What did the railways ever do for us?

The benefits and disadvantages of knowing what time it is

Cover of a 1921 booklet by the Metropolitan Railway promoting peachy life in Metro-land.¹

The railways did not (as anyone who read Time: It Flexes Like A Whore will have noted) invent time. Time existed for some considerable time before the railways came along. What they did do was invent the need to stipulate time, to the minute. Now, that is in fact a pretty useless way to measure Usain Bolt. When he came along, we already needed to measure time to the hundredth of a second. But having to measure it to the minute was a huge advance on what had applied before: measuring time to the half day.

The rail strikes that are currently plaguing New South Wales, in Australia, have led to chaos in and around the city of Sydney. Some trains have been delayed by up to five hours. Others have been cancelled. I do wonder whether a delay of five hours doesn’t just constitute a cancellation in any case. Advice to travellers includes to delay non-essential travel. If residents don’t do so, Transport NSW certainly will.

The first railways, which, in a rudimentary and probably highly dangerous form, date back to the 18th century (if you don’t include the rully gulleys found in great evidence in the ancient streets of Pompeii, once it had been excavated), marked the joyous entry of the industrialised era. The first proper railway to go into service was England’s Stockton & Darlington Railway, which entered operation in September 1825 as the first such way served by steam locomotives. The 1821 act authorising its construction had made no mention whatsoever of steam locomotives, however, but rather allowed its use by anyone with a suitably constructed vehicle, upon payment of a toll. In 1821, the concept of a railway was very much the same as the concept of a toll road: open to anyone, as long as they paid.

It was not the only aspect of railways that, upon their inception, was widely at variance with our modern conception of a railway: the Stockton & Darlington (S&DR) did not carry passengers. Passengers could travel, if they wished, on the S&DR, but did so in separate wagons, which were drawn by a horse. Not until 1833 were passenger services incorporated into the rail services offered by the line under steam power, mainly as a result of the successful service-offering to passengers on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, which commenced operations in 1830.

The S&DR was constructed as an alternative to three other plans that had been successively proposed to link Shildon to the towns of Darlington and Stockton-on-Tees in north-east England, which are connected to the River Tees and thence to the North Sea at Middlesbrough. Two of the alternatives (in 1767 and, then, 1815) had been canals, seeking to profit from the significant coal seams at Shildon, and avoid the laborious method of transporting mined coal from there to boats on the river, and thence to London: up to that point they had had to use pack horses. A further proposal entailed construction of a tramway (or industrial light railway), and this finally took form as a full railway in 1825. What attracted the builders of the S&DR was not passenger revenue, but revenue for the transport of minerals, and this remained their passion even after the thing was built.

Look around the room that you’re in. The desk, made of wood. The computer, of metal and plastic. The window, of glass. Mementos, of ceramic or paper. The filing cabinet, metal. None of these would be there now if it weren’t for the railways. You might well not even be there if it were not for the railways. Where you are sitting might very well not be there, might not even be on the map, if it were not for the railways. It is hard to credit that fact: that so much of how we live today and who we are today and where we even are today is due to that momentous first chuff on the Stockton & Darlington Railway back in September of 1825, nearly two hundred years ago. It would mark the greatest advancement in human existence since the invention of the wheel itself. And, make no mistake about it, it would start us off on the road to a large number of nefarious consequences for us as individuals and for the planet as the place where we live. We lay a lot of blame for climate change at the foot of oil, but coal was there for a century before oil got going.

If the railway had not existed, America would never have grown beyond the Thirteen Colonies (Americans in Edinburgh would ask why the Castle was built so close to Waverley Station because, in the West, the railroad preceded everything). The Interior of Africa would likely never have been discovered, I presume. And Israel would not be proposing to link Goa to Europe by means of a permanent way. So he says. There has even been talk (slightly less now than before Russia invaded Ukraine) of a rail link across the Baring Strait between Russia and the United States of America (a wee bit similar to that across the Kerch Strait, linking Russia to … Ukraine). If the railway had not been developed, in short, we would live now as we did before the industrial revolution: a primarily agrarian, stay-at-home, devoutly religious, bigoted, exploitative, warring, sea-faring world. Railways didn’t change that much, then, did they? The one argument that not building the railways would have changed nothing, even 200 years later, is comparing 1825 to 1353 and trying to discern what had changed in the years since the Black Death. That was in fact a period of half a millennium in which, for the average person, very little in fact did change.

Of course, the railways came in the wake of developments in iron-making, which had come in the wake of developments in smelting, with the discovery that coke was capable of producing a heat even more fierce than that from charcoal (sourced from wood, which at the time, around 1700, was becoming scarce in England). Coke is made by a number of means as a primary or secondary product, but the principal method is to heat coal in the absence of air. The S&DR was therefore an indirect product of coal, whose purpose was conceived as a means of transporting coal. Not people. Why would anyone need to go anywhere? was the answer to why early railways didn’t carry passengers. What made the transport of minerals an imperative for the railway was their mass. And that would, in turn, dictate the imperative for the railways’ transport of people: their mass.

You can still travel on the S&DR today. The original map enclosed with the 1821 investment prospectus is shown below, with kind permission of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. It forms today’s Tees Valley Line, between Middlesbrough and Bishop Auckland. And it carries passengers, as well as goods. So, where do all these passengers travel to these days? The answer, for any competitive and efficient railway, is easy: to work and back.

What the railways did, aside from inventing the need to stipulate time to the minute, was to stipulate the time at which people needed to be where the railways took them. They stipulated the time at which people could leave that place, and the time at which they could be back home. The railways invented commuting, and they invented it en masse.

The early railways, right up until the 1970s (as I recall) were designated as common carriers, meaning that they offered services to all and sundry against payment of a fee, were regulated and offered guarantees for goods and life. That meant, if you wanted something carried by them, they couldn’t refuse, so installations were devised for the acceptance, transport and receipt for collection of packages, parcels, luggage and whatnot: goods were, after all, the prime purpose of railways. With, in Britain, the inception of the Penny Post in 1840, communications across the realm had reached an apogee: not only goods, but people and their correspondence could be transported the length and breadth of the country at uniform, known rates, backed by the statutory guarantee of a government regulator. It was perfection, and it stayed that way for over a hundred years.

The 1840s and the year 1866 saw explosions of investment in railways in Britain. They came to be known as bubbles, the principal incentive being that anywhere that wasn’t on the railway was nowhere, and that any nowhere not on a railway could be made into an anywhere by the coming thereof. There are places in England, such as the towns of Crewe or Eastleigh in Kent, which were nothing but a green field before the railways, but at which railway industries were settled for the convenience of the locus for the railway company in question, if not the amenities already present. Out of nowhere came very much anywhere, in those cases. In the Welsh valleys and the Highlands of Scotland, nowhere remained pretty much nowhere even after the coming of railways: the volume of traffic was never such, despite valiant attempts to vaunt the golfing benefits of Carnoustie or the sights of Mount Snowdon to Britain’s leisure public, as to compensate for the many months when it was as good as nothing.

To the railways, the message was clear: without a dense, frequent commuter service, or a steady flow of goods traffic, their future was at best uncertain. Even the S&DR faced the prospect of take-over by the 1840s, because its transportation of coal was not paying its bills. It was the discovery of iron ore in Cleveland that shifted the north-east’s emphasis from the exportation of coal by rail and ship to London, to the transportation of coal to the smelting plants located on the very river where Stockton stood: at Lackenby, Skinningrove and Middlesbrough.

In other parts of the country, the strategy shifted from building railways to serve people, to building them to create places from which people would want to commute, and no city attracted this idea quite like London. The first London station to serve the county of Kent had gloried in the somewhat odd name of Bricklayers Arms. It was constructed as a response to excess charges imposed on two rival companies to access the station at London Bridge, owned by the London and Greenwich Railway. Bricklayers Arms was far from convenient, however, but had the desired effect of getting the Greenwich company to lower its charges. The bickering that went on between railway companies to the south of the River Thames has left its legacy to this day in the relative lack of development in south London, compared especially to the suburban sprawl that was encouraged in the north, and Metro-land was one such development.

It has been immortalised by that great old Victorianophile, Sir John Betjeman, who in my youth was the Queen’s Poet Laureate, and a great lover of both railways and the Victorian period. He fought hard for, and succeeded in saving, the former Midland Railway’s St Pancras Station, to which Eurostar trains travel today. He was less successful in saving the Doric colonnade of Euston station. But he loved travelling the line north from London built by the Metropolitan Railway and which is today the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground.

In authorising the building of railways, most acts of parliament provided that the company could expropriate such land as it needed, but had to dispose of any land that was excess to requirements. This took some surveying and accounting finesse on companies’ parts, but was the general rule. In the Metropolitan’s case, it lacked any such provision, on the ground that it designated all land it acquired as fulfilling a potential future railway need. The line extended from Marylebone, in the heart of the City of London, to Buckinghamshire, Middlesex and Hertfordshire. And it used its excess land to build low-density suburban housing, often in mock Tudor style, framed in mock bucolic rustic, and viewed with mock admiration by the locals, as a garden city dreamland for the middle income City office worker. It worked, and towns like Harrow and Wembley rapidly expanded as a result.

It’s a more extreme example of the commuter traffic tendency: commuters on the whole justify railways, especially in the absence of goods traffic. Take a ride on a train outside rush hour and you will have space to yourself. Rarely does a line get packed with travellers at all times of the day. Any line that serves no commuter route at all is a line whose future is in jeopardy. Railways created time, they created the need to stipulate time through the day, until you return home. And they stipulated where home would be.

Railways are therefore part of what can be conceived of as a technology trap. Technology is an industrial advancement whose benefits include saving the labour, or the time, needed to do a particular legacy activity, or even to allow it at all. A calculator saves you needing to add up a list of figures. A kettle saves you having to make a fire of wood and kindling to boil a pot of water. And a train saves you having to live in a dirty, smoky city centre. You can work in the dirt and live in the country. And the trap comes when there are no longer any batteries for your calculator. Or there is no longer any power for your electric kettle. Or the trains stop running. Because of a strike, like in Sydney, for instance. You see, all of us live these days in more or less of a technology trap. We accept the risk of a flat battery, because we rely on our ability to buy new ones when the shops open. We rely on kettles, because if there is an outage, it will soon be restored. Till then, we will drink beer. And we rely on trains because, even after five hours, they will get running again, we’re sure of it.

And then there is the small matter of the London and Greenwich Railway. You remember them? They built a railway only two miles (one mile, 56 chains, to be precise) into London Bridge and charged their competitors a fortune to use it. Building your own alternative railway is no solution when the railway occupies a monopoly and refuses to budge on the charges. Gouge pricing is also a form of technology trap. Especially if there is little regulation to force it down.

Here’s an interesting piece by TV scientist James Burke on the technology trap, which comments on the occurrence in 1965 of a relay failure that plunged the entire city of New York into blackness for several hours:

For when technology fails, he conjectures a scenario in which people need to get out. He cites the usefulness of looking for a farm (at 3:15) “because that’s where food comes from, doesn’t it? Okay, so it’s a farm, so you decide to stop. Has anybody got there first? Or are the owners still here? Because you’re gonna need shelter, and people don’t give their homes away, they barricade themselves in. So, sooner or later, exhausted and desperate, you may make the decision to give up and die. Or to make somebody else give up and die, because they won’t accept you in their home voluntarily. And what, in your comfortable, urban life, has ever prepared you for that decision?” Actually, it’s a decision that those who brazenly decide to take the land of others for themselves—and you know who I mean—are only too prepared to take.

It’s a seven-minute excerpt from a series first broadcast in 1975. It’s grainy, but the message is still valid: when you escape one technology trap, you can very easily fall into another one. The outage of electrical power is probably the worst kind: electricity controls so much in our lives, it was the second thing that Klaatu in the 1951 film The Day The World Stood Still made malfunction (the first was the weapons the army shot at him). As a warning from outer space. Or as a warning from the Russian Federation to the Republic of Ukraine, if you like, since it is regularly power stations that are targeted in their attacks.

The railways made us want to work away from where we live. And, with the pandemic, that suddenly had to stop. Office workers had to download Zoom and communicate from their homes. Many retained the right to home-work even after the emergency—they liked it, it saved them travelling (on the railways, for instance), but many companies are now wanting to roll those aberrations or privileges back, since they believe that workers play hooky when they can’t be physically supervised.

Zoom is a technology that makes life easier, and employers don’t always want life to be easier, not for employees, not unless making life easier secures for them the employees they need along the lines of books like McKinsey’s War for Talent. What about the employees stuck at home because the trains aren’t running? Who are Sydney employers blaming for their absence? The railways? The lazy staff members? The railway workers? Unions in general? Our reliance on technology is backed by our reliance on the fact that our demands to get it working again when it ceases to do so will be heeded. But never do we address—not even for the short term—what we would do if the technology stopped working for the foreseeable future. For ever. And one day, it will. The oil will run out, or the coal will give up, or it will no longer be profitable to an exploitable extent (i.e. one that people can afford) to drill or mine for it. Or we will have baked ourselves into the brickwork of our world. You could hold the relay that caused the New York blackout in your hand. It is remarkable what a huge role it played in so many people’s lives for an evening in December 1965. That’s the problem with technology traps: we imagine that a blackout has to be caused by a catastrophic event of great magnitude, like the bursting of the Dnipro Dam in Ukraine. But it might just as well be a tiny link in the control mechanism. And which link it might be, precisely, could be anybody’s guess.

The opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 was attended by none other than the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington. The name indelibly associated with the day is not his, however, but that of William Huskisson, who, wanting to disembark from his carriage (he was MP for Liverpool) to speak to the Duke, with whom he had of late been on poor terms, was struck by the famous Rocket locomotive and thus became the first ever fatality in a railway accident. Gunpowder was around for 700 years before its potential for killing was recognised. The L&MR’s was recognised on its opening day. Had Huskisson had the benefit of hindsight, he’d not have opened his carriage door. But, with the benefit of hindsight, should we have eschewed the invention of the railway? Without it, what loomed large in the eyes of these pre-Victorians (William IV was on the throne) was not its danger, but, precisely, its benefits.

We are surrounded by technology and, therefore, technology traps. It could be that the propensity of the super-rich to build skyrockets and bunkers is driven by a realisation of the technology traps that we are increasingly putting ourselves into. Technology traps can also be a means of regulation, as with the motor car. The labour and effort requirements that technology reduces or eliminates get compensated for with rationales for taxation, penalty, prohibition. Like taxing solar panels, making parking fees a prohibitive necessity, setting up radar traps, charging mobile phone taxable amounts to anyone a company gives them to. In Ohio, you can lose your driver’s licence because you don’t pay some fine that’s utterly unrelated to motoring. That’s also a technology trap.

Take another look around that room you’re in. This stuff, the computer and the mementos and whatnot—could you live without it? The question lacks urgency, because you don’t actually need to live without it, so you can give a non-committal answer: some of it, yes; some of it no. So, if I tell you that none of it would be there without the railways, would you opt sooner to not have the railways invented (if you could) or sooner to have things the way they are? It’s interesting because the people whose homes have been destroyed by fire in Los Angeles recently have in some cases had to make that split decision, not a non-committal one but a very committal one: they had to decide—even if it could be saved—what they would remove from their home as absolutely essential.

I used to wonder what it would have been like to live during the Flemish trade boom in the 15th century, when Bruges and Mechlin became centres for wool or linen. And then I think about the dentistry, and kindly decline the notional time machine that I have offered myself to travel back to those halcyon days. Y’see, health is very important to survival and the technological advances that have been made, especially in even the past 80 years, are phenomenal. There has never been a better time than now to be sick. In the Middle Ages, curers were persecuted for being witches, and in the modern age, they are persecuted for squeezing the public like lemons. The Hippocratic Oath is a high aspiration and an excellent cover story for an excuse to make money.

I don’t suppose that anyone will have answers to the technology trap questions that I have posed above. If you do, don’t let anyone know, because that’s the best way to make sure they won’t work, come the day. I took a train ride into the city today. It got me thinking, “What if this train wasn’t here? What would I do then?” The answer is clear, I’d take the car. But if I had no car, then what? The bike. Or if it’s too far? Could I walk, take the bus, maybe? What if all of that was just impossible? What if all these technology traps were installed around me deliberately. Just so’s I couldn’t find a way out? Those who have to face getting out, when the day comes: it will be they who question the invention of the railways. And they will also question us.

If push came to shove, I would stay at home. And barricade myself in.

1. By Cyril+A+Wilkinson - This image is from 20th Century London [1], cropped.Original booklet first published in 1921. The author, Cyril A Wilkinson (signed bottom left) lived from 1893 to 1926. [2], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19329115.