Tracks to a new world: railway excavation and the extension of geological knowledge in mid-nineteenth-century Britain

The narratives of stratigraphy in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were great ly augmented by new rock exposures arising from railway construction. Leadi ng geologists quickly registered this vast new array of potential scientifi c knowledge and pressed the BAAS and, later, HM Government, to regularize t he recording of 'railway sections'. Artists simultaneously found in these s ometimes vast rock cuttings a rich source of subliminal imagery. A systemat ic examination of the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society reveals c ountry-wide reporting and recording of railway sections. Leading geologists were among the contributors, but so too were railway engineers, demonstrat ing a growing alliance of practical and theoretical geology. Nor were leadi ng geologists strangers to early rail travel. In the 1840s they 'expressed' to annual meetings of the British Association in all its varied provincial venues. William Buckland even gave classes on geology whilst travelling by train, in order better to display the successive rock strata to his studen ts. Ours is no coasting voyage by the sunny shores of some well-havened bay; we steer across the undiscovered oceans of truth, with compasses in need of c orrection, under the canopy of cloud and darkness which involves the origin of things. J. Phillips, Esq., part of his presidential address to the Geological Socie ty, 1859(1).