What if Trevithick's road-going steam vehicle was successful?

[Anetos]

How much could be different if trains were trackless or ran on roads instead of rails?

 

[The Pelican]

We ended up seeing something like this with traction engines around 1900, and indeed with petrol cars in general. The heavy weights of the vehicles would have meant relatively heavily built roads much earlier on, perhaps including grade seperation between roads crossing each other on the routes with the busiest traffic, probably beginning with roads between linked industrial sites.

The lack of guidance would have made long sequences of wagons harder to control than on the railways, so more vehicles would have ended up looking like a modern articulated lorry, or it's ancestors like the Scamell Scarab. Similarly, Georgian horse buses and early motor buses look reasonably similar, so presumably city transport would have used a vehicle like that. It's interesting to think about what long distance transport would have used- would it have looked more like a horsebus or a stagecoach?

In general, insights into a railwayless Victorian era are provided by the kinds of places where the railways came very late- Charters Towers in inland Queensland had a gold rush in 1872 and no railway until 1882, many towns in Tasmania never had a railway. These towns are quite a lot like their equivalents in general layout, so at that small scale, it probably didn't matter too much.

 

[Pigeon]

Have a look at Keith Roberts "Pavane"...

 

[181]

We ended up seeing something like this with traction engines around 1900, and indeed with petrol cars in general. The heavy weights of the vehicles would have meant relatively heavily built roads much earlier on, perhaps including grade seperation between roads crossing each other on the routes with the busiest traffic, probably beginning with roads between linked industrial sites.

The lack of guidance would have made long sequences of wagons harder to control than on the railways, so more vehicles would have ended up looking like a modern articulated lorry, or it's ancestors like the Scamell Scarab. Similarly, Georgian horse buses and early motor buses look reasonably similar, so presumably city transport would have used a vehicle like that. It's interesting to think about what long distance transport would have used- would it have looked more like a horsebus or a stagecoach?

In general, insights into a railwayless Victorian era are provided by the kinds of places where the railways came very late- Charters Towers in inland Queensland had a gold rush in 1872 and no railway until 1882, many towns in Tasmania never had a railway. These towns are quite a lot like their equivalents in general layout, so at that small scale, it probably didn't matter too much.

I doubt if the Victorian era would have remained railwayless -- horse-drawn railways already existed in Trevithick's time, steam power would presumably still have been applied to them, and it would seem likely that railways would have been built for the busier freight or passenger flows, but not many rural branch lines.

 

[The Pelican]

Yes, you are quite right- like in parts of the world which have built much of their railway network since the advent of cars, roads and buses, we might see metro and long distance/high speed lines, without as many "reigonal" railways.

 

[Fawkes Cat]

While I wouldn't want to head for the argument that history must unravel in the way that it actually did, it seems to me that the cards were stacked against a steam road engine in the early 19th century.

A very quick Google tells me that the thing caught fire, which was the immediate cause of failure. But even if it had been possible to make it work reliably, how well would the roads have coped with something that heavy, running on (I assume) iron tyres? My feeling is that the answer would be 'not at all well'. Steam road travel would quite literally get bogged down in the mud.

And when railway technology reached the point of durable rails and so the possibility of trains of wagons, the railway would be able to use one locomotive (and crew) for many wagons rather than one locomotive for one or two. While railways aren't cheap to build, there'd be a substantial saving in locomotive costs and running (fuel, crew) costs.

So in this case, unless we assume several advances in technology earlier than they actually happened, transport probably would snap back to more or less the timeline that we actually have had.

 

[The exile]

While I wouldn't want to head for the argument that history must unravel in the way that it actually did, it seems to me that the cards were stacked against a steam road engine in the early 19th
And when railway technology reached the point of durable rails and so the possibility of trains of wagons, the railway would be able to use one locomotive (and crew) for many wagons rather than one locomotive for one or two. While railways aren't cheap to build, there'd be a substantial saving in locomotive costs and running (fuel, crew) costs.

The cost of getting roads up to a standard that would have coped with anything more than occasional use by a steam road vehicle capable of coping with an economically viable load (possibly therefore up to the standard if those modern roads reinforced to take tanks?) would have been phenomenal.

 

[The Pelican]

The most likely scenario is that reinforced roads would have been built in the same places as early waggonways- places with existing extractive industries profitably exporting material by sea. You presumably want industries where the product is valuable enough to transport long distances, but not extreamly dense and valuable like gold is.

You might then hope for longer distance routes in these mining areas, followed by a Liverpool and Manchester style effort to use these reinforced roads for intercity passenger transport. Among the advantages these vehicles will have is ease of overtaking, so it's an interesting question whether signalling would have developed in the same rigourous and relatively failsafe fashion it did on railways.

 

[OVS Flatbottom]

Have a look at Keith Roberts "Pavane"...

As far as I remember, railways do exist in Pavane - there are a couple of references to them in the text, although they don't appear in the action. Of course, if there are railways, it's not so clear why so much freight goes by road (traction engine) or why an army marches on foot in one sequence... (For what it's worth, it is still one of my favourite novels.)