Brunel: Right About Everything Wrong to Lose

Added: 2026-05-28

[00:00:00]By 1848, Great Western locomotives were regularly exceeding 70 miles per hour, figures that astonished the Victorian public.

[00:00:09]But Brunel had made a catastrophic strategic error. He had assumed that the whole nation would eventually convert to his superior gauge. They did not.

[00:00:19]The Stephenson gauge was already embedded across hundreds of miles of track in the north and Midlands, backed by powerful financial interests and entrenched political support.

[00:00:30]The resulting gauge war, a bitter parliamentary and commercial battle fought through the 1840s, ended with a royal commission ruling in favor of the narrow gauge in 1846.

[00:00:41]Brunel's broad gauge was to remain confined to the Great Western network, creating an expensive and infuriating break of gauge at every junction where passengers and goods had to change trains.

[00:00:54]It was an engineering argument he was right to make and wrong to lose, and it cost the country millions.