The Liverpool and Manchester, Stephenson’s second project, can logically be thought of as the first fully evolved railway to be built. It was intended to provide an extensive passenger service and to rely on locomotive traction alone. The Rainhill locomotive trials were conducted in 1829 to assure that those prime movers would be adequate to the demands placed on them and that adhesion was practicable. Stephenson’s entry, the Rocket, which he built with his son, Robert, won the trials owing to the increased power provided by its multiple fire-tube boiler. The rail line began in a long tunnel from the docks in Liverpool, and the Edgehill Cutting through which it passed dropped the line to a lower elevation across the low plateau above the city. Embankments were raised above the level of the Lancashire Plain to improve the drainage of the line and to reduce grades on a gently rolling natural surface. A firm causeway was pushed across Chat Moss (swamp) to complete the line’s quite considerable engineering works.

When the 50-km (30-mile) line was opened to traffic in 1830 the utility of railroads received their ultimate test. Though its cost had been more than £40,000 per mile and it could no longer be held that the railroad was a cheaper form of transportation than the canal, the Liverpool and Manchester demonstrated the railways’ adaptability to diverse transportation needs and volumes.

Characteristics of British railroads

Not all British railways were so heavily engineered as the Liverpool and Manchester line, but in general terms they were normally constructed to a high standard. Most main lines were double-tracked, were carried on a grade separated from the road network, and were built to make the job of locomotive traction easier. Stephenson believed that grades should be less than 1 percent—substantially less if at all possible—and that curves should have very wide radii, perhaps half a mile or more. Because capital was used somewhat lavishly in right-of-way construction and infrastructure, it was the practice to employ locomotives stingily. Power was used economically, and wheels came off the tracks easily. When a line, such as the Worcester and Birmingham Railway, had to be built on a steep grade (2.68 percent), it proved necessary to purchase American locomotives for successful adhesion.

The national pattern of rails in Britain radiated from London. The early London and Birmingham became ultimately the London, Midland, and Scottish; the London and York line became the Great Northern Railway; the Great Western expanded into a network of most of the western lines; and the Southern Railway provided lines for several boat and ferry trains. All companies ultimately wove dense webs of commuter lines around London, Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Cardiff, and Edinburgh. Ultimately there was competition between companies, particularly on the longer runs such as those to Scotland, Wales, and the southwest.

Because there were limited regional monopolies, in the beginning railway companies established individual terminal stations in London and individual through stations in the provincial cities reached by their monopoly line. By the second half of the 19th century this situation led to a need for interstation local transportation in London, Liverpool, and Glasgow.

The railroad in continental Europe

Development of the railroad in France was somewhat independent of that in Britain. Differences included the use of high-pressure steam multitube boilers (for quick recovery of steam after a pressing demand) and variations in locomotive design. There were certain consistencies, however. It was the transport of coal that frequently determined whether railroads were constructed and where they would run. The earliest rail line in France was in the Stéphanoise coalfield southwest of Lyon. Later, in the Grand-Hornu colliery at St. Ghislain, the first Belgian railroad was constructed.

In Europe the railroad became an instrument of geopolitics early on. The “Belgian Revolution” of 1830 (against Dutch control within a joint monarchy), which had notable British support, left the newly established kingdom rather blocked as to transportation because the medieval waterway system on the Meuse and the Schelde flowed to the sea through the Netherlands. When the Dutch blockaded port traffic, the Belgians were forced to turn to a system of railways constructed according to plans and technologies supplied by George Stephenson. New ports were built on the Channel coast, and the world’s first international rail line ran between Liège and Cologne. By building an extensive system of rail lines Prussia ultimately forced a unification of the German states under its own leadership. In similar fashion the Kingdom of Piedmont, through its rail lines, brought pressure on the Italian states to join in a united country about 1860.

Although British railways were privately built, it was far more common on the Continent that rail construction was undertaken directly by the state. Such was the case in Belgium, where the national treasury paid for the interchange of main railroads (from Ostend to the German border and from the Netherlands to France) that met at Mechelen. The earliest French coal-carrying lines were privately built, but a national system was established in 1842. Six large companies were granted charters to operate, five in vectors from Paris (Nord, Est, Paris-Lyon-Marseille [originally only as far as Dijon], Orléans, West, the “State” line to Le Havre, and the Compagnie du Midi between Bordeaux and Marseille). Under this plan the infrastructure was designed and executed under the supervision of the Corps de Ponts et Chaussées and paid for by the state. The superstructure of ballast, tracks, signals, rolling stock, stations, and operating capital came from the private companies. These charters were normally granted for more than 100 years, but they were abolished in 1938 when the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Française (SNCF; French National Railways) was formed. By 1945 almost all main rail lines in Europe were nationalized, except for significant exceptions in the remaining narrow-gauge lines of Switzerland and France.

Construction of railroads in the German states came at an earlier stage of economic development than was the case in England, Belgium, or France. The first rail lines in most of western Europe were in existence by 1835, but at that time Germany was still quite rural in settlement and development patterns. There had been little accumulation of industrial capital, the backbone of much rail investment elsewhere.

A final aspect of European rail construction is found in what might be called the “defensive use of gauge.” When the first Russian lines were built, there was no effort made to adapt the English standard gauge of 4 feet 8.5 inches (1,435 mm), despite the fact that it was common throughout western Europe (save in Ireland, Spain, and Portugal) as well as in much of the United States and Canada. It was the deliberate policy of Spain, and thereby of Portugal, to adopt a nominal gauge of 1,676 mm (5 feet 6 inches) so as to be distinct from France, a neighbour who on several occasions during the preceding century had interfered in Spanish affairs. In the Russian case it seems not to have been so much a policy of military defense as it was of the tsar having chosen an American engineer to plan his railroads in an era when gauges were not truly standardized in the United States. The 5-foot (1,524-mm) gauge that Major George Whistler of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad proposed for Russia was the same as the regional “Southern” gauge adopted by John Jervis for the South Carolina Railroad in 1833.