Railway Mania
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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" [1], is a reference to the Railway Mania and those who lost money investing in it.
Railway Mania can be compared with a similar mania in the 1990s in the stock of telecom companies. The telecom mania resulted in the installation and deployment of a vast amount of fibre-optic telecommunications infrastructure, ironically spurred on from the realization that the same railways could make affordable conduits for fibre-optics.
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- Report and Resolutions of a Public Meeting, Held at Glasgow, on Friday, March 20 1846, in Support of Sir Robert Peel's Suggestions in Reference to Railways - Peel had commented upon the impolity and danger of allowing too much capital to be invested in railways in too short a period. The merchants of Glasgow evidently agreed in large numbers. From Google Book Search
