[SlinkyOnStairs]

The search term is the "Railway Mania", which predominant describes the UK's railroad bubble, with smaller similar booms on mainland europe. (You will have to look up French and German sources for the best info on those)

The bubble failed in the sense that massive commitments for new railways were made, and then the 1847 economic crisis caused investment to dry up, which collapsed the bubble and put a halt to the railroad construction boom. Those railway commitments never materialized, and stock market crashes followed.

I'm also being a little cheeky with what "massive economic trouble" entails; While the stock market was heavy on railroads and crashed right into a recession, the world in the mid-1800s was much less financialized so the consequences in absolute terms were less pronounced than a similar bubble-collapse would be today. As such, the main historical comparison is structural.

(Similarly, the AI bubble is likely to burst "by itself" unless OpenAI's IPO is truly catastrophically bad. What's more likely is that a recession happens and then the recession triggers a stock market collapse, which then intensify eachother. And so these historical examples of similar situations may prove illustrative.)

[herbst]

This is actually an interesting piece of history I haven't heard about. Thanks for the pointers

[tmnvix]

> and then the 1847 economic crisis ... the world in the mid-1800s was much less financialized so the consequences in absolute terms were less pronounced than a similar bubble-collapse would be today.

And yet 1848 was a very interesting year! Revolutionary even.