<p>Understanding the long-term relationship between rail infrastructure and urban growth provides an insight into how transport systems and cities have evolved together over time. Using historical census and railway network data for England and Wales (1831–2021), we analyze how population, infrastructure provision and accessibility have scaled with one another. We find that the scaling relationships of infrastructure supply (stations and track length) and quality (accessibility) with city population, which initially differed, gradually converged toward linear proportionality. This convergence suggests that, over time, rail provision and accessibility became more proportionally aligned with population size. Periods of railway expansion coincided with the growth of small- and mid-sized cities and rising regional connectivity, whereas subsequent contractions coincided with declining accessibility and a tendency toward greater concentration in larger centers. These results highlight a long-term process of scale-dependent co-evolution between transport networks and urban systems, offering historical evidence of the enduring association of infrastructure and urban structure.</p>