Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
First, he had to cart them to a railway station - a slow journey of up to
ten miles. Then, at the station, he faced a long wait, eventually surren-
dering “to the middleman to get his goods to market.”
2
British trains
went from town to town, but they needed to go to the farms and the
crops.
“Road trains,” Jefferies argued, were the solution. These redesigned
steam-powered trains would run not along rails but on country roads,
stopping at each farm and “loading at the gate of the field.”3
3
Railways,
he granted, would still be essential for long-haul shipments, but the road
trains would bring much-desired change. With speedy transit at hand,
farmers, he continued, would plant perishable fruits and vegetables on
unused plots, the rural population would grow, and British farmers
would recapture revenue that was going to the Continent and America
for imports. To break open rural isolation, daily road trains for passen-
gers would connect villages with market towns. Remote hamlets would
spring to life.
Casting his eye across the Channel at old rival France was no con-
solation. France was moving ahead of Britain, too: “We have lately seen
the French devote an enormous sum to the laying down of rails in agri-
cultural districts, to the making of canals, and generally to the improve-
ment of internal communication in provinces but thinly populated. The
industrious French have recognized that old countries, whose area is
limited, can only compete with America, whose area is almost unlim-
ited, by rendering transit easy and cheap. We in England shall ultimately
have to apply the same fact.”
4
Jefferies's lament takes us back to a period of crisis and adjustment
in the international division of labor and sets the scene for something
new: a comparative spatial history that bridges the gap between two
research areas typically treated in isolation from one another, one on
railways and the other on agriculture. W hat we discover is a beter un-
derstanding of change over space and time between rail transport and
agricultural production. Although rural rail service was a boon to farm-
ing by opening distant urban markets, it also pinched farmers where it
hurt, bringing intensifying international competition in foodstuffs to the
farm gate. Still, even as competition grew and the agrarian depression of
the 1880s and 1890s struck agrarian economies, accessible rail transport
