On September 15, 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened for traffic, with a procession of eight trains carrying about 600 guests the 50 kilometres from Liverpool to Manchester. Prime Minister Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, was aboard. So was William Huskisson, the MP for Liverpool and a former cabinet minister, and he did not reach Manchester alive.
The accident happened at Parkside, about midway, where the trains stopped to take water. Passengers were told to stay on board, and several got off anyway to stretch their legs, including Huskisson, who went over to speak to Wellington, with whom he had been trying to repair a political relationship. George Stephenson's Rocket came along the other line. Huskisson panicked. He tried to climb back into his carriage and fell between the rails, his leg across the track. The leg was amputated at Eccles. He died that evening.
The line itself was what mattered and it was genuinely new. Earlier railways had been local and often horse-drawn, or a mix. This one ran on two tracks the whole way, one for each direction, was worked entirely by locomotives on a published timetable, had a fixed signalling system with police and flags along the route, and crossed the bog at Chat Moss on a floating roadbed of heather and hurdles. It had been surveyed by George and Robert Stephenson against determined opposition from landowners, and the locomotives were chosen at the Rainhill Trials in October 1829, where Rocket won by being faster and lighter than anything else entered and by being the only entry that finished.
The economics were the argument. The line was built to move cotton from the docks at Liverpool to the mills at Manchester, and the canal that handled the traffic was slow and expensive. Shipping costs between the two cities dropped sharply in the first year, and passenger traffic turned out to be far larger than anybody had expected: the railway carried about half a million passengers in its first year and made money.
That is what set off railway mania. Within a decade Britain had thousands of kilometres of track, and the speculative bubble of 1845 to 1846, the largest of the century, came directly out of the demonstration that a railway could pay. Huskisson's death is the first of a very long list.