I’m continuing with a travel theme, and taking a look at my favourite mode of transport: trains. Those of us who are old enough to remember life before the internet have some idea what railways meant to how human beings live on the planet.

As they spread across one country after another in the nineteenth century, they opened unprecedented opportunities for trade, allowed investors to make huge fortunes, and gave ordinary people access to places, goods and services that had previously been exclusively for locals or the wealthy.

They also destroyed industries and the communities built around those industries.

Travelling at speed

Before trains, the fastest form of travel was a galloping horse. Set up a succession of horses spaced about ten miles apart, and you could get a message from London to Edinburgh in, perhaps, 48 hours (depending on road conditions). Travelers without such a facility would take four to eight days. In Victorian times, a train would take 16 hours to do the same journey.

Moving in bulk

Before trains, you could move goods in bulk (by barge or ship), or you could move them at speed (relatively speaking), but not both. Same with people. An army on the march could cover 30 to 50 miles a day, or boat down a river at whatever speed the current traveled. Trains reached 60 miles an hour by 1840, carrying people and goods at speeds never before possible.

Unintended consequences

Trains made the suburbs possible. They put a day trip to the seaside within the reach of ordinary city dwellers. They allowed factories to shift their goods across nations and across borders. They also furthered the depopulation of the countryside, replaced local goods — especially foods — with products brought from far away, and changed social habits, employment, and culture.

Massive engineering projects opened up inaccessible places to travelers and settlers, often at the expense of local communities.

Trains upped the head count in a disaster. An accident to a horse might take a single rider. One to a coach might result in several deaths. When a train hit another in a tunnel in 1861, 23 people died and 176 were injured.

In both positive ways and negative, trains changed the world.