Christian Wolmar

Why the railways are so revolutionary and so game-changing is precisely because before the railways, people didn't get around very much.

Look, it took a stagecoach three or four days to get between London and York.

The roads were lousy.

Nobody would travel faster than you could gallop on a horse.

Before what we know as railways, there were wagonways.

There was actually quite a network in the Northeast and in several other places.

These were basically wagons on rails, which were either pulled by horses or mules or pushed by human beings and moved minerals around.

The railways had many fathers, as it were, and they were pretty much all men, in that there were all sorts of inventions that came together to result in what we know as a railway.

So you needed tracks, you needed places to put tracks, so you needed to create reasonably flat roads, spaces.

when you put the tracks onto the road.

But then you also needed the technology of steam engines, and that was developed over the space of the 18th century by various people, of which the most famous was James Watt, but all sorts of other people contributed to that.

30, 40 years between the first kind of steam engine whizzing around a small track, which was devised by Trevithick in the early 19th century, you get the idea of a train and a railway, which combines all these inventions.

It wasn't until all these inventions were put together and that the technology was found to work properly that you then get what I think is a great opening of the railways, which is 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which is really the breakthrough of this technology.

There were precursors to that.

Those would be the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825.

But that was more like the last of the wagonways rather than the first modern railway, which was definitely the Liverpool and Manchester, which was double-tracked and steam-hauled all the way through.

So that was the breakthrough point.

There was all sorts of technologies that needed to be honed out.

Probably most difficult was creating the power out of steam, burning coal to create steam, which then powered pistons.

And then another problem was getting the weights down.