ABSTRACT
Railways made rapid progress, receiving great stimulus and few checks from the general development of the economy. Vigorous demand for railway services made for healthy traffic and revenue returns, as rival modes of transport were swept aside. Railways reflected features characteristic of the economy at large in several ways, perhaps most conspicuously in the transforming role of fixed capital. Railways were riot the only stimulus to the extension of road haulage which, in the guise of urban cartage, marked the later nineteenth century, but they were by far the most important. Railways were by then fully equipped and had moreover discovered that infiltration of canal ownership, as the lemmings sold out, provided a more effective means of obstructionism and was less costly than price wars. The nature and organisation of railway goods traffic was in fact undergoing very considerable change.
