This book is a timely addition to the literature on railway history. It focuses on the early development of railways, with special reference to the economic conditions that created a demand for rail transport and the new technologies that made the steam locomotive and the railway system viable. Unlike most business histories of railways, it analyzes the development and diffusion of new engineering technology rather than speculative promotion, corporate organization, financing, and profitability. The promoters, the boards of directors, or the shareholders are mentioned, but the emphasis is on the diffusion of the railway concept within and between countries and the engineering skills, both civil and mechanical, that made the construction and operation of railways feasible.

The author is a historian of technology who has played a prominent role in the preservation of railway heritage in Britain—hence the Anglicized “railway” rather than Americanized “railroad” in this title from a US academic publisher. Notwithstanding the focus on Britain as the “cradle” of the steam railway, there is detailed coverage of early US railways as well as early railways in continental Europe. Readers of this book may also be interested in the book series Early Railways and in Early Main Line Railways, to which the author has made significant contributions.

The subject of early railways has already been addressed by previous authors, who have focused on early wooden railways (often called tramways), which were reliant mainly on horse-power, These were characteristic of the 1600s and early 1700s, although even earlier precedents have been identified. The author is principally interested in the age of iron, which begins around 1750, as indicated in the title of the book.

The author focuses on the phase of railway growth up to 1850. For much of this period railways were local rather than national enterprises and were developed very much with local industries in mind. The main period of railway expansion began with the speculative Railway Mania in the UK in 1845 and the promotion of interstate railway routes in the US in the 1850s, neither of which is addressed in detail in this book.

Key “drivers” of early railway growth identified in the book are (1) technological advances in mining for coal and iron ore, such as steam-powered pumping, which enabled mines to go deeper and extract much larger quantities of mineral; (2) the development of cast iron (and later wrought iron) rails, initially fixed to stone sleepers; (3) the importance of local freight lines as feeders to the eighteenth-century canal system; (4) the limitations of chain and rope haulage using stationary steam engines; and (5) the emergence of the steam locomotive (1800–1830) and the pace of its subsequent technological improvement up to 1850.

Some issues that receive relatively little attention are (1) the unexpectedly large demand for passenger traffic in the 1830s, arising from increasing frustration with the limitations of passenger travel by road; (2) the difficulty of deciding on a business model for passenger traffic (e.g., timetabling trains, setting fares, ticketing, and the provision of passenger accommodation); (3) safety features, and in particular the transition from the railway “policeman” to interlocking signaling systems; and (4) the designing of railway junctions to facilitate the interchange of traffic, especially where competing railway companies were involved—a problem that persisted throughout the nineteenth century and was never fully resolved.

The specific contribution of this book lies in its exploitation of obscure and neglected source materials; its synthesis of previous literature on railway technology, much of it published in very specialized books and journals that are no longer readily accessible; its cross-country comparisons of the speed of railway development, and in particular the rapid spread of long-distances lines in the US (1830–1850); and its detailed examination of the process by which railway technology diffused between countries.

Finally, a particularly appealing feature of the book is its exploration of the relationship between railways, engineering design, art, literature, and architecture in 1750–1850. The growth of railways in this period had a profound social, as well as economic, impact, and the author vividly demonstrates how the social and economic impacts interacted with each other.