Railway Revolution, The

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2000 by Divall, Colin

Mark Casson (ed.), The Railway Revolution, eight volumes, Routledge, London, and Thoemmes Press, Bristol (1998), L475.00.

This is a magnificently presented, boxed set of reprints of eight books reflecting the evolution of thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about Britain's railways in the economic, political and military realms. In order of original publication the volumes are: J. S. Jeans, Railway Problems: an inquiry into the economic conditions of railway working in different countries (1887); W. M. Acworth, The Elements of Railway Economics (1905); S. C. Williams, The Economics of Railway Transport (1909); E. Cleveland-Stevens, English Railways: their development and their relation to the State (1915); E. A. Pratt, The Rise of Rail Power in War and Conquest, 1833-1914 (1915); J. M. Clark, Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs (1923); H. G. Lewin, Early British Railways: a short history of their origin and development, 1801-44 (1925); and K. Fenelon, Transport Co-ordination: a study of present-day transport problems (1929). The set is complemented by Mark Casson's lengthy introductory essay, which considers the ways in which railway construction and operation in nineteenth-century Britain deviated from the model of entrepreneurship proposed by Joseph Schumpeter.

If Casson's essay is supposed to clarify the intellectual purpose behind the issuing of this heterogeneous collection, or to justify the inclusion of individual volumes, it must be judged a failure, stimulating though it is in its own right. Still, there are undoubtedly some gems here. Five of the eight volumes - those by Acworth, Clark, Fenelon, Jeans and Williams - were written primarily as contributions to contemporary policy debates about railways or transport more generally. Their historical asides tend to reflect received opinion rather than the fruits of new work with documentary sources. But to the modern scholar they offer invaluable insights into educated opinion of the railways' place in the polity and the economy.

The oldest of the books, that by the historian and political economist J. S. Jeans, is also literally the weightiest. Although written with particular regard to the condition of relations between the State, the railway companies and their customers in Britain and Ireland, Jeans's study draws on numerous comparisons, many of them statistical, from the United States, Europe and the British Empire. If many of Jeans's themes are familiar to us today - for instance, the comparatively high capital cost of English railways then it is in no small measure because of the notice transport and economic historians have already taken of Jeans: it seems unlikely that this rich seam is exhausted yet.

By the end of the nineteenth century, railway economics and management ('administration') were starting to be taught in universities and other institutions of higher education. William Acworth's Elements of Railway Economics grew out of a pioneering course delivered at the London School of Economics from the mid-1890s. The book was originally published in 1905; this reprint is of the revised and enlarged edition of 1924, completed with the assistance of one of Acworth's successors, W. T. Stephenson. The revisions were chiefly of the examples, while the additions included sketches of the impact of the First World War on the railways' relationship with the State, plus an outline of the rate provisions of the 1921 Railways Act. But Acworth's clear exposition of the principles and practice of charging - the greater part of the original edition remains the most valuable resource for the modern scholar.

A Cambridge graduate, Sydney Charles Williams had experience of railway management in India, and his book was the product of a lecture course delivered at Cambridge in 1909. Williams's study is of interest today principally for his attempt to apply Alfred Marshall's economic theories of pricing to the practical circumstances of railway rates and charges, mostly in the British context; the third of the book taken up with organisational, engineering and operating matters yields few surprises. The volume by K. G. Fenelon was another product of the academic world; Fenelon lectured on transport at the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews during the 1920s before moving to Manchester to head the Department of Industrial Administration at the Municipal College of Technology. Judged solely by the amount of material on railways, Transport Co-ordination is slighter than his Railway Economics (1932). But the earlier work is more interesting as an instance of 1920s thinking on how the railways could best be co-ordinated with other forms of inland transport (there are brief summaries on waterways, coastal shipping and air, as well as a more considered analysis of road transport) to maximise the economic and financial returns on each. Modern scholars might find the international comparisons particularly rewarding.

The last of the volumes written with contemporary concerns primarily in mind is in several respects the odd one out. In the first place it is the only one authored and published outside Britain -- J. Maurice Clark was a professor of political economy at the University of Chicago. Not surprisingly, his emphasis as far as railways were concerned was on the United States. Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs shares with Fenelon's later work a concern for other modes of transport, but, much more than that or any of the other books reviewed here, Clark's study is an attempt to treat quite generally the question of identifying and allocating overheads. Our knowledge of the development of costing on Britain's railways in the first half of the twentieth century is still quite poor, and it would be interesting to know what practical influence Clark's work had.