ALMOST exactly 200 years ago, on September 27 1825, a steam-powered locomotive made a 26-mile journey from Shildon to Stockton, via Darlington. It carried coal from collieries all the way to the harbour at the mouth of the River Tees. Also on board were some 600 passengers (not all of them paid the fare). This journey marked the beginning of the modern-day railway network.

Although earlier railways existed — such as the Middleton Railway or the Wylam Colliery Railway — these were private and primarily used for transporting coal. The Stockton & Darlington Railway was the first to be accessible to the public, changing perceptions of what a railway could be, from merely moving coal to being a general network.

Five years later, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway became the first intercity railway in the world; it was also the first to have a signalling system, the first to be fully timetabled, and the first to carry post.

The rest of the 19th century saw a dizzying expansion of the railway in Britain, creating a virtually complete network, with thousands of towns and villages having a rail connection by the end of the century.

Other western European countries, such as France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy, were also developing their railway networks. This expansion occurred alongside technical innovation — the introduction of locomotives powered by electricity allowed for greater efficiency and higher power, enabling longer distances to be travelled faster by train.

However, Britain took a while to embrace these new trains compared with other countries in Europe. Switzerland, for example, had electrified 77 per cent of its rail network by 1939.

The modernisation of the Swiss rail network came after it was nationalised. Similarly, it wasn’t until 1948 when the major British rail companies (the “Big Four”) were nationalised by Clement Attlee’s Labour government that upgrades began on the British railway network.

Prior to nationalisation, steam locomotives still dominated the network, but other infrastructure was also antiquated, such as old mechanical signal boxes. The reason improvements hadn’t been made was that the Big Four companies were struggling to make profits, and were thus reluctant to invest in upgrading their infrastructure and replacing their locomotives. Post-nationalisation, the state took charge of modernising the railway network under the newly formed British Rail.

By the 1960s, the initial rise in profits that came with nationalisation had stalled, primarily due to the rising popularity of road transport. Cuts to the rail network were proposed, known as the “Beeching axe” after the man who proposed them.

This restructure involved the closure of 2,363 stations (55 per cent of the total) and 5,000 miles of railway line and the loss of 67,700 British Rail jobs. Although it did improve the logistics of freight transport by proposing the consolidation of rail freight stations into huge terminals, from where containers could be loaded onto lorries and taken to their final destination, the cuts were extremely unpopular. For small towns in particular, they were devastating.

The Beeching axe also introduced a new problem: what to do with the land occupied by the railway lines post-closure. Although a lot of this land was sold off for redevelopment, many redundant structures like bridges and drainage culverts remain to this day, as well as derelict land where lines once ran or where stations were located.

The final nail in the coffin for British Rail came during John Major’s Conservative government in 1994. After the privatisation of British water supply, gas and electricity boards, and the telephone system, the railway network was also sold off. A private company called Railtrack took over the tracks and other infrastructure, while passenger service providers were sold off to individual private sector operators.

Railtrack came under scrutiny after three train crashes in almost as many years involving multiple casualties. Investigation into the crashes revealed Railtrack’s lack of upkeep of the rail infrastructure and dissolution of engineering capability as it outsourced to private contractors.

Although recent railway issues might be less deadly, privatisation has had a disastrous effect on the British railway system. Delays, cancellations, overcrowding and inflated ticket prices are everyday concerns for anyone using the train in Britain.

The poor conditions extend to railway staff, whose pay remained stagnant between 2019 and 2024, prompting persistent and extended industrial action organised by RMT and Aslef to win backdated pay increases.

Investment in railways, fair wages for their staff, and upgrades to their infrastructure aren’t solely about improving passenger experience. Transport accounts for around 25 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and is currently growing. At present, 90 per cent of energy powering vehicles comes from burning fossil fuels. As one of the few transport modes that is already fully electrified, rail transport produces far less CO2 emissions than driving or flying. And if renewable electricity is used to power the railways, emissions fall even further.

It makes sense to invest in rail transport, and some countries, like China, already are. Its Belt and Road Initiative is financing new railway links across the globe, from: the Mombasa-Nairobi Railway, the largest infrastructure project carried out in Kenya since independence, to the China-Laos Railway, an electrified railway directly connecting China’s south-western Yunnan province to Vientiane, Laos’s capital. China hopes to facilitate increased trade as a result of the increased capacity for the movement of goods and people.

Much of the global South already has some form of railway network. But as Kwame Nkrumah pointed out in his book Neocolonialism, railway networks in colonised nations were often set up to do precisely one thing: move natural resources out of them.

A typical pattern was for railway lines to be built running between inland mines, quarries, ore-production centres and ports, where the resources could be loaded onto ships and stolen away. Newer railways will hopefully serve the interests of local populations; networks of connection, not extraction.

In Britain, bringing train-operating companies back into public ownership is supported by over 60 per cent of the public. But it remains to be seen whether politicians will be able to transform the struggling railway network into a green mode of transport. Unless those in power begin to desire a shared future that benefits us all, rather than simply putting profits in the pockets of the super-wealthy, the outlook does not seem positive.