Chapter 31: Railway Fever Spreads

**Dave Broker** (0:17)
By the end of the first Industrial Revolution, tens of thousands of miles of railways were in use across the world. They were built by hundreds of thousands of workers who used their brains and muscles to move earth, lay cross ties and tracks, hammer spikes, build viaducts, and dig tunnels. It was dangerous work that left many injured or killed. They came from every nation and creed. Some chose to work on the railways for prospects of much higher pay than they could get in the mills or factories. Others were forced to perform this labor as slaves. Leading the workers was a new generation of civil engineers. Among them was an orphan who learned the trade from a variety of projects he saw as he traveled the world. Some were the children of legendary engineers who came before. Others were their students. Financing the railroads were bankers, like the Rothschilds and the Pirares, British capitalists, and in many places the taxpayers too. They paid upwards of $150 billion in modern terms, often with their investments fully returned within a matter of years. While the principles of mass production found in the factory system were slow to spread through Europe and the United States, the transport revolution took off swiftly. In the 20 years following completion of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, freight, passengers, and information moved faster than ever before. The success of an economy could be measured by the ratio of railway miles in a country to that country's total square miles. And just like we do with our modern technologies today, the people of the time felt conflicted by the railroads, excited by the prospect of progress, economic growth, and freedom of movement, worried about the dangers posed to workers, passengers, communities, local culture, and the physical environment. Of all the changes that came with the Industrial Revolution, none had the economic, social, or symbolic impact of railway fever.
This is The Industrial Revolutions, Chapter 31, Railway Fever Spreads.
Okay, so a quick correction from last week's episode. I said that John Rennie, the engineer from Matthew Bolton's Albion Mills, was also an engineer on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Not quite. John Rennie the Elder built the Albion Mills. His son, John Rennie the Younger, worked on the railway. And that's where our story begins today, with John Rennie the Younger. While the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was still being surveyed, Rennie proposed a follow-up project that would be much grander. A railway from London up to Birmingham. In 1823, he formed a new company to build such a line. Over the next ten years, the project slowly came together. Rennie merged his companies with arrivals, and they raised millions of pounds in capital. They spent 32,000 pounds in legal fees, to move a bill through Parliament, approving the railroad. Initially, Parliament rejected the proposed railroad, because, much like with the Liverpool and Manchester railway, they weren't crazy about an eminent domain bill, when almost all of them were landowners. So, the company spent another three-quarters of a million pounds, making land purchases to get it done. The bill finally passed in 1833
At 112 miles long, the Birmingham and London railway would be by far the longest ever built. And to build it, they hired the now 29-year-old Robert Stevenson. George Stevenson had acquired the means to provide his son the education he never got as a child. The expectation was that Robert would learn his lessons at school during the day and bring them home to teach his father at night. During his twenties, Robert managed his own locomotive building company, more or less at the direction of his father. They built the locomotive rocket together. And Robert not only came to possess a masterful understanding of mechanics, but business practices too. In particular, when it came to the building of the Birmingham and London Railway, he understood the value of hiring good subcontractors and developing their talents. These subcontractors in turn would hire and manage at least 20,000 men, many of whom were unruly navvies, to dig tunnels, create cuttings and embankments, and more. The subcontractors were also responsible for handling huge amounts of money. By this point, the principles of mass production had become widely adopted in giant textile mills and factories. And yet, the scale of this undertaking, managing 20,000 workers across 112 miles, was unprecedented. To do it, Robert divided the line into six-mile sections, which he divvied up to his very subcontractors. This way, he was also able to build all the sections simultaneously, getting the job done in a reasonable time frame.
But Robert also had high standards. By his reckoning, he walked the entire length of the railway 15 times to closely inspect the work. It was extremely flat. There were no sharp curves. It was so well designed that, in the 20th century, it was converted to accommodate a national high-speed rail line without much reengineering needed. In fact, it's still in use today.