Railways' Rising Costs in the late Nineteenth Century

One of the major challenges to railway company profitability in the last years of the nineteenth century was the increasingly high cost of materials and fuel. Indeed, the London and South Western Railway, the subject of my thesis, was no exception and the three graphs below show how much it paid for rails per ton, track chairs per ton, Fish plates (that joined the rails together) per ton, individual sleepers and fuel per ton. All graphs indicate a steep increase in prices between 1894 and 1900.