At the start of a rainy autumn day in late September 1825, residents of a small town in northern England called Stockton were destined for one of the strangest days of their lives. These simple people, coal miners, stood and watched for the first time in history a machine transporting humans. At that moment, George Stephenson was launching his first train to carry 450 passengers at a speed exceeding 25 kilometers per hour toward the city of Darlington on a one-hour journey, whereas that trip used to take at least four hours. This scene was the beginning of a new era in transport, not just within Britain, but in the whole world.

George Stephenson was not just one link in the long chain of inventions related to steam. Since his father was a mechanic in one of the mines, this allowed Stephenson as a child to deal with the Newcomen engine, and he became accustomed to the role of steam in performing central tasks both inside and outside the mines. Stephenson developed primitive railways to transport coal from one of the mines at great speed and lower cost than before, and this was why he thought about the next step: transporting people.

The plan for the railway line between Stockton and Darlington was for it to be horse-drawn, but Stephenson convinced his partner that steam could push it with much greater power and speed. Once this small experiment succeeded, the idea of building the first major line between two big cities—Manchester and Liverpool—emerged. The first was the capital of the textile industry, and the second was the most important port for importing cotton, hence the great importance and pioneering nature of this line. On a journey with a speed of approximately 60 kilometers per hour, Stephenson connected the most important cities of the British North in 1830, making him one of the most important figures of the 19th century.

Southward in London, the capital of the Empire, these leaps in the railway industry in Britain launched what was called the “Railway Mania” phase. In this phase, the new middle class that emerged as a result of the Industrial Revolution invested heavily in railway companies and the new lines that began spreading across the country. This phase reached its peak in the mid-1840s before the bubble burst and the shares of private companies collapsed—but not before a large network of lines and railways was established for the first time in Britain, moving from there to the rest of Europe, America, and Egypt in a few years.

This fast-paced story, from the beginning of the steam engine and its development until it reached the stage of changing the shape of transport, economy, and politics, was not as easy or logical as it is told today. From the beginning, the railway was different from all the means of transport and roads known to man before. In the case of roads and canals, the path was separate from the vehicle or boat using it, and the owner of the boat or vehicle did not monopolize the path or need to own it to use it. Flexibility and individual initiative ruled the day. This concept was the impression of the railway; in the beginning, it was no more than an engine carried on a carriage. The suggestion was to use the roads already in existence for horse-drawn carriages and put tracks on them so the railway carriages could run on them. But it turned out that this suggestion was not effective, because the ideal path for a railway must be level, solid, straight, and smooth. Therefore, the railway required a change in the shape of nature, from leveling the ground to suit the trains to digging tunnels and building bridges to cross larger obstacles like hills and rivers. Thus, the passenger, through the railway windows, saw nature while being largely separated from it, reaching its peak when passing through a tunnel, for example. Over time, the concept of the railway grew to include the engine, the locomotive, the tracks, and the signal as an interconnected group.

From a technical standpoint, this made it impossible to separate any development or change in engines or trains from the development of tracks and signals, and vice versa. Practically and in the context of operation, combining the locomotive and the tracks beneath it makes it difficult for the management of the road to be separate from the management of the vehicles on it, as happens in other means of transport. This matter was not easy or acceptable in the beginning, especially since it conflicted with the philosophy of free labor and the lack of dominant government intervention at those moments. Therefore, it took 15 years until the government issued legislation stating that the railway and its trains be treated as a single unit, so that management is comprehensive for both the line and the vehicles to obtain the required homogeneity and order.

The problem was that the private companies that spread widely and in an unorganized manner were a cause of chaos more than efficiency. The absence of any regular planning and the spread of lines without interconnection caused the transfer of passengers and goods between lines, which wasted a lot of time and effort. This, for example, was not common in Belgium and France because they took central planning as a basis for establishing railways. Therefore, Britain, despite its technological progress and the existence of many lines spread everywhere, was more chaotic and less efficient, especially in the “Railway Mania” phase. Consequently, the government intervened to create an entity to coordinate between companies and place the railway—whether trains, tracks, stations, or signals—under one regular management, or what was later known as railway authorities in all countries of the world.

During this period, the railway also began to spread around the world. A proposal to establish a railway in Egypt appeared, and this was crowned by an agreement between Robert Stephenson—heir to the Stephenson empire—and Abbas Hilmi—heir to the kingdom of Muhammad Ali—to begin the story of Egypt’s railways in the mid-19th century.

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