Week 7 suggested essay topic:
Were railways more important in spurring economic development in Britain or France?O'Brien, Patrick (ed.). Railways and the Economic Development of Western Europe, 1830-1914. London: Macmillan, 1983. See the overview chapter by O'Brien, the chapter on France by Caron, and the chapter on Britain by Hawke and Higgins. You can access the three chapters here until 30 June. Your usual Oxford credentials will get you in.
Gourvish, Terry, Railways and the British Economy, 1830-1914, London: Macmillan, 1981.
Hawke, Gary. Railways and Economic Growth in England and Wales, 1840-1870. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. This is basically Hawke's Oxford DPhil disseration of 1968, which you might find if you can't access the book.
Lévy-Leboyer, M. and M. Lescure, "France," Ch. 8 in Patterns of European Industrialisation: The Nineteenth Century, G. Toniolo and R. Sylla eds. (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 153-74.
Leunig, Timothy, "Time is Money: A Re-Assessment of the Passenger Social Savings from Victorian British Railways," JEH, vol. 66, no. 3 (Sept. 2006), pp. 635-73.
Price, Roger, An Economic History of Modern France 1730-1914, London: Macmillan, 1981.
---., The Modernization of Rural France. Communications Networks and Agricultural Market Structures in Nineteenth Century France, London: Hutchinson, 1983.
Schwartz, R., I. Gregory and T. Thevenin, "Spatial History: Railways, Uneven Development, and Population Change in France and Great Britain, 1850-1914," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 42 no. 1 (Summer 2011), pp. 53-88.
Szostak, R., The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution. A Comparison of England and France. Montreal: McGill - Queen's UP, 1991.
Ville, S., "Transport," Ch. 11 in CEHMB, pp. 295-331.
You could also look at work on France by Claude Fohlen, for example his chapters in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe and a similar Fontana series. Or the French chapter in Saul and Milward's The Economic Development of Continental Europe, 1780-1870.
You could take this topic in the direction of financial innovation. There are several articles by Gareth Campbell and co-authors about the Railway Mania in Britain in the 1840s.
You could take this topic in the direction of economic geography and industrial location in general, with railways as one factor. For Britain there are several good articles by Crafts and co-authors.