The World the Railways Made

by Nicholas Faith

  Outside Europe many regions were actually created by the railways. As soon as it was settled, the American Mid-West supplied far-distant markets with its specialities and received in return bulk materials like fertilisers, bricks, clay, timber and other building materials.* But the leader in the specialisation process was the railway industry itself. In the words of the great economist Alfred Marshall, ‘The dominant economic fact of our time is not the development of manufacturing industry, but the development of transport industries.’ The railway ‘sector’ started its leadership by simply being built. At the height of the great railway boom of the 1840s four per cent of the employed male population in Britain was involved in building them.

  Even in the giant American economy, railways accounted for 15 per cent of all the capital investment undertaken in the quarter of a century before the Civil War. In other countries they could account for as much as a quarter of a country’s industrial investment – in France their share varied between ten and fifteen per cent for nearly half a century.

  In Germany – the locus classicus for all types of railway-induced industrial progress – railway construction accounted for up to a quarter of industrial investment, also acting, as in other countries, as a strong counter-cyclical force in times of industrial recession. In the peak years Britain’s railways consumed nearly a fifth of all the pig iron produced in the country – a proportion which reached 30 per cent, including exports. (Britain still remains the world’s largest exporter of the rails themselves.)

  But it was the Germans who most effectively exploited the railways to help develop their engineering industries. In 1843 only a tenth of all the rails in Prussia were home-built. Twenty years later the figure was 85 per cent, and by then all the locomotives were also made in Prussia. In Britain the locomotives were built by an already well-developed steam-engine industry, while in Prussia the locomotive came first; as late as 1875 three quarters of all the steam engines in Prussia were railway locomotives.

  Railways, unlike steamships, and unlike such other major industries as cotton textiles, entailed a long tail of associated industrial structures. The maintenance required by rolling stock during its long life ensured that even a country which relied on imported equipment would develop a considerable mechanical base, and one, moreover, free from foreign competition. By 1870 railway repairing alone accounted for a fifth of all the machinery produced in the United States, and the industry as a whole absorbed forty per cent of all the rolled steel.

  As the biggest industrial organisations of their kind, the railway companies’ impact naturally included their industrial demands. While they were major consumers, most obviously of coal, iron and steel, their biggest impact was more qualitative than quantitative, because of the standard of performance they demanded, the pressures (literal and metaphorical) they imposed on their suppliers.

  In Japan railway equipment, more particularly steam locomotives, performed as a ‘leading sector’ in the economy. The first mass-production locomotives came off the assembly lines as late as 1903, thirty years after railways had first been introduced into Japan. Eight years later the import of steam locomotives was virtually at an end, and the Japanese started making electric locomotives only six years after the Germans. For the Japanese, building rolling stock, like mastering the construction of the lines themselves, was a symbol of technological advance which could easily be measured against European and American standards.

  The Japanese were following the examples of the Americans, the Germans and the French, all of whom had relied on British technology for their first railways but who had soon surpassed their mentors.* The railways required unprecedented numbers of bridges, for example,† and as they were built in increasingly inaccessible corners of the globe they demanded more, and more ambitious, prefabricated structures. Ernest Gouin of the Société des Batignolles developed a standard construction kit for bridges after he had received an order for 5,000 tons’ worth to be erected in the then-inaccessible South of France. He went on to use the same techniques to build ships.

  But under extreme conditions even French engineering proved inferior to the American. The Central Peruvian railway in the high Andes proved the ultimate test. One branch line was built at an altitude as high as Mont Blanc. The French system, in which they used their own teams to build ready-assembled prefabricated structures, proved a failure. The Americans then showed that they could erect a bridge weighing over 60 tons in a mere eight days, whereas comparable British structures weighed over twice as much and took eight weeks. The Americans’ greatest triumphs came with the Verrugas bridge over a tributary of the Rimac (celebrated by a medal struck by the great Louis Tiffany), and later with the Gokteik Bridge, transported safely from the works of the Pennsylvania Bridge Company to its home in Upper Burma.

  With railways inevitably came a whole series of technological challenges. Their requirements for greater strength and durability sparked off the replacement of iron by steel and the development of improved types of steel. In the twentieth century we have become used to defence industries providing the funds for technical advances. In the nineteenth the process was reversed. Alfred Krupp and, to a lesser extent, Tom Vickers, used techniques originally devised to produce strong steel wheels and rails to transform the technology of cannon-making. Krupp prospered making axles and springs for railway wagons before developing the cast steel wheel which provided the technical and financial backing for his subsequent fame. In The Arms of Krupp William Manchester quotes him as writing: ‘It was only through the manufacture of tyres that the works were able to make enough profit to lay down the gun-making plant.’

  The demand for rails and wheels alike, was not domestic – the Prussian state railways were the last to be convinced – but international. In 1874 alone Krupp shipped 175,000 tons of rails from Hamburg to the United States, and by the time the Americans had caught up with German technology, Chinese railways – and German guns based on railway technology – had filled the gap.

  In Belgium, railway industries were at the heart of the country’s wealth and international fame. Belgian industry had a disproportionate share of the world market in iron, steel and locomotives, and a corresponding importance in technological advances. Walschaerts invented the vital valve gear named after him, designed to regulate the flow of steam into the cylinder, Alfred Belpaire improved combustion through developing a wider firebox – and in the twentieth century two other famous Belgian names, Flamme and Lemaitre, also improved steam locomotive technology.

  The railways demanded a wide range of improved engineering tools – like the heavy steam hammers and overhead cranes directly attributable to their requirements – as well as improvements in the rails on which the whole industry depended. In the United States the price of standard T-shaped rails dropped from $200 a ton in 1850 to $28 a ton in 1914: by then they were 30 feet long – double the length and four times the weight of their predecessors, a crucial factor in enabling trains to carry heavier loads.

  The first industrial revolution depended on coal, iron and steel, and railways played the crucial role in developing all three, especially the first. Coal begat the railways, which in turn consumed a substantial proportion of the coal they carried, although increasingly efficient locomotives demanded correspondingly more combustible ‘steam coal’. In the 1870s the Philadelphia & Reading was described as ‘less a railroad carrying coal, but more a coal company operating a railroad to carry its product’.* A hundred years later, during a decade when virtually all other traffic had deserted them, American railroads relied on coal for survival.

  In Britain by 1865 the railways were transporting 1,700 million ton miles of coal, the difference in the cost alone (4.33 (old) pence per ton mile by rail, 16.3 (old) pence by alternative methods) accounting for nearly 11.5 per cent of Britain’s national income. Unfortunately for Britain’s railways, they retained the small, unbraked wagons suitable for working round the sharp curves in colliery sidings well into the twentieth century whe
n they proved too slow to compete with road transport.

  Britain was not the only country where the first railways were short, unambitious lines linking coal mines to the nearest market or stretch of navigable water. The same rule applied in Belgium, France, India and China. Their traffic, and their profits, were assured, providing a good advertisement for rail transport, and a sound base for more ambitious schemes.

  Coal railways had many other effects. In France, for instance, the rural economy had previously been based on wood as a fuel. In Belgium the coal mines and the railways were so important, indeed, that when they were threatened with takeover by foreign interests the whole country was galvanised into action. Even in Spain, usually such a negative example, railways resulted in the development of coalfields in regions like Leon, well away from the coast.

  Since the time of Marco Polo the Chinese had used porters to carry coal, in one case for over sixty miles, and fully realised its importance. In defending his extremely expensive proposed southern network Sun Yat-Sen quoted an old proverb, ‘Nobody would build a city where there is no coal underneath.’ Not surprisingly, the country’s first line, privately built by an English engineer, was designed to serve the Kai-ping coal mines near Tientsin. The venture was perceived as a major challenge to local traditions, showing the capability of this new, foreign, and much-feared form of transport.

  The railways replaced the ironmakers’ previous dependence on limited supplies of charcoal with much more dependable supplies of coal, and enabled the industry to tap distant supplies of iron ore. Both demonstrate the railways’ biggest single contribution to industry: its capacity to liberate factories from the need to be on navigable water, which had previously monopolised the transport of industrial raw materials. More generally the railways provided industry with an unprecedented geographical flexibility. Industrialists could draw their raw materials from a wider range of sources, and allocate the manufacturing process (which itself could be fragmented) to the most economic location.

  The railways’ direct demands could overwhelm an infant iron and steel industry. The Spanish railways were forced to depend almost exclusively on imported iron and steel, and in Russia the railways themselves absorbed the majority of the pig iron produced in the last two decades of the 19th century.

  But more often the railways acted as midwives to entirely new industrial centres. One of the most amazing was Birmingham, Alabama, the major industrial city improbably situated in the heart of the deep South, a success story due almost entirely to the missionary efforts of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. The railroad invested directly, lent money, granted favourable freight rates, extended the tracks to tap the iron ore deposits at Red Mountain. The L & N’s crotchety, if prescient, president, Milton H. Smith, understood that ‘while higher rates would have given a better return on the capital invested, they would probably have prevented development’.27

  But, as so often, it was the previously backward Germans who best demonstrated the railways’ capacity to unlock latent industrial potential. ‘Iron production had not developed much beyond the technological level of the 16th century.’28 As late as 1835 nine tenths of all Germany’s iron was still being smelted in furnaces using charcoal, a fuel long abandoned in Britain. But ‘at the start of the 1850s new modern coke-using blast furnaces were erected in the Ruhr area.’ As a result the iron ore traffic multiplied over forty-fold during the 1850s to reach 227,000 tons by 1860, a period which also saw the Ruhr’s greatest surge in coal production, encouraged by a sharp drop in the cost of rail transport.

  Inevitably railways created uprecedented strains on existing industries, existing ways of life. Switzerland, formerly over-reliant on small-scale enterprises, agricultural as well as industrial, had to switch almost overnight to the scenery which begat mass tourism and to specialised manufactures like watches and machinery which could exploit the country’s excellent educational system.

  Once the railways had established a base load of a heavy commodity like coal they were poised to cash in on the low marginal cost of additional, smaller scale, widely-varied freight. This was not only industrial, it included the innumerable items of baggage which accompanied nineteenth-century travellers. Trains could absorb – albeit only after the sort of muddle beloved of comic writers looking for material – the untidy parcels carried by the poor and the trunks and fine leather suitcases belonging to richer travellers. Households could move far more frequently, far more ambitiously, than ever before. But the personal freight was not solely domestic. In Le Musicien Errant, Hector Berlioz complains that the enormous cost of transporting music by post-coach removed all his profits from provincial concert tours in the pre-railway age.

  On a larger scale, as the cost of transport dropped – and, almost as importantly, continued dropping – so efficient producers of the whole gamut of agricultural and industrial goods found that they could dominate their markets throughout a region, a country, a continent. In Britain, as Michael Robbins pointed out in The Railway Age, ‘Specialization was the key to success. Each district … had its particular range of products: the Victorian child’s game which showed steel and ship-building at Barrow, jute at Dundee, straw hats at Luton, boots and shoes at Northampton, cutlery at Sheffield, was not seriously misrepresenting the facts.’

  Symbolically the barrels of beer brewed at Burton, over a hundred miles from London, were stored in special cellars built under Saint Pancras Station in London. The specialisation continued for generations after the railways’ arrival: it took forty years before the clay deposits at Whittlesea near Peterborough were exploited to produce the bricks which standardised so much of Britain’s housing.

  The extraordinary variety of goods pouring into London every morning was hymned by The Railway News as early as 1864:

  In the grey mists of the morning, in the atmosphere of a hundred conflicting smells, and by the light of faintly burning gas, we see a large portion of the supply of the great London markets rapidly disgorged by these night trains: Fish, flesh and food, Aylesbury butter and dairy-fed pork, apples, cabbages, and cucumbers, alarming supplies of cats’ meat, cart loads of water cresses, and we know not what else, for the daily consumption of the metropolis. No sooner do these disappear than at ten minutes’ interval arrive other trains with Manchester packs and bales, Liverpool cotton, American provisions, Worcester gloves, Kidderminster carpets, Birmingham and Staffordshire hardware, crates of pottery from North Staffordshire, and cloth from Huddersfield, Leeds, Bradford, and other Yorkshire towns, which have to be delivered in the City before the hour for the general commencement of business. At a later hour of the morning these are followed by other trains with the heaviest class of traffic: stones, bricks, iron girders, iron pipes, ale (which comes in great quantities, especially from Allsopps’, and the world-famous Burton breweries), coal, hay, straw, grain, flour, and salt …29

  In France Rondo Cameron lists ‘the concentration of the cotton and linen industries, exploitation of the coal mines of the Pas de Calais … the development of Languedoc vineyards, stock raising in Thierache and Charentes, fishing off Boulogne, coal, sugar, oil, iron and steel in the north and east of France and mechanical and food processing industries in and around Paris’30 among the railways’ contributions to industrial development. Production of animal-based products, from eggs to butter and the like, more than doubled in the first quarter of a century after the railway network was completed. Nevertheless, in France as in Britain, large-scale, national specialisation had a corollary, the decline and fall of hundreds of local, small scale firms historically protected from competition by transport costs.

  The most spectacular world-ranging specialities bred by the railways were agricultural, most obviously grain and meat. Rail-borne grain flooded from the American and later Canadian prairies, then from the Argentine pampas, causing a major agricultural slump throughout Europe. The railways opening up the prairies thus had a direct interest in improving the quantity of wheat they could produce. The Menn
onites lured by the Santa Fe brought with them the ‘Turkey’ strain of hard wheat which proved admirably suited to prairie conditions. Specialisation liberated land previously used for grain for more profitable crops. In Southern Russia a number of lines, culminating in the ‘Turksib’, brought cereals to Central Asia, freeing the land for growing cotton.

  In some cases the connection was more direct. William Van Horne of the Canadian Pacific built enormous grain elevators to ensure that the reputation of Manitoba grain would not be tarnished by unsuitable storage conditions. He encouraged farmers to grow the most suitable varieties of soft wheat and he carried one variety, Red Fife, free of charge. When the CPR’s profitable monopoly led to the construction of the more northerly Canadian National Railway the protagonists could not rely on existing strains of wheat. After twenty years of research, a leading agronomist, Dr Saunders, developed ‘Marquis’ wheat which would grow two hundred miles further north than existing varieties requiring longer summers in which to ripen. In the United States the Illinois Central went even further, awarding prizes to encourage production of a steam-driven plough, a ditching machine and a workable corn-cutter and stacker.

  For arable farmers, railways meant not only wider markets, but, crucially, a far cheaper and greatly increased supply of fertiliser. In France, for instance, the railways carried 627,000 tons in 1868, and double that quantity a decade later, in a period in which wheat production rose by over a third.