Portrait of Thomas Gray, the Railway Pioneer

By 1838 railways were being built across Britain. They attracted customers away from coaches. You could get from Exeter to London by train in four-and-a-half hours. Thomas Grey was convinced that railways were the future. Grey lost lots of money on impractical projects, but his vision of a national rail network event came true by the time he died in 1848. Exeter was linked to London by a regular train service.