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Railroads and Geography

One of the central technologies of the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps the most important child of the steam engine, was the railroad, which, along with steamships, played a central role in giving birth to radically new geographies of social and economic life. Railroads were central to the rise of modern capitalism and the opening up of continental interiors through rapid, cheap, and dependable transportation and were thus the most explicit symbol of the vast wave of time-space compression unleashed throughout the 19th century. In addition to their ability to shuttle people, railroads could move heavy loads over long overland stretches, but not in areas with too steep a grade, reducing land transport costs by as much as 95%.

This entry first reviews the evolution of the railroad in Europe and the United States, as railroad lines contributed to the growth of capital cities, expanded markets, and increased the accessibility of previously remote areas. The entry then explores the impacts of rail transportation not only on the experience of travel but also on national and international commerce.

Historical Development

Britain

British railroads, the world's first, began with the Penydarren Tramroad in Wales in 1804, although it did not rely on steam power. In 1814, George Stephenson unveiled the first steam locomotive, and the British system expanded rapidly, including the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825, one of a series of famous Newcastle railways. In 1830, the first interurban railroad connected Liverpool and Manchester. Early railroads achieved speeds between 20 and 30 mph (miles per hour), or three times that achieved by stagecoaches; later ones achieved speeds of up to 70 or 80 mph. By 1838, the London to Birmingham route opened to immediate success, reducing the time needed to travel the 112 mi. (miles) in between from 12.5 to 5.5 hrs. (hours). Other travel times fell accordingly: London to York, for example, took 96 hrs. to walk in 1754, 36 hrs. by stagecoach in 1776, and 20 hrs. by railroad in 1830.

During a period of intense, widespread, and rapid urbanization, railroads soon became the dominant sign of the Industrial Revolution in much the same way as the Internet came to symbolize postmodern capitalism. The enormous costs of constructing and maintaining such networks, however, required high volumes of traffic to amortize expenses over numerous clients. Fortunately, the velocities of the new system were popular: British passengers increased from 5.4 million in 1838 to 170 million in 1862. Originally, British railroads deployed the 4-foot, 8-inch gauge of the coal mines. The integration of wider markets, however, required standardized tracks, which led other countries eventually to adopt the British standard. The standardization of different European rail gauges was finally accomplished with the International Railway Conference of 1882, which took more than a decade to unfold.

Russia

In Russia, railroads helped forestall a decline into Third World country status. With the opening of the Moscow-to-St. Petersburg line in 1851, Russia's railroads zoomed from 700 total mi. in 1860 to 12,500 mi. in 1878, to 21,000 mi. in 1894, and 36,000 mi. in 1900. The first leg of the Trans-Siberian railroad opened in 1903, stretching 6,000 mi. from Moscow to Vladivostok; by reducing journey times between Europe and Asian Russia from months to days, it brought the vast resources of Siberia into the tsarist spatial division of labor. Within a decade, 2.5 million Russian settlers were living in northeast Asia. The Trans-Siberian railroad was therefore central in making Russia a formidable land power, a point important to the geopolitics of Halford Mackinder.

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