The impact of the railways on Britain was immediate and profound the disorientation induced must have been overwhelming. The colossal scale of the undertaking still makes one blink. In 1830 there were fewer than 400 miles of track by 1852 there were 6,600. In 1846, when the Army and Navy numbered fewer than 160,000 men, 200,000 navvies were at work on the construction of the railways in England. In 1844 Wordsworth wrote: Is there no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault. Northampton Castle was knocked down, the ancient city walls of Chester and York were breached there were even proposals to build railways through Stonehenge and Epping Forest.

The railway was the agent of the modern. To contemporaries it was a miracle, annihilating space and time: what had been quick was now slow, what had been distant near. It gave rise to new social experiences, mixing people up in new and alarming ways different communities were created and there was a shocking disturbance to settled ways and a terrifying acceleration of the pace of life. Even time was affected. Before the railways, local time was measured on a sundial and varied according to locality. After 1842 lobbying by the railway companies resulted in the replacing of local time by Greenwich time. By the 1850s Greenwich or railway time was standard. It was, observed Dickens, as if the sun itself had given in.

The novelty of the straight lines cutting in to the landscape gave rise to a variety of responses from artists and topographers, many of whom were commissioned by the railway companies to provide images that helped mitigate the alarm felt at the noise, disruption and danger to life. Early railway drawings often show excavations and massive works of engineering rather than the locomotives, which are depicted as static objects, the trail of smoke scarcely expressing their power and energy.

Some prints and drawings emphasize the superiority of the railway to the places it passes. Others, by placing bridges and viaducts at a distance, envelope them in a pre-existing landscape so that it seems as if the trains scarcely move, while cows graze contentedly and the traditional pursuits of the countryside are unaffected.

See all the prints, drawings and watercolours in the exhibition