““Some have speculated that had he succeeded, the road, not the railway, might have remained the conventional way to travel, that the runaway expansion of the railway might never have taken place. In a book called The Suppression of the Automobile: Skulduggery at the Crossroads, David Beasley argues that road transport was more potentially profitable, and failed only because powerful political interests were determined to stop it. ‘If the steam carriage proponents in Parliament had forged a lasting alliance between the radical Whigs and Conservatives,’ he says, ‘the railways would have been stopped in their tracks.””
