The railway revolution: 'The most profound change to British society since the arrival of the Normans, perhaps even the Romans'

The last of the carriage doors slams shut. The guard, impatient to be off, gives his whistle a long, urgent blast. The engine lurches forwards, forcing the standing passengers to steady themselves. Slowly, the train picks up speed. One minute, the platform is there; the next it is far behind.

Passengers waving goodbye to friends and family step back from the windows and settle into their seats, wriggling to make themselves comfortable, conscious of the rough kiss of the upholstery against their legs. Soon the train is rattling over the points, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson:

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

And charging along like troops in a battle,

All through the meadows the horses and cattle.

This departure ritual has barely changed since the first ever passenger train travelled the 26 miles from Shildon to Stockton exactly 200 years ago. Then, the passengers sat on wooden chairs in open coal waggons and the top speed was 12mph. Now, they sit in air-conditioned luxury, with a top speed of 125mph, but the essentials remain the same. In this blasé, scientific age, when innovation is taken for granted and we rarely experience wonder, it is difficult to grasp the extraordinary impact that the invention of rail travel had on the public psyche.

Some 40,000 people turned up to witness George Stephenson’s Locomotion No.1 make its initial journey. When it arrived in Stockton, the band, passengers and railway officials marched to the town hall, where a huge banquet had been arranged for them. Arguably, that short trip ushered in the most profound change to British society since the arrival of the Normans, perhaps even the Romans.

What had been slow, dangerous and expensive became fast, safe and cheap. In 1821, getting from Manchester to London involved 24 excruciatingly cramped and painful hours in a stagecoach and cost several guineas. In 1841, the same journey could be completed in eight hours for only 15 shillings.

The improvement was even more pronounced for freight. What took a day to transport by canal, took an hour by train — and at a fraction of the cost. Businesses no longer needed to rely on local markets, but could sell their goods everywhere from Land’s End to John O’Groats.

Not that the new railway companies confined themselves to moving people and products. The Victorians soon discovered that anything — elephants and lions, racehorses and hunters, beehives and monkeys — could be transported by train. One landed gentleman used to take his coach and four with him when he travelled up to London.

Little wonder that, by the 1840s, Britain was experiencing ‘railway mania’: a frenzy of investment that resulted in thousands of miles of track and hundreds of stations being constructed at breakneck speed. By 1844, there were 2,200 miles of rail. By 1870, this had grown to 16,000 miles and, by the turn of the century, more than 1.1 billion passenger journeys were being made every year.

Suddenly, the remotest parts of the UK became accessible and mass travel became a reality. One of the most interesting and significant effects of this was how it improved people’s diets. Farmers and fishermen could now send perishable goods all over the country. Indeed, it was the opening of the rail network that made fish and chips our national dish.

Great Western Rail-way’s decision to launch a daily milk train in 1860 heralded another major improvement: affordable, fresh milk for all. Rail wasn’t, of course, the only reason British cities expanded dramatically in the second half of the 19th century — London’s population doubled in size between 1850 and 1900 — but it provided the two most necessary components: food and fuel.

It also meant that workers did not have to be within walking (or riding) distance of their employment, but could commute: as early as 1834, the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway offered season tickets.

Train travel led to something else altogether more positive: excursions and holidays. For the first time, once-remote villages, coasts and wildernesses became accessible. By the time Thomas Cook came up with the idea of the package tour in 1841 — his first offering involved chartering a special train to take 500 Temperance campaigners from Leicester to Loughborough and included music and meals — several seaside resorts (not least Brighton) were already being developed to cater for tourists.

Yet, not everyone benefited from the railway revolution. It spelt the end of several thousand coaching inns and most of the farriers, coachmen, carriers and others involved in horse-drawn transport lost their livelihood. Towns and villages connected by rail may have prospered, but those without a station often saw their fortunes decline.

Nor was everyone enamoured with rail travel. In 1844, William Wordsworth wrote to William Gladstone, at that time a minister in Robert Peel’s government, objecting to a new Lake District line, which he compared to a military invasion. He even penned a poem on the subject, which opens: ‘Is then no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?’

Rash assault or not, a great deal of ground was blasted, moved and carved to create the new rail network. In doing so, the engineers unintentionally opened a window into Britain’s deep past. Workman digging the Tilton railway cutting in Leicestershire exposed millions of fossils that hadn’t seen the light of day for more than 200 million years; in Kew, fossilised bones of oxen and bears were found buried deep in the clay and in Manchester a whole petrified forest was uncovered.

The speed with which the network grew, and the lack of a masterplan, frequently produced some eccentric outcomes. Many landowners insisted on private stations and several obtained the right to stop passing trains for their own convenience. The Duke of Sunderland even had his own personal line, which ran for 17 miles across his Scottish estate. Clearly, he saw no danger in rail travel, but many Victorian doctors warned that the jarring motion and noise could injure the brain and shatter the nerves.

During the 1850s, the newspapers were full of stories of travellers struck down by a medical condition called ‘railway madness’ — an aristocrat who tore off all his clothes mid journey, a man who laughed maniacally and started firing a pistol out of the window, a gentleman who suffered from memory loss.

As the century progressed, railways became woven into every aspect of British life. Trains featured in our poetry and literature. Rail-way terms — ‘train wreck’, ‘gravy train’, ‘train of thought’, ‘derailed’, ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ — permeated our speech. We even abandoned local time in favour of railway time to avoid confusions over timetabling.

Had Napoleon lived long enough, doubtless he would not have called us a nation of shopkeepers, but of train lovers.

This feature originally appeared in the December 24, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.