What were relative advantages of canal and railway transportation?

Answer:
Advantages of Canal Transportation

• Canals were mainly built to transport coal to cities. The bulk and weight of coal made its transport by road much slower and expensive than by barges on canals. Coal was mainly used for heating and lighting homes in cities. The demand for coal grew constantly. The first English canal was made by James Bindley in 1761. It was known as Worsely canal. Its main purpose was to carry coal from the coal deposits at Worsely (near Manchester) to that city; after the canal was completed.
• Canals were usually built by big landowners. The confluence of canals created marketing centres in new towns. For example, the city of Birmingham owed its growth to its position at the heart of a canal system connecting London, the Bristol Channel, and the Mersey and Humber rivers. Between 1760 to 1790, 25 projects of canal building began. The period between 1788 to 1796 is known as canal mania. In it, there were another 46 new projects and over the next 60 years more than 4,000 miles of canal were built.

Advantages of Railway Transportation

• Railways emerged as a new means of transportation available throughout the year. It was both cheap and fast, to carry passengers and goods.
• In the second stage, the invention of the railways took the entire process of industrialisation. In 1801, Richard Trevithick had devised an engine called the ‘Puffing Devil’. In 1814, the railway engineer George Stephenson invented a lomocotive called ‘The Blutcher’. It could pull a weight of 30 tonnes upto a hill at 4 mph. The first railway line connected the cities of Stockton and Darlington in 1825. The distance between the two cities was just nine miles which could be covered in 2 hours at the speed of 24 KPh.