Daily Inspiration Quote by George Stephenson

Stephenson is puncturing a bubble with the plainspoken authority of someone who helped inflate it. The line reads like an engineer’s shrug, but it’s really an early diagnosis of hype economics: when a technology feels inevitable, the market stops asking whether it’s useful in a specific place. “Rage” is the key word. Not “interest,” not “demand” - rage, as in fashion, contagion, a mass mood. He’s warning that rail will become less an infrastructure choice than a social reflex.

The restraint of “many will be laid” does quiet work. It sidesteps moral panic and instead frames overbuilding as a mechanical outcome of collective enthusiasm. Stephenson doesn’t need to name villains; the subtext is that investors, politicians, and civic boosters can all be rational individually and still produce irrational systems. Railways promise modernity, jobs, prestige, and national power, so the cost-benefit math gets dressed up as destiny.

Context sharpens the cynicism. In Stephenson’s lifetime Britain experienced repeated railway manias, with speculative capital chasing lines that looked good on maps and prospectuses. The “will not pay” clause is blunt Victorian accounting, but it also hints at a deeper asymmetry: tracks, once laid, rewire land values and settlement patterns even when they fail financially. He’s anticipating a familiar pattern of tech booms - the internet, crypto, AI infrastructure - where the first wave builds too much, in the wrong places, for the wrong reasons. The critique isn’t anti-rail; it’s anti-fetish. Build because it works, not because it’s the era’s favorite story.