otherwise. In the mid-1840s, at the peak of Britain’s railway bubble, engineers assumed that most traffic would come from long-distance travel between big cities. Unfortunately, few bothered to question this assumption. There were some studies on the continent, though. To work out how people might actually travel, Belgian engineer Henri-Guillaume Desart designed the first ever gravity model in 1846. His analysis showed that there would be a lot of demand for local trips, an idea that was ignored by rail operators on the other side of the channel. The British railway network would probably have
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