Early Railways 2 (review)

The nineteen papers published here were initially presented to the Second International Early Railway Conference held in Manchester in 2001. Papers from an earlier conference, in Durham in 1998, have already been published, but the excellence of this second collection demonstrates that enthusiasm for the subject has by no means been exhausted. While most railway historiography has concentrated on the great age of steam locomotion and the construction of national and transcontinental lines, large areas of ignorance, confusion, and mythology have continued to surround the conditions out of which these better recorded events developed, providing ample material for continuing historical research. Conferences such as those in Manchester and Durham are thus performing a valuable service to the history of technology and should be welcomed accordingly.

The essays in Early Railways 2 have been well edited by Michael Lewis, a pioneer in this realm of scholarship. He has arranged them in four main categories, following the introduction by Colin Divall. The first group consists of six papers under the heading "History," including some interesting reflections by Winifred Stokes on the emergence of distinct offices and specializations in early railway companies. The second group has three papers on "Infrastructure," with a contribution from the editor discussing the evolution of cast-iron edge rails as an intermediary stage between wooden edge rails and cast-iron plateways, on the one hand, and fully developed wrought-iron edge rails, on the other. The third group, under the heading "Mechanical," contains seven papers, including useful studies of the early locomotives of George Stephenson, identifying most of the sixteen that he claimed to have built before the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825. A final section, "Overseas," contains two essays dealing with early railways in Italy and Canada.

This volume represents a welcome return to mainline book publication by the British Newcomen Society (after confining its attention for many years to its exemplary annual Transactions), a noteworthy event in the historiography of technology. It has been well produced, with an arresting laminated cover depicting the tramway built by Samuel Homfray in 1821 to bring coal down to Newport from his collieries in South Wales. The painting by John Thomas, in a naïve style, shows two trains of wagons, each being drawn by four horses, with ships in the Severn estuary in the background. It now hangs in the National Museum of Wales and is the subject of an instructive and entertaining analysis by David Gwyn in this volume. Gwyn is able to show that, in addition to its significance as a technical record, the painting also elucidates aspects of the Chartist agitation that was convulsing working-class communities in South Wales and elsewhere during the late 1830s.

In sum, this book helps to justify Lewis's optimism that "the study of early railways is in fine fettle."