embraces many kinds of transport systems apart from those conventionally known as railways; wheels need not be a feature. But for our purposes the real advantage of the definition is that in referring to a prepared track it draws attention to the fact that railways are built with a specific purpose in mind. That purpose may vary from system to system, but the principle remains the same – a railway is a linear transport feature, the rest is detail.

By the standards of most modern industries railways have unusually deep historical roots. Railways that fit Lewis’s definition existed as far back as the 6th century BC; the Greek Diolkos was a railway with a track made from stone, 6km in length across the Peloponnese, used for transporting ships until the 9th century AD – an extraordinarily long period. Works such as Agricola’s De Re Metallica date the extensive use of railways with wooden rails and vehicles to around the 15th century. Although of great technical interest, individual systems had short lives and were of no significance as anything other than adjuncts to the mining industries. By the 18th century, however, wooden railways began to be used for larger loads and more diverse purposes. Railways developed from mine tracks where people pushed four-wheel trucks of coal, stone, or ore into longer and more complex lines with large wagons and horse haulage. Late in the same century, the change was made in many places to iron rails and wheels. Wooden and stone railways did not immediately disappear, however; indeed, in Britain, the Hay Tor Tramroad was built with stone ‘rails’ at the late date of 1820.

The British monopoly on railways was to be short-lived. Even as the Liverpool & Manchester was being built, entrepreneurs in the United States were planning the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, an enterprise on quite a different scale (Stover 1997; Vance 1995; Dilts 1993). Nearly 400 miles (640km) long, the line was promoted by mercantile interests as a way of maintaining the Maryland port’s trade with the mid west, a particular instance of a more general motivation that was to drive much of the early railroad development on the eastern seaboard of the USA. Mercantile rivalries produced a ‘system’ that was far from perfect; breaks of gauge, deliberately engineered to prevent through-running from the lines of one port on to those of another, survived until at least 1900. By 1907, however, there were about 237,000 miles (379,000km) of route in the USA, making it by far the largest single network of railways in the world (Robbins 1998).

The place of the railway in the history of industrialization is assured. Economic historians might disagree over the precise contribution that railways made to economic growth in the industrializing nations of the 19th century, but all recognize the steam railways’ critical role as the dominant form of inland transport for any but the shortest of journeys (eg Szostak 1991; Ville 1990). Railways rapidly developed as the largest and most complex examples of socio-technical systems that the world had known: the political, financial, business, and managerial structures that developed to meet their novel requirements later influenced the growth of large-scale corporate business, particularly – but by no means exclusively – in the USA (Dobbin 1994; Chandler 1990) The railways’ advantages of speed, capacity, and economy made them more than mere instruments of industrial and business development, however. Culturally their impact was huge. In particular the sensibilities of societies that had never known travel at speeds above that of a galloping horse were irrevocably changed by the coming of steam locomotion. In Europe and the USA, the railway came rapidly to stand at the very focus of that mixed feeling of awe, wonderment and apprehension that historians have called the ‘technological sublime’ (Nye 1994; Wosk 1992; Danley & Marx 1990; Schivelbusch 1986).

The railways’ influence was not only felt in those countries that industrialized first. By the 1850s the cutting edge had spread well beyond Europe and even the USA. Railway construction began in the colonies of the European powers and the South American republics, with the first lines opening in Brazil and Chile (1852), Argentina (1857), India (1853), Java (1864), and Australia (1854). The Canadian Grand Trunk Railway, started in 1852 and intended to link the Atlantic seaboard with the Great Lakes, was at the time the longest railway planned in the world. Its promoters combined politics and economics in their reckoning: the line was built with the combined intention of binding the eastern Canadian provinces together economically and of reducing the influence of the USA (Lee 1998; Legget 1973). The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway at the end of the 19th century provided a similar national link for Russia. By 1907, there were 168,000 miles (268,800km) of railway outside Europe and the USA, built at a cost of nearly GB£1.5 billion (Robbins 1998).

Imperial penetration had always begun from ports, but until the coming of the railway the influence of the European powers rarely extended far inland. The railway permitted comparatively easy access to the hinterland; imperialists used railways to integrate and annex territory, and to exploit the resources of the regions surrounding the ports they controlled. The obstacles that had to be overcome were varied and often considerable. They might be political – the resistance of traditional elites or the populace, or that of another rival European power, such as the chimerical French threat to British control over the Suez route to the East that led to the construction of the Uganda Railway. Once these challenges had been met, geography often forced civil engineers to scale ever greater heights, both metaphorically and – sometimes – literally. Their engineering feats became all the more impressive as physical and political boundaries were pushed farther back. Tunnels, bridges, viaducts, cuttings, and embankments, all were developed to take the railway into places which previously had been inaccessible to any but the most determined. Whatever the difficulties, or for that matter the degree of success, the aim remained more or less constant: from Manchuria to Argentinean pampas, from the Great Lakes to the African veldt, from Yunnan to the Australian bush, the creation of a hinterland was the chief motivation (Lee 1998).

 Colonial railways were thus an essential part of the spread around the world of the economic processes, ideas, and institutions of the European powers: the production of new foodstuffs and raw materials to feed the industries and peoples of the West, new populations to produce them, new patterns of land ownership, and new legal codes to make the conquered lands safe for investment and exploitation. In European-settled parts of the world, most communities desired the coming of railways as the key to prosperity, while every government wanted them for national development. However, railways were expensive, and the direct financial returns in most parts of the world uncertain, even in the longer term. Typically, railways outside Europe and the USA were joint ventures between European private investors and the governments of the host countries which guaranteed a fixed rate of interest on the borrowed capital. Thus many states fell into financial dependence on the European banks and stock exchanges, mortgaging lands and taxes to pay for railways that were costly both to build and to operate. Nor did contemporaries often draw attention to the social and environmental downside of the technological triumph of the world-wide spread of railways: the exploitation of humans and resources to an unprecedented degree. More commonplace was an almost missionary fervour, emphasizing the role of the railway and (European) engineers as harbingers of ‘civilization’ (Lee 1998). Whatever the social and economic benefits that later accrued – and we should not forget those that were difficult, if not impossible, to reckon within the conventional accountancy of the day, such as the provision of the infrastructure of public utilities – the initial cost in human life and misery was all too often appalling high (eg Kerr 1995).