Christian Wolmar

And very quickly, it was realized that

You needed standardised time, which had never been done before.

The time was standardised.

In London, Greenwich Mean Time became nought, and that was established around the world.

In America, they standardize the time into four different time zones, but they did that again because of the railways and because the inconvenience of not being able to work out precisely what time the railways are operating.

It worked for everybody.

You'd go up to the local market town more easily, bring your agricultural produce if you were a farmer.

It worked for mail-order goods.

So you could order things from department stores in London and they would get sent to you by train.

And it made it easier for people to travel.

The big example of that was the great exhibition in the early 1850s where special trains were organized there.

from all around Britain to bring literally thousands of people into London to see these wonders of the modern world.

And that would not have been possible without the railways.

You wouldn't have got that number of people in there.

So holidays were really enabled by the railways, both because they could travel to the seaside in particular in huge, lengthy chartered trains, which had 15, 20 carriages hauled with two or three locomotives to take people off.

But also because of industrialization and the demands it put on people, they began to require holidays and they were given a week off.

The factory would close and everybody would go off to the seaside by rail.

They actually even enable the spread of fish and chips because originally fresh fish will only have been available in seaside towns because you couldn't take fresh fish inland very fast.

When the railways arrive, you can take fresh fish into lots of towns, so fish and chip shops can open up, and people got the taste for the fish and chips by going to the seaside towns and seeing fresh fish and chips.

Isn't that wonderful?