Re. the railways and standardisation of spellings of place names: a good example is to be found in Kent, where the nearby towns Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells are spelt differently. My understanding is that the locals couldn't agree whether the 'o' or 'u' was correct, so after much debate on the matter there was a compromise, where one was spelt with the 'o' and the other with the 'u'. Before that they were interchangeable.