In the eighteenth century the authorities ordered each plantation owner to build and maintain a public road to connect to the two adjacent neigbouring plantations. The original width of this roadway was 16 feet, but this was later increased to 36 feet. This road was a public right of way, and if the plantation owner refused to build the road or maintain it, the Government authorities would carry out the task and then demand payment from him. If he could not meet the payment, his land could be sold by the West India Company or the Berbice Association to recover the cost.

When the British took control in Guyana in the early nineteenth century, a Commissioner of Roads and Bridges was given the task of supervising the maintenance of the public roads and bridges. Those plantations which did not keep the public right of way in good condition faced the penalty of being sold to recover the cost if the Government was forced to carry out the task.

The plantations which were purchased by ex-slaves after 1838 at first experienced problems in raising money to maintain the public road and bridges with the result that they were at first in a poor state of disrepair. However, when these "proprietary villages" established forms of local government and levied their own local taxes, they were able to obtain funds to carry out maintenance.

Since almost all the plantations were located on the coast or the lower river banks, the interior forest and savannah areas had very few roadways, and the local Amerindian population used mainly tracks and pathways to move from one settlement to another, or used the rivers for that purpose.

As the population grew and the need for movement of an increased volume of goods arose, the Demerara Railway Company, established in the 1840s, began the building of a railway between Georgetown and Mahaica. The first section of five miles between Georgetown and Plaisance was opened in November 1848. Two years later, the line has extended to Two Friends, about 15 miles east of Georgetown.

At the end of 1850, the Demerara Railway Company experienced a financial crisis and announced that it would no longer be able to continue building the line. But this problem was averted when the Company was given a loan of $840,000 by the Government to continue to extend the railway, and by 1864 it reached its original planned terminus at Mahaica.

The railway was very popular among the people on the East Coast Demerara, and soon there were demands for it to be extended further to Rosignol on the west bank of the Berbice River, 69 miles east of Georgetown. The Government finally in 1890 granted a contract to the Demerara Railway Company to build the line between Mahaica and Rosignol, and also another line between Vreed-en-Hoop and Tuschen west of the Demerara River.

The railway not only helped in quick and easy movement of the travelling public, but it also transported large quantities of goods very quickly. Bulk sugar from the estates was transported with relative ease to Georgetown for export. But despite the popularity of the railway, the sugar estate owners did not particularly like for a particular reason. They felt it would encourage their workers to abandon their jobs on the estates and settle on lands near the railway and become peasant farmers. The movement of people to live and farm in the vicinity of the railway did occur, but this did not pull away workers from the sugar estates as their owners feared.