Stronger Government support is vital for UK owned companies to compete effectively in overseas markets.
Railways have an extraordinary capability to transform geographical regions and even entire countries. The social, economic and political impact of a new railway should not be under-estimated. They transported the Industrial Revolution worldwide, spread economic development everywhere and were a ‘democratising force’, whilst diversifying economies across a broader range of products and services.
The opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway (1830) was driven by the need to carry raw cotton from Liverpool’s port to Manchester’s mills, but its primary innovation was that it carried passengers. In India, the motivating force was the need to get raw cotton to port in what is now Mumbai. The failure of the American cotton crop in 1846 pushed cloth manufacturers in Manchester and Glasgow to seek new sources, India being one. But to guarantee a steady supply, transport to the port at Bombay needed to be improved and so the cotton magnates pressured the British Government to build a railway.
The same pattern can be seen globally - the need to move workers to where they were needed for the extraction…
