Bayerns Weg zur Eisenbahn: Joseph von Baader und die Fruhzeit der Eisenbahn in Bayern 1800 bis 1835

Joseph Ritter von Baader (1763–1835) is a pioneer in railroad history almost unknown to the anglophone public. Stephan Deutinger presents a comprehensive examination of Baader’s long fight for the advent of railroads, a struggle often unappreciated in his time. Appended to the book are 151 pages of informative primary documents concerning Baader.

Deutinger begins by noting the commercial and military importance of railroads during the nineteenth century, and how, in Germany, they served as the engine of development, effecting fundamental changes throughout social life. He explains how Baader became a central figure in transferring rail technology to the kingdom of Bavaria, wrote as much advocating railroads as Friedrich List, with whom he had considerable correspondence, and was a foremost champion of railroads over canals. Critics of Baader’s proposals questioned the accuracy of his low estimates of construction costs for railroads.

Educated at Göttingen in medicine, Baader turned to civil engineering, especially after studying physics and mathematics in Edinburgh from 1787 to 1791. He became the Bavarian director of mechanical engineering and mining in 1798. Napoleon called him to Paris in 1805, where he prepared plans for the production of new machinery for waterworks. Beginning in 1807, Baader began his support of railroads, a calling reinforced by field study of English mining railways in 1815–16. To demonstrate railroads, he built a scale model during 1818 in a park at Nymphenburg. As early as 1815 he planned to connect the rivers Danube and Main by a railroad instead of the then-usual canal, and in 1818 he proposed to the Bavarian government a horse-powered, iron railroad between Nurnberg and Furth. (Powered by steam, a similar short line became Germany’s first, in 1835, but it was a private line uninfluenced by Baader.) In 1820, he proposed to Kaiser Franz I a rail connection between the Danube and Moldau (already proposed in 1808 by respected insider Franz Joseph von Gerstner). Franz Joseph’s son, engineer Franz Anton, received in Russia the recognition, and the contract for constructing that country’s first railroad, denied to Baader.

Baader set forth his unique, sometimes impractical, views on railroad construction during 1822 in his Neues System der fortschaffenden Mechanik oder vollstaendige Beschreibung neuerfundener Eisenbahnen und Wagen. In his railroad engineering, Baader proposed all manner of motive power for pulling trains of cars: draft horses, human-powered devices on cars, gravity and counterweight energized movements, and even a locomotive powered by compressed air stored in cylinders. With foresight, he proposed the hauling of ordinary road wagons, piggyback style, on flat cars. But he saw little use for the locomotive steam engine in obliterating the barriers of time and distance until just before his death.

In contrast to the two orthodox manners of providing guidance for rail vehicles (by flanges on the wheels or on the rails), Baader’s railroad designs usually called for flangeless wheels on flangeless rails. His rail designs were either entirely of wood or composite, with cast-iron plates spiked to wooden under members. Some form of small, paired, horizontally mounted guide wheels provided the necessary vehicle guidance against a third, center rail. This form of guidance never saw adoption, save for recent, reinvented, near-applications in the Paris and Montreal subways. Baader designed quite small freight cars, which would not have proven commercially competitive with the standard English cars of the time.

The controversy over extent to which Baader failed disastrously as the manager of the Haigh ironworks at Wigan during the period 1791–93 receives scant attention (p. 16). Nor are his telling satirists and critics mentioned. For example, nothing is said about M. G. Saphir’s written ridicule, in 1831, of Baader, the hydraulic engineer and rail enthusiast, as “The Water Rat on the Railroad or the Knight without a Head...