Do you think that people in 1830 (who other than George Stephenson himself couldn’t even conceive the possibility of a horseless carriage moving on its own all the way from Liverpool to Manchester) could even conceive that the railway that they saw open would still be around even 100 years later, having been through a world war, while a 100 storey building was being built in America, which had only become independent 47 years earlier, let alone that there would still be people here, having been through another world war, thinking about it’s 200th anniversary taking place within the decade and everything that has happened in the intervening years, half of which has taken place during the queen’s lifetime.
Maybe not in 1830, but within a few years after that there seemed to be an expectation that everywhere needed a railway. Sometimes this was motivated by dividentd to shareholders and in others local businesses promoted the railway, not so much to make a direct profit but to ensure their other interests didn't fall victim to rail-connected competitors. Implicit in either was the assumption that the railway would continue to serve the same role indefinitely.
When these schemes were promoted in the mid-19th century, the short-lived canal era was still in living memory, not to mention much of the industrial revolution. But there seemed to be no expectation that within a similar period going forward, further technological progress would advance road transport enough to threaten the continued viability of many of these rail routes.
Perhaps that's a good thing. If people had known that, many of the railways that remain useful, and have become more so in the last 50 years or so, would never have been built.
Revisiting this thread after a couple-plus months: doing so, prompted by a recent chance-happened-on "aside" in a book essentially on a non-rail subject; which comment seems to me interestingly to chime in with the thoughts of two thread participants as quoted above. The book is by Pete Brown, who writes basically on beer and associated topics -- title
Shakespeare's Local: about the George Inn in Southwark, the last-surviving example today (surviving physically, only in part) of London's one-time coaching inns. In the late 19th century, the inn's premises came into the ownership of the Great Northern Railway, which made over the majority thereof into office / warehousing / goods handling facilities -- recounting this, leads the author (not, so far as I can tell, a railway enthusiast as such) into a paragraph of railway-related "what-if-ing", as follows.
"It's strange now to think about the complete transformation the railways brought about. From around the 1850s until motorcars became popular in the 1930s, Britain's roads were dead. Imagine if you can what it might be like today if things had continued along this path, if the railway branch lines had remained open and railways had evolved in such a way as to keep their role as the dominant mode of transport. Imagine if light cars and vans were used just for short-distance trips to the station and back, because everyone had a station near them and train travel was quicker and cheaper than road travel could ever be. There would be no motorways, much less pollution, hardly any drink-driving fatalities ... What a wonderful world that would be ! The train may be the villain of our story about the George, but its golden age wasn't much longer than that of the stagecoach."
I feel that the above quote smacks somewhat of hack journalism and its attendant over-simplification; and the author's "what it might be like today" flight of fancy strikes me as implausible unless the internal combustion engine had never come to be (his "light cars and vans" being otherwise powered), or, if feasible, had proved much feebler and less versatile than in fact it was and is -- get the feeling, though, that he does truly like the mental picture which he draws -- his "what a wonderful world ..." is genuine, not ironic.
I find the various quotes in this post, salutary in bringing to mind something which I feel is valid even to those of us who are not aficionados of "alternative-history" speculation and fantasy: that the way in which history has gone, is not necessarily how it ineluctably has to have gone; and that people do
not know with certainty, how the future will be (as opposed to the exercise of looking at the past, with the benefit of hindsight) -- they can only speculate and guess, bringing to bear the best information they can as regards patterns of things in past history.
@507020's and
@edwin_m's musings above, along the lines of people in the early / mid-19th century not necessarily feeling certain that the new railways were likely to be long-lasting -- or that they weren't likely to -- are thought-stimulating.
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