Here is a review I did some years ago about a book dealing with the world’s first common-carrier steam railroad. The actual scarce resource turned out to be the land the tracks ran on, not the technology.

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Robert E. Carlson, The Liverpool & Manchester Railway Project, 1821-1831, Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, New York, 1969

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, built between 1826 and 1830, is described as ‘the first successful steam railroad.’ This implies a somewhat greater degree of novelty than was in fact the case. The L&M was based on a solid foundation of ‘prior art,’ most notably the Stockton and Darlington Railway. The significance of the L&M was that it brought railroads into the forefront of commerce. Instead of being part of the apparatus of a mine, as previous railroads had been, the L&M was a trunk line linking the great manufacturing city of Manchester with the correspondingly great port of Liverpool. Up to the advent of the railroad, the commerce between Liverpool and Manchester was primarily handled by canals, but the potential efficiency of these canals was blunted by the fact that their proprietors had decided on a policy of restricted output and monopoly pricing.

The railroad was, apart from its innate efficiency, an end run around the canal monopoly. Its promoters may be described as the wealthiest and most eminent merchants of Liverpool. In this connection, one significant shortcoming of the book is that Carlson fails to develop linkages between the railroad and the political movement leading to the parliamentary Reform Bill shortly afterwards.

The difficulties of the L&M were less technical than they were political. Even the possible economic difficulties had primarily political dimensions. By its nature, a railroad is legally extraordinary, and must rely on special means of land acquisition. In a remote wilderness, this means special legislative grants of colonial proprietorship, of the sort given to the western American railroads. In settled country, it means the power of eminent domain. The single overwhelming problem of the L&M was the necessity of passing through the lands of two earls (Lords Sefton and Derby) and the lands of the late Duke of Bridgewater, held in trust for the Marquess of Stafford. In the latter case, there was the further complication that the Bridgewater estate was the proprietor of one of the canals which the railroad proposed to supersede.

The abortive 1825 proposal surveyed by George Stephenson followed the logical route in a civil engineer’s terms, that is the one with the minimum grades. The problem with this route was that it went through the Sefton and Derby estates more than strictly necessary. Further, it was presented to parliament in conjunction with an attack on the abuses of the canal monopoly. In short, the route was a frontal assault on the principle of noble privilege.

Stephenson’s survey was flawed, if for no other reason than that his people had been obliged to complete it under physical attack (by objective standards, both earls, Sefton and Derby, probably laid themselves open to charges of ‘incitement to do grievous bodily harm,’ especially in their rousing of the notoriously savage and barbarous coal miners). This represents another point of weakness in Carlson’s treatment. He could have examined Sefton and Derby as men who could still call forth savage hordes, residual descendants of the Scots Highland chiefs at Culloden.

At any rate, Stephenson’s survey, as delivered to parliament, was error-ridden, but at the same time, these errors were not really of a serious description, not so grave as to prevent the building of a railroad. Stephenson had chosen mild grades, and the financial climate was such as to absorb cost overruns easily (L&M shares almost always traded at a comfortable premium). Such errors merely permitted the opposition to portray Stephenson as an incompetent. A good deal of harm was done by the fact that he could not speak the King’s English, but had to express himself in North-Country dialect. After an all-out lobbying campaign on both sides, a committee of the house of commons rejected the bill.

The next year, a new bill was introduced, based on a new route and a new survey conducted under the direction of the new chief engineers George and John Rennie. The new route was accomodationist rather than confrontational. It accepted stiff grades in order to keep away from the great estates. Additional backing was secured in Liverpool by agreeing to bring the railroad into town via an expensive tunnel. Steam locomotives had been subjected to an extensive demonization by propaganda, with emphasis on their satanic elements. so their role was downplayed, and the debate over them postponed to a later date. And the Marquess of Stafford was permitted to buy a fifth share in the railroad at a favorable price. The adjustments were sufficient, and the bill passed. Then George Stephenson was brought back to carry out the new plan, the railroad was then built without significant difficulty, the railroad was put into service– with steam locomotives– and it proceeded to pay for itself handsomely.

In sum, this book is a sound narrative of events from the point of view of the railroad promoters, but it fails to account for the political (and social) opposition which made the railroad an uncertain venture. It would have benefited from a greater sense of social context, of social systems in conflict, etc., which would remove the behavior of the opposition from the merely inexplicable and place it in the humanly tragic. A good analog might be John Prebble’s _Culloden_, with its linkage of military defeat to the destruction of highland society. By analogy, it is possible to ask questions, such as: when the railroad went through, what happened to the miners who, five years before, had smashed Stephenson’s theodolite?