There's an excellent book on the start of the railways "Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain". It's very interesting and full of side storie

There's an excellent book on the start of the railways "Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain". It's very interesting and full of side stories about how people adapted to the start of the steam age. For example the one of the first railway lines was more like a toll road. A company built the tracks, and then other companies paid to run their locomotives on them. This lead to chaos where two locomotives would meet on the single track, neither was willing to back up, and so the passengers would often get out and fight each other over it.