Unlike some stock market bubbles, however, there was actually a net tangible result from all the investment: a vast expansion of the British railway system,though perhaps at an inflated cost.
The line in Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, "They threatened its life with a railway share" [1], is a reference to the Railway mania and those who lost money investing in it.
Railway mania can be compared with the similar craze in the 1990s, where a vast amount of fibre-optic telecommincations infrastructure was installed.