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

using locomotives for going uphill by train. Consequently he had to add a good deal of civil engineering to the project: tunnels, bridges, sustaining walls etc.

On the other hand, Seguin chose clearly the locomotive solution as early as 1826, after he had seen the first Stephenson ones operating on the Darlington line, recently opened and equipped by the Stephenson Company. That led him to the Stephenson gauge for his line, and he also convinced Beaunier to do the same with the Andrézieux line whose building site had just begun. Such a decision would have important consequences because all of the further French lines chose the same gauge as other major European countries. Fie also chose wagons that were not too heavy (3 metric tons) with large manual brakes to easily get control when going downhill. For the track he refused the Stephenson proposal for iron undulated rails. He preferred the long regular iron rails, more easily produced by the rolling-mill. Those were made by the Le Creusot ironworks after a competition with British producers and other French ironmasters.

Despite their difficult experiment of steam engines for towing boats on the Rhone River12 and their brilliant experiment in bridge construction, the Seguin brothers clearly underestimated the real cost of the railway construction and furthermore the cost of its

12 The Seguin’s Steam Towing Co was in failure at the end of 1828.

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