In my terraced street there have been a few false starts. The pavements were taken up to lay cables for TV; roofs were adorned with giant white mushrooms for TV; a proposal to communally install solar panels did not gain traction; plastic caddies for bio-waste likewise did not get wide take-up.
Why did it take just a decade around 1840 for railways to drive stage coaches out of business? They had been the cat’s whiskers for two hundred years.
“There is of late such an admirable commodiousness, both for men and women, to travel from London to the principal towns of the country that the like hath not been known in the world, and that is by stage coaches, wherein any one may be transported to any place sheltered from foul weather and foul ways, free from endamaging one’s health and one’s body by hard jogging or over violent motion on horseback, and this not only at the low price of about a shilling for every five miles, but with such velocity and speed in one hour as the foreign post can make but in one day.” (The Present State of Great Britain. Edward Chamberlayne, 1649)
“The speed of travel remained constant until the mid-18th century. Reforms of the turnpike trusts, new methods of road building and the improved construction of coaches led to a sustained rise in the comfort and speed of the average journey – from an average journey length of 2 days for the Cambridge-London route in 1750 to a length of under 7 hours in 1820.
In 1754, a Manchester-based company began a new service called the “Flying Coach”. It was advertised with the following announcement – “However incredible it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester.” A similar service was begun from Liverpool three years later, using coaches with steel spring suspension. This coach took an unprecedented three days to reach London with an average speed of eight miles per hour.
Stagecoaches in Victorian Britain were heavily taxed on the number of passenger seats. If more passengers were carried than the licence allowed there were penalties to pay. The lawyer Stanley Harris (1816–1897) writes in his books Old Coaching Days and The Coaching Age that he knew of informers ready to report any breach of regulations to the authorities. This could be overloading of passengers in excess of the licence or minor matters such as luggage too high on the roof. They did this in return for a portion of any fines imposed, sometimes as much as half. The tax paid on passenger seats was a major expense for coach operators. Harris gives an example of the tax payable on the London to Newcastle coach route (278 miles). Annual tax amounted to £2,529 for 15 passengers per coach (4 inside and 11 outside). Annual tolls were £2,537. The hire of the four coach vehicles needed was £1,274. The 250 horses needed for this service also needed to be paid for.
The development of railways in the 1830s spelled the end for stagecoaches and mail coaches. The first rail delivery between Liverpool and Manchester took place on 11 November 1830. By the early 1840s most London-based coaches had been withdrawn from service.” (Wikipedia)