By the second half of the nineteenth century the railway had remade Britain. Great companies competed for traffic and prestige, monumental stations rose in every city, and for the first time the whole nation kept the same time.
The great companies
The network consolidated into powerful concerns — the London & North Western (which styled itself “the Premier Line”), the Midland, the Great Northern, the Caledonian, the North British and the Great Eastern among them. The Midland transformed travel by admitting third-class passengers to all its trains and abolishing second class, forcing its rivals to follow.
Railway time
The railways even standardised the clock. Before them, towns kept their own local time; the need for a single timetable spread “railway time” across the country, giving Britain one national time standard for the first time.
Elegant engines and the Races to the North
This was the heyday of the graceful single-driver express engine, exemplified by Patrick Stirling's beautiful GNR Stirling Single with its 8-foot driving wheels. Locomotive engineering matured under superintendents such as John Ramsbottom, Patrick Stirling, Dugald Drummond and Samuel Johnson. Competition reached a theatrical climax in the Races to the North of 1888 and 1895, when East Coast and West Coast companies openly raced their expresses from London to Scotland.