This illustrated history describes how the two pioneering railways of northern England, the Stockton and Darlington and Newcastle and Carlisle railways, developed from unsuccessful canal proposals and how they, with the ill-fated Stanhope and Tyne Railway, initiated the development of the railway system that served the North Pennine Orefield. It reveals the public and private railways, as well as proposed lines, and the recovery and extensions of the Stockton and Darlington Railway until the North Eastern Railway took over in the early 1860s. Dr Tom Bell’s impressive research also explores the subsequent slow but continuous decline as the minerals became exhausted, to the situation today when all that is left are three different tourist lines, one of which is trying to revive the mineral traffic.

This is the first history of the British railway system written from a modern economic perspective. It uses conterfactual analysis to construct an alternative network to represent the most efficient alternative rail network that could have been constructed given what was known at the time - the first time this has been done.

Although a great deal has been published on the economic, social and engineering history of nineteenth-century railways, the work of historical geographers has been much less conspicuous. This overview by David Turnock goes a long way towards restoring the balance. It details every important aspect of the railway's influence on spatial distribution of economic and social change, providing a full account of the nineteenth-century geography of the British Isles seen in the context of the railway. The book reviews and explains the shape of the developing railway network, beginning with the pre-steam railways and connections between existing road and water communications and the new rail lines. The author also discusses the impact of the railways on the patterns of industrial, urban and rural change throughout the century. Throughout, the historical geography of Ireland is treated in equal detail to that of Great Britain.