Jobs Museum

History · 1830

Railway Age

On 15 September 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened with a timetable, steam locomotives, and paying passengers. It was not the first railway. It was the first to prove that steam haulage on a reserved track could replace canals and coaches for both goods and people, at a speed no horse could hold. George Stephenson's Rocket had won the Rainhill trials the year before. Within twenty years, Britain, then Europe and North America, were laying track as fast as capital and navvies could move.

Rail created a geography of jobs. A town with a junction gained engine sheds, hotels, and a reason for clerks to exist. A town the line skipped began to shrink. Work started to mean getting to the work, on someone else's schedule.

Building the line

Before anyone drove a train, an army of navvies cut the earth. The word comes from 'navigator,' the laborers who had dug the canals. Railway navvies were mobile, well paid by the standards of farm labor, and notoriously hard to house. They blasted cuttings, raised embankments, and died in collapses often enough that the job was understood as dangerous rather than merely dirty. Tunnel miners and bricklayers followed them. Surveyors and resident engineers walked the route ahead of everyone, arguing with landowners.

The capital behind them was new too. Railway companies were among the first businesses owned by thousands of distant shareholders. That required accountants, secretaries, and a printed prospectus. The railway boom of the 1840s was a financial occupation as much as a civil-engineering one, and it ruined plenty of both.

Running it

A train is a hierarchy on wheels. The engine driver and fireman lived in the cab and knew a particular locomotive. Guards managed the train and, on early lines, the brakes. Signalmen controlled a stretch of track from a box, first with flags and time intervals, later with the electric telegraph and block instruments. Station masters ran a local world of porters, booking clerks, and lamp men. Porters handled luggage and goods. The timetable was the product, and missing it was a professional failure.

Telegraphists grew up beside the railway because the companies needed to know where their trains were. By mid-century a signal box and a telegraph instrument were part of the same safety system. The person who sent the message and the person who pulled the lever were new technical jobs that did not exist in the coaching era.

What the coach road lost

Stagecoach companies, posting inns, and a great many ostlers and coachmen lost their through traffic within a decade of a line opening. Horses did not disappear. They did the last mile, from the station to the town the railway had not bothered to enter. That is a pattern worth keeping: a new network does not erase the old job so much as shove it to the edge, where it becomes local, poorer, and easier to overlook.

Rail also standardized time. Towns had kept their own noon, set by the sun. A timetable cannot survive that. Railway time, later national time, is a workplace invention. The conductor's watch was not an accessory. It was how the system kept people from occupying the same track.

Work that grew

  • Navvy
  • Locomotive driver and fireman
  • Signalman
  • Station master
  • Railway clerk
  • Telegraphist

Work that lost its place

  • Long-distance stagecoach crew
  • Posting inn as a national system
  • Local sun time as the clock of business

Companies of this chapter

Largest

  • The Bank of England

    Still the center of British credit while railway shares became a national speculation.

  • The Rothschild houses

    The leading cross-border bankers, financing states and, soon, the railways themselves.

  • Baring Brothers

    London's great merchant bank, underwriting trade and foreign loans.

New at the time