ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to describe and evaluate Butterley's activities as suppliers of rails and other castings to private customers and to canal and railway companies between 1790 and 1830, using, for the first time, the company's own records, the bulk of which are now in public hands. In their first forty years Butterley produced a remarkable variety of cast iron goods, ranging from 'a heater for a tea urn' to the ironwork for Vauxhall Bridge. Broadly speaking, they specialised in structural ironwork for docks, bridges and canals; pipes for gas and waterworks; and rails and other goods for railways. The precise nature and extent of the Butterley Company's predominance, if any, in the market for the supply of cast iron railway goods in the early nineteenth century has been the subject of comment rather than investigation. About sixty railway companies were incorporated between 1801 and 1830, although several of the lines authorised were never built.
