Banche e ferrovie in Piemonte 167
Milan, one which was, of course, rejected. In its scepticism the Turin government was no different from ali others on the Continent. Europe's first modera commercial railroad began operations in England in 1830 and it was the spark which truly fired the European imaginaition. By the end of the decade Britain had been through its first great raiJway mania and newly-independent Belgium had mapped out, built and put into opera-tion a state-owned and -operated system of trunk lines which set the standard for Continental railroad development. Ali of the major powers and many of the minor ones had by then accorded their first, tentati ve rail concessìons and at least started to formulate comprehensive policies to govern further railroad expansion. The Kingdom of Sardinia, however, continued to prevaricate, lagging behind not only its rivai Austria and liberal-tending Tuscany, but even backward Naples.22*
The Turin government made its first study of railroading in 1837, in response to the challenge posed by a new Milan to Venice project, but it immediately lapsed back into inactivity. In 1840 it finally began to move deliberately forward. A new government study was commissioned which initiated a progressive development of policy which reached its eventual culmination at the beginning of 1845. At the same time, in 1840, a potent private combination was given permission to begin engineering studies of the Genoa to Milan route. By 1843 the government and the group were engaged in serious negotiations for a concession and other combinations interested in other major roads were beginning to surface in the kingdom. In 1844 the government published a pian laying out the first major domestic trunks it wished to see developed. Then, early in 1845, much to the disappointment of the kingdom's capitalists, the Turin government announced its intention to follow the Belgium example and build and operate the two most important trunks itself. They ran from Turin to Genoa via Alessandria and from Alessandria to the southern tip of Lake Maggiore, on the trade route to Switzerland and south and centrai Germany. The approach -left everything else to private enterprise, but the government was unwilling to commit itself to any routes to the kingdom's frontiers with its Austrian-ruled or -dominated neighbors in the Po valley. The pian, in other words, placed a premium on mUitary and administrative considerations while making commercial ones purely secondary. The kingdom's other international connections were fraught with technical difficulties posed by the terrain, so in 1845 private initiative turned to a
22) J. H. Clapham, Art Economie History of Modem Britain, voi. 1, The Early Railway Age, 1820-1850, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1930), pp. 381ff, and Economie Development, pp. 140ff; William L. Langer, Politicai and Social Upheaval, 1832-1852 (New York, 1969), pp. 26-27; Giulio Guderzo, Vìe e mezzi di comunicazione in Piemonte dal 1831 al 1861. I servìzi di posta (Turin, 1961), pp. 62-64; Cameron, France, p. 209; Corrado De Biase, // problema delle ferrovie nel Risorgimento (Modena, 1940), pp. 6, 17, 21ff; Isidore Sachs, L'Italie, ses fmances et son développement économique depuis l'unlfication du royaume, 1859-1884, d'après des documenta officiels <Parls, 1885), pp. 950-953; and Atti del Parlamento Subalpino, then Italiano (hercafter AP) 91:3500,