Christian Wolmar

We'd love to have that in our town.

The railways were very important in really establishing the idea of nationhood, let alone empire.

So countries such as Germany and Italy were linked within each other by railways.

And really the nations were created by the fact that now people could travel all the way around the country without any difficulties, whereas they could not do that before.

When Britain was building up its empire in Africa in the last quarter of the 19th century, there was very much the idea that if we want to hold on to this particular territory, we need to build a railway.

And so wherever they went, they essentially tried, sometimes not entirely successfully because it's not easy territory, to build railways to hold on to the parts of Africa they wanted to have control.

So railways and imperialism go hand in hand.

Some of the railways that Assessa Roads built in Africa were at the expense of vast numbers of people who died of disease or accidents.

True, also in India, true, the worst railway in the world for that was probably the Panama Railway, which was built by largely American interests in order to create a quicker route from one side of America to the other without having to go down to the Cape.

So there was little concern for the lives that were lost in this rush to build railways.

Once the railway companies no longer have to invest in building new lines, which happens really towards the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, they can then focus on trying to make the railways more comfortable, smoothing out curves in the track.

providing better facilities for passengers, building grander stations, and so on.

So it's a gradual process of improvement, which probably reaches its height both in Europe and America between the wars.

There were wonderful trains that operated at the time and there's great posters about the travel itself and the offer of food on board and on some trains you had secretaries who were available to type up letters for business people and some trains you had DJs on them and they played music throughout the train.

There were a lot of very nice trains at the time, but the basic service for a lot of people hadn't really changed much since the middle of the 19th century, where you get kind of smoky stations.

You get a couple of carriages hauled by a tank engine rather slowly between towns and villages.

You get a pretty kind of desultory service being offered by the railways.

The American Civil War was really the first railway war because most of the battles took place around junctions or places that were easily accessible by rail.

Both sides used the railways very extensively, and the North happened to be better at that than the secessionists.

And that was one of the reasons why they won, because they had better railways and made better use of them.