Interestingly, Charles Mackay, the author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, was himself one of the most ardent cheerleaders for the Railway Mania [0] "urging people to put their money into the railways and pooh-poohing those who were concerned." and "He had become famous by mocking the bubbles of the past - but had rather less to say about the far more serious bubble that he himself had helped to inflate."[1]
[0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1927396
I happened to read Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which is a fantastic take on the railway mania, at the height of the dot com bubble. Really increased the enjoyment to read about it and see it unfold in real time.