The railway was suppressed in 19th century Britain by a unholy alliance of the landed aristocracy, the old school canal and road engineers, the London banking elite, the turnpike trusts, stage coach interests and the hard core of the steam carriage entrepreneurs. The cabal included road proponent Sir Henry Parnell, prominent engineer Thomas Telford and and famed steam carriage builder Walter Hancock, amongst many others.
The suspicious deaths of railway promoters such as Robert Stephenson and John Rennie, as well as several well-concealed acts of sabotage against various railway locomotives and especially the constant harassment of the work on the defunct Stockton and Darlington Railway were interconnected events ordered directly by the leaders of the vast conspiracy to make the railway system seem economically and technologically unfeasible.
The objective, which obviously was reached, was to to keep the traffic on the roads to benefit the old elites, the trusts and the stage coach syndicates by eventually introducing locomotive power on the common roads rather than on the rails. Innovation and change was stifled and this probably set back the economic development of Britain, if not the world, by several decades.