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Inspired by Devvy's great threads in the Post 1900 forum about alternate rail management & developments in the UK and the US in the latter half of the 1900s I got to thinking about how railway mainlines might have been built along different alignments in the first place back in the 1800s - especially here in Sweden but also elsewhere. In Sweden the mainlines would probably have been very differently planned if the fear of invasion (from across the Baltic Sea) hadn't been so strong - or at least not as decisive for the planning of the railways. Another planning idea was to create new towns & potential cities where rail lines met instead of making existing cities the hubs (thought was that more towns was better than fewer, bigger ones).

My thought has been that with a POD involving what groups held sway over the decisions of how the lines were designed the railways could have been aligned differently. E.g. the Line Stockholm-Göteborg might have shared tracks with the Stockholm-Malmö line all the way to Jönköping before heading west to Göteborg via Borås (similar to the proposals/plans for HSR nowadays). Also, with some forethought straighter alignments might have been procured even if they hadn't been built at the time (i.e. a straight ROW created by the government realizing tech & costs would change over time). I'm thinking the effects over the years of such differences would have been quite profound on the country's economy. Or am I way off the rails? (pun intended and a bit forced)

Similar thoughts have of course occurred to me regarding the UK. What if the mainlines had been centrally planned from earlier on? Instead of corporations trying to out-do eachother (and also hinder the competitions attempts), the government had had a plan for needed connections and maybe laws in place to help the companies that got the concessions to force people to give up land so lines could go even straighter than they do? Would this have have had any direct effects in terms of which cities and towns would have grown over the years? Would the overall economic growth change? Or would such effects have been so small that they wouldn't really impact things like urbanization patterns?

/had to get these thoughts out of my head before gong to bed.
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