History of rail transport
The history of rail transport began before the common era. It can be divided into several discrete periods, defined by the principal track material and power used.
Ancient systems
The Post Track, a prehistoric causeway in the valley of the River Brue in the Somerset Levels, England, is one of the oldest known constructed trackways and dates from around 3838 BCE, making it some 30 years older than the Sweet Track in the same area. Various sections have been designated as scheduled monuments.Evidence indicates that there was a paved trackway, which transported boats across the Isthmus of Corinth in Greece from around 600 BCE. Wheeled vehicles pulled by men and animals ran in grooves in limestone, which was the track preventing the wagons from leaving the intended route. The Diolkos was in use for over 650 years, until at least the 1st century CE. Paved trackways were also later built in Roman Egypt.
Pre-steam
Wooden rails introduced
In 1515, Cardinal Matthäus Lang wrote a description of the Reisszug, a funicular railway at the Hohensalzburg Fortress in Austria. The line originally used wooden rails and a hemp haulage rope and was operated by human or animal power through a treadwheel. The line still exists today and remains operational, though in updated form. It may be the oldest operational railway.File:Mining cart.jpg|thumb|left|Minecart shown in De Re Metallica. The guide pin fits in a groove between two wooden planks.
Wagonways, with wooden rails and horse-drawn traffic, were used in the 1550s to facilitate transportation of ore tubs to and from mines. They soon became popular in Europe, and Georgius Agricola illustrated their operation in his 1556 work De re metallica. This line used "Hund" carts with unflanged wheels running on wooden planks and a vertical pin on the truck fitting into the gap between the planks to keep it going the right way. The miners called the wagons Hunde from the noise they made on the tracks. There are many references to wagonways in central Europe in the 16th century.
A wagonway was introduced to England by German miners at Caldbeck, Cumbria, possibly in the 1560s. This underground wagonway is the earliest known evidence for the use of tracked transport in Britain. A wagonway was built at Prescot, near Liverpool, sometime around 1600, possibly as early as 1594. Owned by Philip Layton, the line carried coal from a pit near Prescot Hall to a terminus about half a mile away. The Wollaton Wagonway, completed in 1604 by Huntingdon Beaumont, was the earliest British railway, excluding systems using a guided pin. It ran from Strelley to Wollaton near Nottingham. Several funicular railways were set up at Broseley in Shropshire from October 1605. Another line constructed in April 1606, carried coal for James Clifford from his mines down to the river Severn to be loaded onto barges and carried to riverside towns.
The Middleton Railway in Leeds, which was built in 1758, later became the world's oldest operational railway, albeit now in an upgraded form. In 1764, the first railway in the Americas was built in Lewiston, New York.
Metal rails introduced
The introduction of steam engines to powering blast furnaces led to a large increase in British iron production after the mid-1750s.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. At first, only balloon loops could be used for turning wagons, but later, movable points were introduced that allowed passing loops to be created.
A system was introduced in which unflanged wheels ran on L-shaped metal plates these became known as plateways. John Curr, a Sheffield colliery manager, invented this flanged rail in 1787, though the exact date of this is disputed. The plate rail was taken up by Benjamin Outram for wagonways serving his canals, manufacturing them at his Butterley ironworks. In 1803, William Jessop opened the Surrey Iron Railway, a double track plateway in south London sometimes erroneously cited as world's first public railway.
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. In 1790, Jessop and his partner Outram began to manufacture edge-rails. Jessop became a partner in the Butterley Company in 1790. The first public edgeway built was the Lake Lock Rail Road in 1796. Although the primary purpose of the line was to carry coal, it also carried passengers.
These two systems of constructing iron railways, the "L" plate-rail and the smooth edge-rail, continued to exist side by side into the early 19th century. The flanged wheel and edge-rail eventually proved its superiority and became the standard for railways.
File:Cromford and High Peak Railway cast-iron fishbelly rail.png|thumb|Cast-iron fishbelly edge rail manufactured by Outram at the Butterley Company ironworks for the Cromford and High Peak Railway. These are smooth edgerails for wheels with flanges.
Cast iron was not a satisfactory material for rails because it was brittle and broke under heavy loads. The wrought iron rail invented by John Birkinshaw in 1820 solved this problem. Wrought iron was a ductile material that could undergo considerable deformation before breaking, making it more suitable for iron rails, but wrought iron was expensive to produce until Henry Cort patented the puddling process in 1784. In 1783, Cort also patented the rolling process, which was 15 times faster at consolidating and shaping iron than hammering. These processes greatly lowered the cost of producing iron and iron rails. The next important development in iron production was hot blast patented by James Beaumont Neilson in 1828, which considerably reduced the amount of coke or charcoal needed to produce pig iron. Wrought iron was a soft material that contained slag or dross. The softness and dross tended to make iron rails distort and delaminate, and they typically lasted less than 10 years in use and sometimes as little as one year under high traffic. All these developments in the production of iron eventually led to replacement of composite wood/iron rails with superior all-iron rails.
The introduction of the Bessemer process reduced the cost of steel production and led to a great expansion of railways that began in the late 1860s. Steel rails lasted several times longer than iron. Steel rails made heavier locomotives possible, allowing for longer trains and improving the productivity of railroads. However, the Bessemer process introduced nitrogen into the steel, which caused the steel to become brittle with age, and the open hearth furnace began to replace the Bessemer process near the end of 19th century, improving the quality of steel and further reducing costs. Steel completely replaced the use of iron in rails, becoming standard for all railways. According to Ozyuksel, the rails were one of the major initiators of the expansion of the steel industry. 600,000 people across the globe worked in the rail industry in 1907.
Steam power introduced
Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt greatly improved the steam engine of Thomas Newcomen, which was used to pump water out of mines. In 1769, Watt developed a reciprocating engine capable of powering a wheel. It was a large stationary engine: the state of boiler technology necessitated the use of low-pressure steam acting upon a vacuum in the cylinder, and this required a separate condenser and an air pump. As the construction of boilers improved, Watt investigated the use of high-pressure steam acting directly upon a piston. This raised the possibility of a smaller engine that could be used to power a vehicle, and he patented a design for a steam locomotive in 1784. His employee William Murdoch produced a working model of a self-propelled steam carriage in that year.In 1804, the first full-scale working railway steam locomotive was built in the United Kingdom by Richard Trevithick, a British engineer born in Cornwall. This used high-pressure steam to drive the engine by one power stroke. The transmission system employed a large flywheel to even out the action of the piston rod. On 21st February 1804, Trevithick's unnamed steam locomotive hauled a train along the tramway of the Penydarren ironworks near Merthyr Tydfil in South Wales, becoming the world's first steam-powered railway journey. Trevithick later demonstrated a locomotive operating upon a piece of circular rail track in Bloomsbury, London, the Catch Me Who Can, but he never got beyond the experimental stage with railway locomotives, not least because his engines were too heavy for the cast-iron plateway track in use at that time.
In 1812, the first commercially successful steam locomotive was Matthew Murray's rack locomotive Salamanca built for the Middleton Railway in Leeds. This twin-cylinder locomotive was not heavy enough to break the edge-rails track and solved the problem of adhesion by a cog-wheel using teeth cast on the side of one of the rails. Thus it was also the first rack railway.
In 1813, this was followed by the locomotive Puffing Billy built by Christopher Blackett and William Hedley for the Wylam Colliery Railway, the first successful locomotive running by adhesion only. This was accomplished by the distribution of weight between a number of wheels. Puffing Billy is now on display in the Science Museum in London, making it the oldest locomotive in existence.
File:Locomotion No. 1..jpg|thumb|The original Locomotion at Darlington Railway Centre and Museum in northern England
In 1814, inspired by the early locomotives of Trevithick, Murray and Hedley, George Stephenson persuaded the manager of the Killingworth colliery where he worked to allow him to build a steam-powered machine. Stephenson played a pivotal role in the development and widespread adoption of the steam locomotive. His designs considerably improved on the work of the earlier pioneers. He built the locomotive Blücher, also a successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive. In 1825, he built the locomotive Locomotion for the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the North East of England, which became the first public steam railway in the world, although it used both horse power and steam power on different runs. In 1829, he built the locomotive Rocket, which entered in and won the Rainhill Trials. 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. In 1830, the first public railway which used only steam locomotives, all the time, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, was built. On 15th September 1830, the world's first and historical train journey was between Liverpool and Manchester in England.
Steam power continued to be the dominant power system in railways around the world for more than a century.