European regional railways and real income, 1870-1910: a preliminary report

This article introduces our project on the relationship between railways and real income levels across European regions between 1870 and 1910. While similar relationships have been analysed for the USA, India and individual European countries, our project is the first to take a pan-European regional perspective. We discuss the reasons for the neglect to date, highlighting the need to drill deeper into the changing directional effects of railways on income, the importance or necessity of using regional-level data and the amount of research that still needs to be done. To this end, we present preliminary insights from our novel database on European regional per capita income and railway mileage, after discussing our data sources in depth. We also outline our research agenda, showing our intended conceptual and analytical approach for future work.