Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
I. Für eine Kulturgeschichte der Eisenbahn / Towards a cultural history of railways - Michael Cotte: Railways and Culture: An Introduction
Michael Cotte Beyond the competition among three companies for the final tender of 1826, we may see other reasons for the drastic decrease in the transportation rate. Berard’s and de Lapanouse’s proposals certainly expressed other capitalist interests than Seguin’s, but they were not as technically well-founded. That was not exceptional during that period: a group of applicants may have won a tender and then tried to draw up a proposal only afterwards, sometimes making deals with other applicants. The state administration were able to stop a project that was too fantastic both by the corps survey and by the legal authorisation of the company before it really started the building site. Nevertheless, through the Saint-Etienne transportation competition, the price of transportation fell impressively in some months to a rate that nobody would have imagined only few years earlier in France. At that time, some essential things had changed in the French mentality: high transportation rates did not act as a fatality but it would be changed by railways and steam engines. The Seguin brothers, especially Marc, acted decisively in that, as a witness of the English progress in the field and as propagandists of their proposal among French elites and administration. His rate challenge was actually too optimistic and during the first years of the railway use, the St-E & F Company had to claim to obtain an exceptional rate of augmentation for the growth of traffic, largely underestimated for its technical difficulties. Technical Choices at the base of the Challenge of Transportation Seguin’s brothers and allied firms from their small industrial city had performed some private fact finding trips to England before they proposed the railway line: in 1823 for suspension bridges, in 1825 for boat steam engines, likewise at the end of 1825 and the beginning of 1826 also for railways lines and locomotives, and in January 1827 for rails, locomotives and rolling stock. They got a good vision of British technology, meeting early some important actors such as Marc Brunei (1823), Philip Taylor (1825), George Stephenson in Newcastle (1825-26) and visiting the Liverpool - Manchester building site ( 1 827). In January 1826, they came back to France convinced of the great interest in locomotives for railway traction as a solution better than both horse power and inclines with fixed steam engines to tow the wagons on short slopes. The initial proposal and the tariff negotiation of 1826 with the central administration deciding for such a solution: 56
