These data were created as part of the project 'Understanding the effects of different generations of large-scale technological change' which used modern economic theory to measure more accurately the effects of major technological changes. It did this by comparing current major new technology - computing- with two previous generations of large-scale technological change, railways and electricity, thereby creating a yardstick by which to judge what constitutes a large effect. It then moved away from the commonly held assumption that new technology simply reduces the price of existing goods and instead examined the notion that major new technologies create new goods and that consumers value some of those new goods very highly. It also considered the extent to which these technologies deserve the term general purpose, by looking at how evenly the effects of each technology are spread across the different sectors of the economy. These particular data were used to more accurately assess the average speeds of English and Welsh railways in the period. These data give the times of all weekday train journeys on 50 important routes in England and Wales and of 1 train journey on each of 222 minor routes, for each four benchmark years: 1850, 1870, 1887 and 1910.