Railroads Go Global

The success of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway gave encouragement to railroad enthusiasts elsewhere.

More and more railways were built in Britain: the Leicester and Swannington, the Grand Junction Railway, the London and Birmingham, and in Scotland lines from Monkland to Kirkintilloch and from Glasgow to Garnkirk; and overseas the lines began to appear.

Steam locomotion was first introduced to France in 1832 on a mine railroad which had been opened in 1823.

The Dublin and Kingstown Railway in Ireland was opened in 1834. The same year the Belgian Government began construction of a line from Brussels to Malines which was opened in 1835 with two locomotives built by Stephenson.

In December 1835 Der Adler, another Stephenson locomotive, opened the Ludwigsbahn from Nuremberg to Fürth.

A line from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk was opened in 1837, although later development in Russia was slow. That year, too, the first steam locomotive, sent out from England, began work on the Kaiser Ferdinands Nordbahn near Vienna, though Austria had had horse railroads since 1832.

In Holland (Now part of Netherlands) a railroad from Amsterdam to Haarlem was opened on 24th September 1839 and ten days later five miles of line from Naples to Portici were opened in Italy.

The first railway in Scandinavia, a privately owned line from Copenhagen to Roskilde, did not come until 1847 and railroads in Norway and Sweden did not appear until the next decade - and in Finland not until 1862.

Switzerland, which since 1844 had had a mile-long extension of the Alsace Railway linking Basle with the French frontier, built a line between Zurich and Baden in 1847. In 1849 Robert Stephenson was called in to advise on the country's railroad development.

In 1848 the first Spanish line, from Barcelona to Mataro, was inaugurated with a ceremony, attended by the full court, at which the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo blessed the locomotive.

As the rails spread across the Continent the European powers built railways in their overseas possessions. Indeed there was a railway in Cuba eleven years before the first line in Spain. In India there was strong pressure in favor of using waterways for communications, but railroads were developed from 1853.

For Australia the British Government recommended a standard gauge of 4 ft. 85 in. but in 1852 and 1853 New South Wales and Victoria went ahead with lines on a 5 ft. 3 in. gauge. The next year New South Wales converted to 4 ft. 85 in. Later Queensland and Western Australia built lines at 3 ft. 6 in. - and South Australia had all three gauges! The result was that travellers across Australia must change trains as they pass from state to state.

In New Zealand the Lyttelton and Christchurch Railway was commenced in 1860 to a gauge of 5 ft. 3 in. but an Act of Parliament in 1870 set down a gauge of 3 ft. 6 in. for all future railroads, thereby preventing the confusion which grew up in Australia.

In Africa, Egypt's first railroad dated from 1852, and at the other end of the Continent the first line, two miles long from Durban to the Point, opened in 1860. In 1862 the first steam trains began to run in South Africa between Cape Town and Eerste, and after the discovery of diamonds in 1867 the railway system grew rapidly.

Japan's first railroad, between Yokohama, Tokyo and Shimbashi, was not opened until 1872; and the first railroad in China, a nine-mile line from Shanghai to Woosung, begun in 1876, was torn up by the authorities - although four years later another line was opened.