A photograph of a Union military railway locomotive, number 133, during the American Civil War
Locomotive #133, U.S.M.R.R., 1861–65
Marked Stockton

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

The railway age

From the Stockton and Darlington in 1825 and the Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, railways spread across the world in a lifetime, changing how far people could travel, what they ate and even what time it was.

Place
Stockton · Liverpool Road, Manchester · Promontory Summit · MumbaiThe whole world
Laid out as
An inventionA new way of doing something, link by link: what came before, the breakthrough, and what it changed.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

BeforeTravel at the speed of a horse.

  1. IStockton and Darlington
  2. IIRainhill and the Rocket
  3. IIIThe navvies
  4. IVRailway time
  5. VRailways and empire
  6. VIAcross a continent

AfterTravel at the speed of steam, on a timetable.

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • George Stephenson
  • Robert Stephenson
  • Isambard Kingdom Brunel
  • Fanny Kemble

Objects

  • Rocket
  • Railway timetables

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

1825 to 1914. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?