096: Railway Mania – Britain's Great Infrastructure Bubble (1840s)

Today we step into the smoky, clanging, coal-fired world of the 1840s British railway boom — an episode known to history as Railway Mania.This is the story of how a genuinely transformative technology, the steam locomotive, collided with unchecked speculation, easy credit, a national obsession with progress, and a sudden flood of cheap money, creating one of the largest infrastructure bubbles in history.