Post #2753259

Like, the automobile? It looks like the boom in the UK they were talking about was in the 1840s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania >**Railway Mania** was a stock market bubble in the railway industry of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the 1840s. There were primitive automobiles earlier, but the mass market automobile didn't come around for a long time after that, and then it'll have taken longer to get substantial marlet penetration. *searches* https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42182497 It runs a bit off the edge --- I don't know how far back they had licensing and mileage data.  But extrapolating from those lines, I'd guess that annual distance traveled in the UK in autos on roads surpassed rail only in the 1940s or so, about a hundred years later. That's probably outside the investment horizon of people investing in the 1840s --- in evaluating whether an investment is worthwhile, they won't be considering returns a century hence. That being said, it is possible to maybe consider freight rail, and it's possible that that works out differently. The US doesn't use much passenger rail in 2025, but it does do quite a bit of freight rail; the two can be decoupled. EDIT: It can't be too much earlier that road traffic could have risen, though, since mass-market motor vehicles weren't much earlier than that.