Railroad History

No one really knows who first came up with the idea of railroads, or railways, but it is known that ancient civilizations were aware that wheels move more easily over a smooth surface and that, indeed, the Greeks, Romans and Assyrians used grooves cut into stone slabs as a means to guide their vehicles along tracks. We know this because the tracks are still there, carved into ancient stones.

Much later, in Elizabethan England, it was observes that heavy carts with wooden wheels soon wore ruts into the soft, dirt roads and that you could put wooden boards in the ruts to enable carts to pull heavy loads much easier.

Lines of wooden rails began to be used in the mines of Britain some time near or after 1600. Roger Worth described tramroads at Newcastle in 1680: ' The manner of the carriage is by laying rails of timber from the colliery down to the river. Exactly straight and parallel, and bulky carts are made with four rowlets fitting these rails. Whereby the carriage is so easy, that one horse will draw down four or five chaldron of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal merchants.'

When iron plates were added to wheels to make them last longer they wore away the wooden rails quicker, so it soon became necessary to ass a metal plate to the wooden rails also. As early as 1738 there is a report of cast-iron rails being used in place of wooden ones. However, the cast-iron rails were not strong enough and wooden rails were kept in use until it was common knowledge that one could disperse the weight by using many carriages linked together instead of just one. In 1765 wooden rails were still in use, despite the multi-carriage technique being known by many: 'When the road has been traced at six feet in breadth, and where the declivities are fixed, an excavation is made of the breadth of the said road, more or less deep according as the leveling of the road requires. There are afterwards arranged over the whole breadth of this excavation, pieces of oak wood of the thickness of four, five, six and even eight inches square: these are placed across and at the distance of two or three feet from each other: these pieces need only be squared at their extremities, and upon these are fixed other pieces of wood, well squared and sawed, of about six or seven inches breadth by five in depth, with pegs of wood; these pieces are placed on each side of the road along its whole length; they are commonly placed at four feet distance from each other, which forms the interior breadth of the road.'

With the harnessing of steam power in the mines, iron became cheaper and cast iron rails became more usual. These railroads operated by man-power, horse-power, or sometimes by a rope attached to a stationary engine.