Preconditions for Transformation 521

The opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825.

Southampton to London. Yet, at the same time, railways also entailed the
destruction of large swaths of major city centers, displacing about 50,000
people in Manchester during a seventy-five year period, and many times that
in London. Railway construction also brought continental states into the
realm of economic decision making; in France, the government and private
companies cooperated in building a railway system. In Belgium and Austria,
the railway system was state owned from the beginning (see Map 14.2).
Railways became part of the social and cultural landscape. The relatively
rapid pace of travel arguably helped spread the sense of being “on time,” and
in the 1850s Greenwich time, or “railway time,” had become standard in
Britain. Trains brought places much closer together, carrying newspapers
and mail more rapidly than could ever have been imagined. The first trains
could speed along at twenty-five miles an hour, three times faster than the
finest carriages. An English clergyman described his first train ride in 1830:
“No words can convey an adequate notion of the magnificence (cannot use a
smaller word) of our progress... soon we felt that we were going.... The
most intense curiosity and excitement prevailed.” Railroad companies were
quick to divide their cars into first-, second-, and third-class service,
although at first the luxuries were limited to foot-warmers in winter. For
people of more modest means, second- or even third-class carriages (called
“penny a mile” travel in Britain, with train wagons not even sheltered from
the elements until the mid-1840s) had to suffice. English seaside resorts
lured middle-class visitors and some craftsmen and their families. Trains ran