Railways, it was supposed, would be a means of uniting the nations, of spreading a progressive gospel of democracy and modernisation the world over. The supposition was only partly correct. They did indeed unite the inhabitants of individual countries, but they were of no help in the quest for international peace; and they proved quite as suitable for authoritarian as for democratic societies.
The more backward the country, the more urgent its need – psychological as much as economic – to modernise, the more eagerly it seized on the railway as the key to progress. A model railway was one of the gifts Commodore Perry presented to the Japanese to demonstrate the power of the West. The Japanese had already grasped the railways’ significance. In 1855, before Perry’s arrival, they built a crude model of a Russian train. Another, running on a circular track, features in a book on Western civilisation published in Japan in 1867.
To the Japanese, the locomotive was a crucial symbol of foreign, modern technology.
In one important sense the railways were undeniably democratic. For the first time in history the poor could travel in the same conveyance, at the same speed as the rich – though, as we shall see, railway companies soon found a way of ensuring that the rich could travel faster, as well as more comfortably than the poor. The railways’ fundamentally democratic nature was welcomed by progressives the world over. In France Walter Pecqueur, a leading Saint-Simonian, waxed suitably eloquent:
by causing all classes of society to travel together and thus juxtaposing them into a kind of mosaic of all the fortunes, positions, characters, manners, customs and modes of dress that each and every nation has to offer, the railways quite prodigiously advance the reign of truly fraternal social relations and do more for the sentiments of equality than the most exalted sermons of the tribunes of democracy … It is the same convoy, the same power that carries the great and the small, the rich and the poor; thus the railways most generally provide a continuous lesson in equality and fraternity.
Conversely the railways were hated by elitists like Thomas Carlyle and, more importantly, by reactionary autocrats – the Emperor Francis II of Austria opposed railways which he assumed would bring ‘rebellion’ in the shape of democratic ideas into his empire.
With progress and democracy went the association of railways with the specific identity, the unity, the national aspirations of countries old and new. This association was not confined to politicians and philosophers. Robert Stephenson was moved to describe the opening of the Royal Border bridge at Berwick-on-Tweed as ‘the last act of Union’ between England and Scotland. A twentieth-century Governor of Kenya was typical in asserting that ‘the railway is the beginning of all history in Kenya. Without it there would be no history of Kenya.’
The precedent was set by the Belgians. In 1830 they had successfully revolted against their former Dutch masters. For the new country, building a rail network was conclusive proof of their country’s existence, that it could survive without Dutch supervision or Dutch finance. As one Belgian put it,2 ‘Without the revolution the railway could never have existed, without the railway the revolution would have been compromised.’ In 1834 they defined their country by establishing a state-owned railway network. Not only would it tie the country together, it would also be international, with links extending to the country’s frontiers, anticipating that the French and the states of the Rhineland would build railways to their own side of the frontier.
The railways were also designed for strategic purposes, to act as an alternative transport network in case the Dutch tried to block Antwerp’s access to the sea.* This necessity had been foreseen as early as October 1830, when the Liègeois asked the provisional government to find ways of using railways to replace the Dutch waterways between the Rhine and the Escaut which provided access to Antwerp, Belgium’s principal port. Naturally the network was to be nationally-controlled – any private railways were granted only twenty-year licences before they reverted to state control.
The Germans followed the Belgian example. In the 1830s the then-independent state of Baden was shocked into action when the French started building lines in Lorraine the other side of the Rhine, but Baden went it alone, proudly refusing to adopt the common English gauge used by every other German state. Baden and its neighbour, Hesse, genuinely wished to construct a railway linking them, yet ‘six valuable years were spent merely coming to a political agreement on a railroad project vital to the development of both states immediately involved’.3
Most of Germany’s dozens of states ignored the success (and profitability) of the economic activity generated by railways in other countries, basing their calculations on the share of existing traffic the trains could hope to attract. Their motives changed when railways became a symbol of national unity, of economic progress, of military preparedness. The creation of a united railway network was a demonstration of German capacity to join in a common aim. By 1846, only eleven years after the opening of Germany’s first railway, the German states had formed a Union of German Railway Administrations, ensuring a uniform tariff throughout the country. ‘The frontiers of the races and the states’, wrote the philosopher William Treitschke, ‘lost their disruptive power, rivalries were forgotten and the Germans discovered the pleasure of getting to know each other.’
Prussian generals, notably von Moltke, have often been credited with determining the shape of Germany’s rail system. In fact the network was developed earlier for strict economic considerations, combined with a spirit of emulation among the German states and a desire for national unity. When Germany was first united in 1871 the railways had remained under the control of individual states, but for Bismarck, architect of the country’s unity, ‘railways were too serious a matter to be left to the market or to the particularist forces within the Reich’. He fought long and hard ‘to have the Reich acquire the country’s railways and organise them into an efficient national system – as a functional and symbolic demonstration of the newly-found national unity.’4
For the Italians, another people searching for national unity during the first railway generation, both the idea and the reality of railways was supremely important. Count Camillo di Cavour, the Piedmontese founder of the modern Italian state, was obsessed by them – he even planned and supervised his country’s timetables. They were proof that Italians could govern themselves without the tutelage of their former Austrian masters. As early as 1857, when Piedmont was still a small, isolated kingdom, he persuaded its parliament to pledge the country’s credit for ludicrously large sums to enable work to start on a tunnel under the Mont Cenis pass, the vital route to France, the first of many prodigious achievements of Italian engineers. (Described in Chapter VII)
Although the first railway in Italy had been in the Kingdom of the reactionary Bourbon King of Naples by 1860 Piedmont, the country’s most advanced and industrialised state, naturally accounted for half the miles of track in the whole peninsula. Following the Belgian example the network extended to the kingdom’s frontiers. After the creation of a united Italy in 1861 Cavour envisaged railways as the crucial force for Italian unity, and in the state’s early years investment in railways accounted for a full fifth of the national budget.
There were a few exceptions to the rule that national pride automatically led to the promotion of a rail network as an instrument of national development. For a variety of reasons, economic, cultural, social, political, Spain, already a united country before the railway age, signally failed to take the opportunities for increased political cohesion and economic development they offered. Initially the Swiss deliberately refused to use their burgeoning railway system to unite a country which had been the loosest of confederations for over five centuries until 1848. The Swiss remained parochial, far more attached to their cantons and to their own narrow financial interests than to the Confederation. Hence, in the words of an official report, ‘a priori the Swiss will find it difficult to accept a rail network providing uniform services to different regions and different inhabi
tants, crowded industrial cities and other major traffic centres, following the example of Belgium which is presented to us as a model.’5
How Swiss railway builders conquered the Alps.
The decision did not reflect national indifference. While the majority of economic arguments did not interest the average Swiss, ‘the railway question actively interested the common people’.6 They were faced with a choice between railways financed by private capital, much of it from abroad, and a ‘link between all states and cities [which] should be the monument of living democracy’. At the outset they chose the private path – though many of them lived to regret it.
They were galvanised into action only in 1867, when two trans-Alpine rail routes were opened – in the west through the Mont Cenis tunnel and in the east by way of the Brenner Pass – neither of which passed through their country. As a result the Swiss lost much of their precious transit traffic. They were so heavily involved in international overland transport through their control of key Alpine passes that existing vested interests, carriers, innkeepers and the like, their power reinforced by the country’s deeply decentralised political structure, had been able to block progress on trans-Alpine rail links through Switzerland.
Only when faced by competition did they take seriously the idea of building a tunnel under the St Gotthard pass to Italy, the historic route over the Alps which had been the key to Swiss prosperity down the centuries. To be fair to the Swiss, concerted action over such a route was possible only when all the countries involved – Germany and Italy as well as Switzerland – had cohesive national governments of their own. Even in the late 1860s Germany was still a loose confederation while Italy was only a few years old.
In 1883, when the concessions came up for renewal, re-purchase by the state was rejected by only a small majority. Eight years later nationalisation had become the subject of probably the single most passionate political debate in which the Swiss have ever engaged. The agreed purchase of the Central, the biggest of the railways, was overturned in a referendum but, nothing daunted, the nationalisers rallied their countrymen under the slogan, ‘The Swiss railways for the Swiss people’, playing heavily on the fact that the railways were controlled by foreign capitalists, many of them Jewish. Their private-enterprise opponents, uniting under the equally apposite banner ‘The Swiss debt for the Swiss people’, and thus emphasising the cost of the purchase, were swamped in a vote which surprised everyone, for it marked a considerable advance in federal involvement in national affairs. If the Swiss, staunchest of free-marketeers, could be persuaded that government control of railways was a national necessity, then protagonists of private railways elsewhere in Continental Europe were clearly doomed.
Throughout the world a national railway system was as much a proof of national identity as an airline is today. Then as now the smaller and poorer the country the more insistent the pressure. In Central America the Costa Ricans, seeing that the Hondurans were building a railway from sea to sea with money borrowed in London, resolved not to be outdone by their poorer neighbours.
Across the desert from Cairo to Alexandria
Throughout the less-developed world, any megalomaniac ruler naturally dreamed of railways. Ismail Pasha of Egypt was a perfect case.7 He planned a railway a thousand kilometres long linking Cairo with Khartoum to help develop what he believed were the fabled agricultural riches of the Sudan – rejecting a cheaper route using the Red Sea for part of the journey on the specious grounds that it would expose traffic to possible naval action.
Railways as a symbol of nationalist autocratic megalomania lasted until well into the twentieth century. When the former corporal Reza seized the Persian throne in 1922 one of his first acts was to order the construction of a railway across his country from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. Even though the Government of India offered to help, the Shah ‘was not disposed to adopt such half measures’. The line of his dream was to be purely Persian, ‘its ownership, management and maintenance Persian, its finances untainted by foreign loans. We may doubt the wisdom of his policy: but we cannot withhold our admiration from the originator of the grandiose scheme.’8 The line, built by forty thousand workers under an international consortium, overcame appalling obstacles and provided a vital route for supplies to Russia between 1941 and 1945.
In the New World railways found their greatest scope for creating nations, if only by connecting previously isolated settlements. In Argentina Juan Batista Alberdi, a ‘liberal’ (i.e. capitalist) statesman could enthuse that the railway ‘will unify the Argentine republic better than any congress. A congress can declare a country one and indivisible; but without the iron road, which draws together a nation’s far-flung extremes, the country will for ever remain divisible and divided in spite of all legislative mandates. Thus political unity must begin with territorial unity, and only the railroad can make a single area out of two places separated by 500 leagues.’9
But an undeveloped country needed a strong sense of national identity to use foreign capital without lasting damage. Not surprisingly, the masters at this difficult task were the Japanese, who first showed their uncanny capacity to absorb foreign technology and improve on it when building up their rail network in the last quarter of the century. In the New World only two countries, Canada and the United States, were strong enough to use foreign capital as an instrument of their own national creation.
Every single step in the creation of a united Canada seemingly demanded a major railway. One of the first, the Intercolonial across the Maritime Provinces, was an explicit part of their willingness to join the fledgling country. ‘No railway, no Federation,’ was in effect the attitude of their delegates; an attitude which was clearly appreciated by the Canadians. The Intercolonial had to be promised and promised definitely.10
Two more provinces demanded a railway link in return for adherence to the Canadian Federation. One case was fundamental to Canadian history: in 1872 the veteran politician Alfred Waddington insisted that the federal government promise to build a transcontinental railway within a decade as a condition of bringing British Columbia into the federation. The other instance was pure farce: the inhabitants of Prince Edward island in the Gulf of the St Lawrence forced the federal government to assume the debts of its railway system (120 miles, costing $12,000 annually in interest payments) as part of its price of entry.
The Intercolonial, wrote a contemporary historian, ‘was one of those great projects essential to an independent Canadian nationality which have been forced on this country by the proximity of the United States’11 – a proximity which dominated Canadian thinking about railways, as about every other aspect of economic and political life. The Canadians used railways not only to define their national boundaries, but also to repel the opportunities they offered the Americans to integrate the two countries’ economies and thus, in Canadian eyes, subjugate them to the American yoke, using them quite consciously to rebuff repeated American attempts at colonisation through railways.
This theme recurred throughout the first fifty years of Canadian railway development. In the 1840s one new line was designed to pass to the (Canadian) north of Lake Erie to link two American cities, Buffalo and Detroit. The Grand Trunk, Canada’s first ambitious railway venture, at the time the biggest in the world, nine hundred miles of track, using English finance and engineering know-how, was designed to drain Canadian traffic south to Portland in Maine. The idea was actively supported by the inhabitants of the lowlands round the St Lawrence who wanted an outlet to improve their ties with Great Britain. For over half a century, until it was nationalised just after World War I, the Grand Trunk was considered an intruder, its London-based board assumed to be unsympathetic to Canadian interests. Nevertheless it was, essentially, the product of a Canadian dream. ‘Canadians saw that Britain and the United States were thriving. They knew that both these countries had many miles of rail and, so they said, if Canada had railways, she would be united and prosperous too.’12
Inevita
bly the theme of national unity was prominent during the long, tangled, story of the Canadian Pacific, the country’s first transcontinental railroad. A Canadian–American project in the early 1870s was defeated after one of the most bitter political battles the new country had ever seen. But the dream remained. ‘Until this great work is completed,’ said the Prime Minister, Sir John Macdonald, ‘our Dominion is little more than a geographical expression.’
A few years later these feelings defeated the great American railroad-builder, Jim Hill, when he proposed an economically-sensible transcontinental southern route through Minneapolis and Chicago, thus depriving Canada of a purely national route to the Pacific. Defeated, he withdrew and constructed the Great Northern, his own, purely American, route to the Pacific just south of the Canadian border. Despite continuing American sniping and a financial situation of continuing precariousness the Canadians showed the world that they could build a transcontinental railway honestly and quickly.
They were lucky: the builders were led by George Stephen, called ‘the greatest genius in the whole history of Canadian finance’, his cousin, another Scot, Donald Smith, later Lord Strathcona, a brilliant businessman, and William van Horne, one of the ablest of all railway generals. All were honest; all prepared to commit their last pennies, their whole personal credit, to the completion of the CPR.
The automatic association of railroads, especially those across the continent, with Canadian national pride continued even after the triumphant completion of the Canadian Pacific. The CPR had been the dream of Sir John Macdonald. His disciple and successor, Sir Wilfred Laurier, echoed his master’s vision with the idea of building the more northerly railroad, parallel to the CPR, a plan which emerged as the ill-fated Canadian National. In the words of an English writer, ‘The illusions of grandeur which made the Dominion, with a population of only ten million, build railways sufficient for fifty million people, seemed to have become an integral part of the Canadian soul, destined to outlive the generation that was their birth.’13
The World the Railways Made Page 8