ABSTRACT
This chapter has been concerned with only one aspect of the contractors' activities in the construction of British railways in the second half of the nineteenth century. It has shown their transformation from a prime concern with engineering to an equal if not greater interest in finance. It would be absurd to suggest that the contractors were the most important figures in the railway world, but in the period after the great mania of the 1840s any history of railway construction which ignored them would be ludicrously incomplete. The railway contractors were not new in the 1850s; railways had almost always been built by them from the earliest days, as had, indeed, the canals before them. When a contractor was paid in securities the railway company was obviously solving its financial problems. For the contractors a possible motive was the need to keep their permanent staff and equipment occupied.
