Railway Mania
November 12, 2013 6:16 AM   Subscribe

"Railway Mania was an economic bubble in the United Kingdom in the 1840s that involved a railroad development frenzy and a speculative bubble in the shares of railroad companies. ... [T]he British Railway Mania was the result of overexuberance toward the business prospects of a disruptive innovation; though railroads are now a part of everyday life, they were once every bit as revolutionary as the internet was when it was first introduced."
posted by frimble (8 comments total) 5 users marked this as a favorite
 
So what you're saying is, a Ticket to Ride: UK should be coming soon?
posted by toxtethogrady at 6:29 AM on November 12, 2013


You can read about, or you can relive it!! (free, runs on DOSBox)
posted by Artful Codger at 6:49 AM on November 12, 2013


So what you're saying is, a Ticket to Ride: UK should be coming soon?

Ha ha, no.

(Tories broke it all.)
posted by Artw at 6:50 AM on November 12, 2013


If we're turning this into a board game discussion, there already is a family of stock-based train games taking place in the 1800's.
posted by Midnight Rambler at 6:55 AM on November 12, 2013


there already is a family of stock-based train games taking place in the 1800's.

Would you describe their proliferation as a bubble?
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:23 AM on November 12, 2013


I wonder if this inspired the setting for China MiƩville's Railsea?
posted by Rock Steady at 7:35 AM on November 12, 2013


a Ticket to Ride: UK

That'll be 289 quid one way. Or 167 quid if you break your travel on exactly the same train and same route into 2 trips. 87 quid if you buy a ticket that goes three stops further your actual planned trip.

Only in our current environment of neo-liberal privatization to barely regulated extortionate monopolies pretending to be markets would an actual competitive market where some business succeed and some fail and all have to be beholden to customers be described as 'mania'.
posted by srboisvert at 8:44 AM on November 12, 2013 [2 favorites]


A similar situation in the US. There were over 10,000 independent railroads by the 1920s. Figuring out train schedules was a major deal, chaos. The routes generally had names not numbers, and the names didn't always make sense (e.g. "The Atlantic" for a line going from Kansas to Chicago). At each stop it was hub and spoke so you had to hop from one independent railroad to the next to get to a destination. Miss one stop and you are sent far away to who knows where.
posted by stbalbach at 10:44 AM on November 12, 2013


« Older Meet the Somalis   |   Right Behind Burundi Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments