The Coming of the Railway and United Kingdom Economic Growth

Abstract

According to W. W. Rostow, “the introduction of the railroad has been historically the most powerful single initiator of take-offs,” having “three major kinds of impact on economic growth during the take-off period,” namely, lowering transport costs and bringing new areas and products into the market; developing a major new export sector; and leading on to the development of modern coal, iron, and engineering industries. But though all these three can be traced in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, the railways are not accorded the role of initiator in that country since, in the Rostow schema, the take-off had already occurred before the invention of the locomotive. The size of the investment in Britain's railways is such, however, that it is worth examining their impact, even if this was not so overwhelming as in some other countries.