railway mania

Railway Mania is the term given to the speculative frenzy in Britain in the 1840s. It followed a common pattern: as the price of railway shares increased, more and more money was poured in by speculators, until the inevitable collapse. It reached its zenith in 1846, when no fewer than 272 Acts of Parliament were passed, setting up new railway companies. Unlike some stock market bubbles, however, there was actually a net tangible result from all the investment: a vast expansion of the British railway system, though perhaps at an inflated cost. The line in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, "They threatened its life with a railway share" http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Carroll/snark/snark6.html, is a reference to the Railway Mania and those who lost money investing in it. Railway Mania can be compared with the similar craze in the 1990s, where a vast amount of fibre-optic telecommunications infrastructure was installed.

Railway Mania

See also