Book excerpt: Between 1750 and 1850 the British landscape was transformed by a transport revolution which involved engineering works on a scale not seen in Europe since Roman times. While the economic background of the canal and railway ages are relatively well known and many histories have been written about the locomotives which ran on the railways, relatively little has been published on how the engineering works themselves were made possible. This book brings together a series of papers which seek to answer the questions of how canals and railways were built, how the engineers responsible organised the works, how they were designed and what the role of the contractors was in the process.