The railways have been described as Britain's 'gift to the world'. The sheer scale, ambition and audaciousness of the engineering still inspires awe and reshaped the landscape forever. They brought towns and cities closer together and instigated irreversible economic, political and social changes. However, as is often the case with a new technology, the railways also brought negative side effects, one of the most destructive of which was fire damage caused by sparks and lighted coals from steam locomotives. The railway sparks issue has long served as a case study for the economic analysis of tort and the issue of where the loss should fall. Nevertheless, much of the analysis has lacked an appreciation of how the courts actually resolved these disputes. This has attracted some comment from tort scholars and legal historians but has never been the subject of a sustained piece of doctrinal or historical research. This article constitutes the first truly comprehensive and in-depth analysis of the cases (both reported and unreported). The study has yielded new insights into the main arguments (and in particular the need to fit spark arresters to locomotives), the attitude of the railway industry to the problem and the role played by such cases in key doctrinal developments such as strict liability. Moreover, it examines how railway interests in Parliament were able to stymy attempts to replace the common law with a much more onerous strict liability regime under statute. As such it affords important new insights into how law responded to some of the new challenges of the Industrial Age.

中文翻译：

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铁路火花：技术发展和普通法

铁路被描述为英国“送给世界的礼物”。工程的绝对规模、雄心和大胆仍然令人敬畏，并永远重塑了景观。它们使城镇更加紧密地联系在一起，并引发了不可逆转的经济、政治和社会变革。然而，与新技术经常发生的情况一样，铁路也带来了负面影响，其中最具破坏性的一种是蒸汽机车的火花和点燃的煤引起的火灾。长期以来，铁路火花问题一直是侵权行为经济分析和损失应归于何处的案例研究。然而，大部分分析都缺乏对法院如何实际解决这些争议的认识。这引起了侵权学者和法律历史学家的一些评论，但从未成为持续的教义或历史研究的主题。本文构成了对案例（报告和未报告）的第一个真正全面和深入的分析。该研究对主要论点（尤其是在机车上安装火花抑制器的必要性）、铁路行业对该问题的态度以及此类案例在严格责任等关键理论发展中所起的作用产生了新的见解。此外，它还研究了议会中的铁路利益如何能够阻止以更加繁重的严格责任制度取代普通法的企图。因此，它为法律如何应对工业时代的一些新挑战提供了重要的新见解。