The book ‘The Coming Of the Railway’ by David Gwyn is an encyclopedic reference work about the “early iron railway,” the development of which “truly made the modern world.”
The author relates the tangled sequence of invention, trial, and error that, by 1850, had relegated roads and canals to being “tributaries of the iron road” that helped knit modern nations together. While the author makes clear that Britain was the center of the creation of the modern railroad system, he covers railways’ spread into the U.S., across continental Europe, and then to the distant shores of Australia and the Caribbean.
From their origin in wooden, animal-drawn vehicles, railroads became the factor without which the industrial and commercial revolution, starting with its voracious need for coal, would have been unimaginable.
They linked cities; eventually carried people as well as coal and goods; made seaside ports indispensable; caused commerce to be measured in speed; and created many of the auxiliary trades, scientific discoveries, engineering feats, labor realities market competition, military logistics, and methods of finance we now take for granted.
To make clear how this happened, the author digs into details about such innovations as the track system, curved rails, the standardization of railroad gauges, and the challenges of inventing locomotives of sufficient power and braking systems to be economical.
The author’s primary limitation is that by sticking mostly to basic factual history, he doesn’t offer enough analysis of the railroads’ contribution to the larger history of capitalism through the middle of the 19th century.
Yet even if the text’s relentless factuality requires reader diligence, it’s worth the effort. The author closes with a coda on railroads’ influence on the artistry of such figures as Dickens, Thoreau, and Victor Hugo, who “was enchanted by the iron horse…a machine which for him became a living thing.”
