Encyclopedia > Railway mania

  Article Content

Railway mania

Railway mania was the term given to the speculative frenzy in Britain in the 1840s. It followed a common pattern: as the price of railway shares increased, more and more money was poured in by speculators, until the inevitable collapse.

Unlike some stock market bubbles, however, there was actually a net tangible result from all the investment: a vast expansion of the British railway system,though perhaps at an inflated cost.

The line in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, "They threatened its life with a railway share" [1] (http://www.underthesun.cc/Classics/Carroll/snark/snark6), is a reference to the Railway mania and those who lost money investing in it.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

... the English or French languages in communications with Canada's federal government and certain of Canada's provincial governments minority language education rights: ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 39 ms