Suburban rail lines built for a gold rush boom
Launch library · evergreen read
The skeleton of today's train network was largely laid down during the same nineteenth century boom that filled the city with grand buildings. Sudden wealth demanded fast, reliable transport to new suburbs springing up well beyond what horse drawn transport could comfortably reach. Wealth generated almost overnight demanded transport infrastructure built at a similarly urgent, occasionally reckless pace.
Lines were pushed outward at a pace that seems remarkable in hindsight, private companies racing to connect new estates to the centre, each hoping to profit from the land speculation that followed close behind every new station. Some of these speculative ventures collapsed before a single service even ran, leaving behind little more than abandoned survey pegs.
Long after the speculative boom collapsed, the rail lines themselves endured, gradually consolidated into a single public network. The suburbs that grew fastest were, more often than not, simply the ones lucky enough to sit closest to a station. Even now, a suburb's relative prosperity can often be traced loosely back to how early its station first opened.