History of rail transport

[5][6] Wheeled vehicles pulled by men and animals ran in grooves in limestone, which provided the track element, preventing the wagons from leaving the intended route.

[19]: 123–25 In the late 1760s, the Coalbrookdale Company began to fix plates of cast iron to the upper surface of wooden rails, which increased their durability and load-bearing ability.

[21] In 1789, William Jessop had introduced a form of all-iron edge rail and flanged wheels for an extension to the Charnwood Forest Canal at Nanpantan, Loughborough, Leicestershire.

It could not be otherwise: the state of boiler technology necessitated the use of low pressure steam acting upon a vacuum in the cylinder; this required a separate condenser and an air pump.

On 21 February 1804, the world's first steam-powered railway journey took place when Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ironworks, near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales.

[33] In 1814, George Stephenson, inspired by the early locomotives of Trevithick, Murray and Hedley, persuaded the manager of the Killingworth colliery where he worked to allow him to build a steam-powered machine.

This success led to Stephenson establishing his company as the pre-eminent builder of steam locomotives for railways in Great Britain and Ireland, the United States, and much of Europe.

The seven-ton vehicle had two direct-drive reluctance motors, with fixed electromagnets acting on iron bars attached to a wooden cylinder on each axle, and simple commutators.

In 1891, Brown had demonstrated long-distance power transmission, using three-phase AC, between a hydro-electric plant at Lauffen am Neckar and Frankfurt am Main West, a distance of 280 km.

In 1914, world's first functional diesel–electric railcars were produced for the Königlich-Sächsische Staatseisenbahnen (Royal Saxon State Railways) by Waggonfabrik Rastatt with electric equipment from Brown, Boveri & Cie and diesel engines from Swiss Sulzer AG.

Since then high-speed rail transport, functioning at speeds up and above 300 km/h (186.4 mph), has been built in Japan, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Indonesia.

[citation needed] High-speed trains normally operate on standard gauge tracks of continuously welded rail on grade-separated right-of-way that incorporates a large turning radius in its design.

This began life in 1725 as a wooden waggonway worked with horse power and developed by private coal owners and included the construction of the Causey Arch, the world's oldest purpose built railway bridge.

It seems likely[67] that in 1808 James attended the demonstration running of Richard Trevithick's steam locomotive Catch me who can in London; certainly at this time he began to consider the long-term development of this means of transport.

As this would constitute the bulk of the traffic, the company took the important step of offering to haul the colliery wagons or chaldrons by locomotive power, something that required a scheduled or timetabled service of trains.

The building of railways and locomotives, for example, called for large quantities of heavy materials and thus provided a significant stimulus or 'backward linkage', to the coal-mining, iron-production, engineering and construction industries.

The solution was a narrow base of funding through the Rothschilds and the closed circles of the Bourse in Paris, so France did not develop the same kind of national stock exchange that flourished in London and New York.

The railways probably helped the industrial revolution in France by facilitating a national market for raw materials, wines, cheeses and imported and exported manufactured products.

The takeoff stage of economic development came with the railroad revolution in the 1840s, which opened up new markets for local products, created a pool of middle managers, increased the demand for engineers, architects and skilled machinists and stimulated investments in coal and iron.

Unlike the situation in France, the goal was support of industrialisation and so heavy lines crisscrossed the Ruhr and other industrial districts and provided good connections to the major ports of Hamburg and Bremen.

The following year the firm Holzhammer of Bolzano was granted the "Imperial-Royal privilege" to build the Milano–Monza line (12 km (7.5 mi)), the second railway built in Italy, in the then Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia, a part of the Austrian Empire.

Rail transport in the Netherlands is generally considered to have begun on 20 September 1839 when the first train, drawn by the locomotive De Arend, successfully made the 16 km trip from Amsterdam to Haarlem.

The history of rail transport in the Netherlands can be described in six eras: Poland restored its own independence as the Second Polish Republic in 1918 from the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.

Leonard Tilley, New Brunswick's most ardent railway promoter, championed the cause of "economic progress," stressing that Atlantic Canadians needed to pursue the most cost-effective transportation connections possible if they wanted to expand their influence beyond local markets.

Thus metropolitan rivalries between Montreal, Halifax and Saint John led Canada to build more railway lines per capita than any other industrializing nation, even though it lacked capital resources and had too little freight and passenger traffic to allow the systems to turn a profit.

For example, the first transcontinental railroad resulted in passengers and freight being able to cross the country in a matter of days instead of months and at one tenth the cost of stagecoach or wagon transport.

[92][93][94][95][96] Although the South started early to build railways, it concentrated on short lines linking cotton regions to oceanic or river ports and the absence of an interconnected network was a major handicap during the Civil War.

In the heavily settled Midwestern Corn Belt, over 80 percent of farms were within 10 miles of a railway, facilitating the shipment of grain, hogs and cattle to national and international markets.

In 1964, the first electric high-speed rail in the world, Tōkaidō Shinkansen (standard gauge) was inaugurated by Japanese National Railways (JNR), and connected between Tokyo and Osaka.

The first railway in the German colony of South West Africa was the 18 kilometres (11 mi)-long line running North-East from Walvis Bay to connect with the existing road between Swakopmund and Windhoek.