During the nineteenth century, a complex infrastructure of railway and tramway track, water reservoirs and distribution systems, gas works and pipes, electricity stations, cables and grids, telegraph and telephone systems was constructed. The first developments were in the country that was the first to shift to factory industry, Britain. The early decades of the century witnessed a huge increase in the industrial demand for water and in household needs arising from rapid urbanisation. The construction of water distribution systems goes back at least to the Romans, but the first decades of the nineteenth century saw a major discontinuity, and in several Western European countries this took the form of the growth of large joint stock water companies, tapping rivers and later constructing reservoirs. Gas was a new industry supplying lighting in streets and factories, and gas street lighting spread to all the European capitals from Oslo to Lisbon in the first half of the century. Investment in roads, canals, rivers and other inland waterways was also important and very well developed in France, the Low Countries, Germany and the Po Valley in Italy. All was changed, however, by the railway, whose expansion is illustrated in Figure 2.1 for eight European countries. Led by Britain and Belgium from the 1830s, the others were initially slow to follow, but the length of track open in Britain was overtaken by Germany in the 1870s and by France in the 1880s.