Many of these countries saw' railways as a means for industrial transformation, with the result that the European railway network expanded from 1,865 miles to over 215,000 miles between 1840 and 1913 (Ambrosius and Henrich-Franke, 2016: 44). While early systems in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and the United States were often entirely private or a mix of public and private (with some significant public investment exceptions), from the late nineteenth century onwards there was a gradual public takeover of responsibility, supported by broader national visions of “municipal socialism” in Europe and “progressivism” in the United States (Marshall, 2013). In the first phase, extensive state involvement was essentially through subsidies, regulations, legal privileges, military protection, etc.