Economics
Britain once poured a war-sized share of its economy into railway stock
During the 1840s, cheap credit sent British investors piling into railway company shares, and Parliament approved over 260 new railway acts in 1846 alone. At its peak, railway investment consumed a share of UK GDP that historians compare to wartime mobilisation. When the Bank of England tightened credit in 1845, the bubble burst and shares roughly halved — but unlike the South Sea Bubble or tulip mania, the mania left behind a genuinely useful national rail network.