Railway history

Railway History comprises the railways of the world from the early 19th century in Britain to the present day.

19th century

Britain

George Hudson (1800-71) was the most important railway promoter of his time. He had a particular aptitude for visualizing and arranging spectacular company and line amalgamations and his activities helped to bring about the beginnings of a more modern railway network. In 1849 he exercised effective control over nearly 30% of the rail track then operating in the United Kingdom, most of it owned by four railway groups, the Eastern Counties Railway, the Midland, the York, Newcastle and Berwick, and the York and North Midland, before a series of scandalous revelations forced him out of office. The economic, railway, and accounting literatures have treated Hudson as an important figure in railway history, although concentrating largely on the financial reporting malpractices of the Eastern Counties Railway, while Hudson was its chairman, which were incorporated into the influential Monteagle Committee Report of 1849.

Leunig (2006) assesses train speeds in England and Wales during 1843-1912. Trains were fast compared with coaches or walking, and the social saving of time saved grew over time to become over 10% of national income in 1912. Including fare savings, social savings were 14% of national income in 1912, with consumer surplus of 6%. Time savings dominated fare savings once railways became a new good: travel for the masses. Using the social savings-total factor productivity identity, the article shows that railways accounted for around a sixth of economy-wide productivity growth in this era.

Labour

Howlett (2004) explores an important labor market development toward the end of the 19th century, the rise of the internal labor market. Railway companies were pioneers in this area, and in 1904 comprised all 10 of the largest enterprises in britain. Howlett presents an analysis of the career histories of 848 traffic staff workers of the Great Eastern Railway Company. This large longitudinal sample provides the first detailed account of the internal labor dynamics of a pre-1914 railway company, providing a unique insight into an early internal labor market. Union membership was quoite low before World War I. There was a clearly structured market for unskilled entrants, that promotion and demotion were an important managerial tool, and that there was a significant wage premium for promotion.

Nationalization and Privatization

Bagwell (2004) shows the Railway Bill of February 1993 privatizated the railways. Railtrack was responsible for the infrastructure; passenger services were provided by (initially) 25 operating companies, while goods services were concentrated in three companies, eventually EWS (English Welsh and Scottish Railway Ltd). The records and experiences of travelers reveal that punctuality and reliability, i.e., the likelihood of timetabled services running at all, deteriorated. Passengers' complaints increased in number. Under British Rail, before 1993, much engineering work was done "in house." Contracting it out was detrimental to good overall management and contributed to low morale among passengers and staff alike. Secretary of State for Transport Stephen Byers's decision in October 2001 to put Railtrack under administration is explained.

British colonies

The British built a superb system in India. However, Christensen (1996) looks at of colonial purpose, local needs, capital, service, and private-versus-public interests. He concludes that making the railways a creature of the state hindered success because railway expenses had to go through the same time-consuming and political budgeting process as did all other state expenses. Railway costs could therefore not be tailored to the timely needs of the railways or their passengers.

By the 1940s, India had the fourth longest railway network in the world. Yet the country's industrialization was delayed until after independence in 1947 by British colonial policy. Until the 1930s, both the Indian government and the private railway companies hired only European supervisors, civil engineers, and even operating personnel, such as locomotive drivers (engineers). The government's "Stores Policy" required that bids on railway materiel be presented to the India Office in London, making it almost impossible for enterprises based in India to compete for orders. Likewise, the railway companies purchased most of their materiel in Britain, rather than in India. Although the railway maintenance workshops in India could have manufactured and repaired locomotives, the railways imported a majority of them from Britain, and the others from Germany, Belgium, and the United States. The Tata company built a steel mill in India before World War I but could not obtain orders for rails until the 1920s and 1930s.

United States

see Central Pacific Railroad

World

China started building late. In 1900 there were only 860 kilometres of track and about 3,000 railway workers. After 1920 the major cities, ports and mining districts were connected. Railways became a major employer of industrial labor and by 1937 they had about 300,000 employees in China Proper and the Japanese-controlled Northeast, along 21,270 kilometres of track.

Labor

Licht (1983) shows that raileays changed employment in many ways. Lines with hundreds or thousands of employees developed systematic rules and procedures not only for running the equipment buty in hiring, promoting, paying and supervising employees. The railway system was adopted by all major business Railways offered a new type of work experience in enterprises vastly larger in size, complexity and management. At first workers were recruited from occupations where skills were roughly analogous and transferable, that is, workshop mechanics from the iron, machine and building trades; conductors from stagecoach drivers, steamship stewards and mail boat captains; station masters from commerce and commission agencies; clerks from government offices.

Bibliography

• Nock, O . S. ed. Encyclopedia of Railways (London, 1977), worldwide coverage, heavily illustrated

Britain

• Arnold, A. J. and McCartney, S. George Hudson: The Rise and Fall of the Railway King (2004). 317 pp. A study in Victorian entrepreneurship
• Bailey, Michael R., ed. Robert Stephenson: The Eminent Engineer. (2003). 401 pp.
• Carter, Ian. Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity. (2001). 338 pp.
• Clapham, J. H. An Economic History of Modern Britain: The Early Railway Age, 1820-1850 (1926) online edition
• Ellis, Hamilton. British Railway History: An Outline from the Accession of William IV to the Nationalization of Railways, 1877-1947 1959 online edition
• Gourvish, Terri, ed. Railways volume 1; volume 2, edited by Geoffrey Channon. (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company and the Scholar Press, 1996. Pp. xviii, 174; xxi, 187. Articles from Journal of Transport History
• Kostal, R. W. Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875, (1994)
• Simmons, Jack and Gordon Biddle, (eds). The Oxford Companion to British Railway History: From 1603 to the 1990s (2nd ed 1999)
• Skelton, Oscar D. The Railway Builders (1916)

British Empire

• R. O. Christensen on "The State and Indian Railway Performance, 1870-1920" in Terri Gourvish, ed. Railways vol 1 (1996)
• den Otter, A.A. The Philosophy of Railways: The Transcontinental Railway Idea in British North America. University of Toronto Press, 1997.
• Huddleston, George. History of the East Indian Railway (1906) 281 pages; online at Google

Europe

• Fremdling, Rainer. "Railways and German Economic Growth: A Leading Sector Analysis with a Comparison to the United States and Great Britain," The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 37, No. 3. (Sep., 1977), pp. 583-604.
• Heywood, Anthony. Modernising Lenin's Russia: Economic Reconstruction, Foreign Trade and the Railways Cambridge University Press, 1999 online edition
• O’Brien, Patrick. Railways and the Economic Development of Western Europe, 1830-1914 (1983)

United States and Canada

• Middleton, William D. ed. Encyclopedia of North American Railroads (2007) Indiana U. Press: 1200 pp; the most valuable reference book; 500+ entries by experts, with bibliographies
• Chandler, Alfred, ed. The Railroads: The Nation's First Big Business - Sources and Readings. (1965)
• Chandler, Alfred. The Visible Hand--The Managerial Revolution in American Business. (1977) highhly influential study of railway management
• Davis, John Patterson. Union Pacific Railway: A Study in Railway Politics, History, and Economics (1894) 247 pages online at Google
• Dozier, Howard Douglas. A History of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad (1920) 197 pages online at Google
• Jenks, Leland H. "Railroads as an Economic Force in American Development," The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 4, No. 1 (May, 1944), 1-20. in JSTOR
• Kirkland, Edward Chase. Men, Cities and Transportation, A Study of New England History 1820-1900 2 vol (1948)
• Klein, Maury. Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life (1997)
• Klein, Maury. The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (1997) excerpt online at Amazon.com
• Klein, Maury. The Life & Legend of E. H. Harriman (2000) online edition
• Martin, Albro. James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (1990)
• Martin, Albro. Railroads Triumphant: The Growth, Rejection, and Rebirth of a Vital American Force (1992)
• Moody, John. The Railroad Builders: A Chronicle of the Welding of the States 1919 online at Project Gutenberg
• Nice, David C. Amtrak: The History and Politics of a National Railroad (1998) online edition
• Raper, Charles Lee. and Arthur Twining Hadley. Railway Transportation: A History of Its Economics and of Its Relation to the State, (1912) 331 pages; online at Google
• Riegel, Robert Edgar. The Story of the Western Railroads 1926 onine edition
• Stover, John. The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (2001)
• Stover, John. American Railways (2nd ed 1997) good, brief overview; excerpt online at Amazon.com
• Stover, John. History of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (1987; 2nd ed 1999)
• Stover, John. History of the Illinois Central Railroad (1975)
• Stover, John. Iron Road to the West: American Railroads in the 1850's (1978)
• Stover, John. The Railroads of the South 1865-1900 A Study in Finance and Control (1955)

Labor issues

• Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century Princeton University Press, 1983
• Morgan, Stephen L. "Personnel Discipline and Industrial Relations on the Railways of Republican China." The Australian Journal of Politics and History. 47#1 (2001) pp 24+ online edition

Technology

• Alston, Liviu. Railways and Energy. Washington, DC: World Bank. 1984.
• Biddle, Gordon. Britain's Historic Railway Buildings: An Oxford Gazetteer of Structures and Sites. (2003). 759 pp.
• Drinkwater, Robert. "Code of the Rail" Beaver 2005 85(1): 41-43. ISSN: 0005-7517 Fulltext: in Ebsco
• Grant, H. Roger. The Railroad: The Life Story of a Technology. Greenwood, 2005. 182 pp.
• Marsden, Ben and Smith, Crosbie. Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. 2005. 351 pp.
• McGowan, Christopher. Rail, Steam, And Speed: The "Rocket" and the Birth of Steam Locomotion. (2004). 400 pp.
• Riley, C. J. The Encyclopedia of Trains & Locomotives (2002).

External Links

• Simone Sterne, "Railroads" from 1881 Encyclopedia
• primary sources on 19th century and early 20th century American railways